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Author: Loïc J. D. Wacquant
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Published: 2009
Total Pages: 227
ISBN-13: 0816639000
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In this title, the author examines how penal policies emanating from the United States have spread thoughout the world. The author argues that the policies have their roots in a network of Reagan-era conservative think tanks, which used them as weapons in their crusade to dismantle the welfare state and, in effect, criminalise poverty.
Author: Elizabeth Hinton
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2016-05-02
Total Pages: 460
ISBN-13: 0674737237
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Co-Winner of the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize A New York Times Notable Book of the Year A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice A Wall Street Journal Favorite Book of the Year A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year A Publishers Weekly Favorite Book of the Year In the United States today, one in every thirty-one adults is under some form of penal control, including one in eleven African American men. How did the “land of the free” become the home of the world’s largest prison system? Challenging the belief that America’s prison problem originated with the Reagan administration’s War on Drugs, Elizabeth Hinton traces the rise of mass incarceration to an ironic source: the social welfare programs of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society at the height of the civil rights era. “An extraordinary and important new book.” —Jill Lepore, New Yorker “Hinton’s book is more than an argument; it is a revelation...There are moments that will make your skin crawl...This is history, but the implications for today are striking. Readers will learn how the militarization of the police that we’ve witnessed in Ferguson and elsewhere had roots in the 1960s.” —Imani Perry, New York Times Book Review
Author: Peter Edelman
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2019-07-02
Total Pages: 223
ISBN-13: 162097553X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Awarded "Special Recognition" by the 2018 Robert F. Kennedy Book & Journalism Awards Finalist for the American Bar Association's 2018 Silver Gavel Book Award Named one of the "10 books to read after you've read Evicted" by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel "Essential reading for anyone trying to understand the demands of social justice in America."—Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy Winner of a special Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, the book that Evicted author Matthew Desmond calls "a powerful investigation into the ways the United States has addressed poverty . . . lucid and troubling" In one of the richest countries on Earth it has effectively become a crime to be poor. For example, in Ferguson, Missouri, the U.S. Department of Justice didn't just expose racially biased policing; it also exposed exorbitant fines and fees for minor crimes that mainly hit the city's poor, African American population, resulting in jail by the thousands. As Peter Edelman explains in Not a Crime to Be Poor, in fact Ferguson is everywhere: the debtors' prisons of the twenty-first century. The anti-tax revolution that began with the Reagan era led state and local governments, starved for revenues, to squeeze ordinary people, collect fines and fees to the tune of 10 million people who now owe $50 billion. Nor is the criminalization of poverty confined to money. Schoolchildren are sent to court for playground skirmishes that previously sent them to the principal's office. Women are evicted from their homes for calling the police too often to ask for protection from domestic violence. The homeless are arrested for sleeping in the park or urinating in public. A former aide to Robert F. Kennedy and senior official in the Clinton administration, Peter Edelman has devoted his life to understanding the causes of poverty. As Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy has said, "No one has been more committed to struggles against impoverishment and its cruel consequences than Peter Edelman." And former New York Times columnist Bob Herbert writes, "If there is one essential book on the great tragedy of poverty and inequality in America, this is it."
Author: Jeffrey Reiman
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-07-14
Total Pages: 296
ISBN-13: 131734295X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Illustrates the issue of economic inequality within the American justice system. The best-selling text, The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison contends that the criminal justice system is biased against the poor from start to finish. The authors argue that even before the process of arrest, trial, and sentencing, the system is biased against the poor in what it chooses to treat as crime. The authors show that numerous acts of the well-off--such as their refusal to make workplaces safe, refusal to curtail deadly pollution, promotion of unnecessary surgery, and prescriptions for unnecessary drugs--cause as much harm as the acts of the poor that are treated as crimes. However, the dangerous acts of the well-off are almost never treated as crimes, and when they are, they are almost never treated as severely as the crimes of the poor. Not only does the criminal justice system fail to protect against the harmful acts of well-off people, it also fails to remedy the causes of crime, such as poverty. This results in a large population of poor criminals in our prisons and in our media. The authors contend that the idea of crime as a work of the poor serves the interests of the rich and powerful while conveying a misleading notion that the real threat to Americans comes from the bottom of society rather than the top. Learning Goals Upon completing this book, readers will be able to: Examine the criminal justice system through the lens of the poor. Understand that much of what goes on in the criminal justice system violates one’s own sense of fairness. Morally evaluate the criminal justice system’s failures. Identify the type of legislature that is biased against the poor.
Author: Paul Wright
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-10-23
Total Pages: 345
ISBN-13: 1135342563
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Prison Nation is a distant dispatch from a foreign and forbidden place--the world of America's prisons. Written by prisoners, social critics and luminaries of investigative reporting, Prison Nation testifies to the current state of America's prisoners' living conditions and political concerns. These concerns are not normally the concerns of most Americans, but they should be. From substandard medical care the inadequacy of resources for public defenders to the death penalty, the issues covered in this volume grow more urgent every day. Articles by outstanding writers such as Mumia Abu-Jamal, Noam Chomsky, Mark Dow, Judy Green, Tracy Huling and Christian Parenti chronicle the injustices of prison privatization, class and race in the justice system, our quixotic drug war, the rarely discussed prison AIDS crisis and a judicial system that rewards mostly those with significant resources or the desire to name names. Correctional facilities have become a profitable growth industry, for companies like Wackenhut that run them and companies like Boeing that use cheap prison labor. With fascinating narratives, shocking tales and small stories of hope, Prison Nation paints a picture of a world many Americans know little or nothing about.
Author: Bruce Western
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
Published: 2018-05-04
Total Pages: 234
ISBN-13: 1610448715
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In the era of mass incarceration, over 600,000 people are released from federal or state prison each year, with many returning to chaotic living environments rife with violence. In these circumstances, how do former prisoners navigate reentering society? In Homeward, sociologist Bruce Western examines the tumultuous first year after release from prison. Drawing from in-depth interviews with over one hundred individuals, he describes the lives of the formerly incarcerated and demonstrates how poverty, racial inequality, and failures of social support trap many in a cycle of vulnerability despite their efforts to rejoin society. Western and his research team conducted comprehensive interviews with men and women released from the Massachusetts state prison system who returned to neighborhoods around Boston. Western finds that for most, leaving prison is associated with acute material hardship. In the first year after prison, most respondents could not afford their own housing and relied on family support and government programs, with half living in deep poverty. Many struggled with chronic pain, mental illnesses, or addiction—the most important predictor of recidivism. Most respondents were also unemployed. Some older white men found union jobs in the construction industry through their social networks, but many others, particularly those who were black or Latino, were unable to obtain full-time work due to few social connections to good jobs, discrimination, and lack of credentials. Violence was common in their lives, and often preceded their incarceration. In contrast to the stereotype of tough criminals preying upon helpless citizens, Western shows that many former prisoners were themselves subject to lifetimes of violence and abuse and encountered more violence after leaving prison, blurring the line between victims and perpetrators. Western concludes that boosting the social integration of former prisoners is key to both ameliorating deep disadvantage and strengthening public safety. He advocates policies that increase assistance to those in their first year after prison, including guaranteed housing and health care, drug treatment, and transitional employment. By foregrounding the stories of people struggling against the odds to exit the criminal justice system, Homeward shows how overhauling the process of prisoner reentry and rethinking the foundations of justice policy could address the harms of mass incarceration.
Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
Published: 2013-08-08
Total Pages: 67
ISBN-13: 0309287715
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Over the past four decades, the rate of incarceration in the United States has skyrocketed to unprecedented heights, both historically and in comparison to that of other developed nations. At far higher rates than the general population, those in or entering U.S. jails and prisons are prone to many health problems. This is a problem not just for them, but also for the communities from which they come and to which, in nearly all cases, they will return. Health and Incarceration is the summary of a workshop jointly sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences(NAS) Committee on Law and Justice and the Institute of Medicine(IOM) Board on Health and Select Populations in December 2012. Academics, practitioners, state officials, and nongovernmental organization representatives from the fields of healthcare, prisoner advocacy, and corrections reviewed what is known about these health issues and what appear to be the best opportunities to improve healthcare for those who are now or will be incarcerated. The workshop was designed as a roundtable with brief presentations from 16 experts and time for group discussion. Health and Incarceration reviews what is known about the health of incarcerated individuals, the healthcare they receive, and effects of incarceration on public health. This report identifies opportunities to improve healthcare for these populations and provides a platform for visions of how the world of incarceration health can be a better place.
Author: Bruce Western
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
Published: 2006-05-25
Total Pages: 264
ISBN-13: 1610445554
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Over the last thirty years, the prison population in the United States has increased more than seven-fold to over two million people, including vastly disproportionate numbers of minorities and people with little education. For some racial and educational groups, incarceration has become a depressingly regular experience, and prison culture and influence pervade their communities. Almost 60 percent of black male high school drop-outs in their early thirties have spent time in prison. In Punishment and Inequality in America, sociologist Bruce Western explores the recent era of mass incarceration and the serious social and economic consequences it has wrought. Punishment and Inequality in America dispels many of the myths about the relationships among crime, imprisonment, and inequality. While many people support the increase in incarceration because of recent reductions in crime, Western shows that the decrease in crime rates in the 1990s was mostly fueled by growth in city police forces and the pacification of the drug trade. Getting "tough on crime" with longer sentences only explains about 10 percent of the fall in crime, but has come at a significant cost. Punishment and Inequality in America reveals a strong relationship between incarceration and severely dampened economic prospects for former inmates. Western finds that because of their involvement in the penal system, young black men hardly benefited from the economic boom of the 1990s. Those who spent time in prison had much lower wages and employment rates than did similar men without criminal records. The losses from mass incarceration spread to the social sphere as well, leaving one out of ten young black children with a father behind bars by the end of the 1990s, thereby helping perpetuate the damaging cycle of broken families, poverty, and crime. The recent explosion of imprisonment is exacting heavy costs on American society and exacerbating inequality. Whereas college or the military were once the formative institutions in young men's lives, prison has increasingly usurped that role in many communities. Punishment and Inequality in America profiles how the growth in incarceration came about and the toll it is taking on the social and economic fabric of many American communities.
Author: Committee on Causes and Consequences of High Rates of Incarceration
Publisher: National Academies Press
Published: 2014-12-31
Total Pages: 800
ISBN-13: 9780309298018
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →After decades of stability from the 1920s to the early 1970s, the rate of imprisonment in the United States has increased fivefold during the last four decades. The U.S. penal population of 2.2 million adults is by far the largest in the world. Just under one-quarter of the world's prisoners are held in American prisons. The U.S. rate of incarceration, with nearly 1 out of every 100 adults in prison or jail, is 5 to 10 times higher than the rates in Western Europe and other democracies. The U.S. prison population is largely drawn from the most disadvantaged part of the nation's population: mostly men under age 40, disproportionately minority, and poorly educated. Prisoners often carry additional deficits of drug and alcohol addictions, mental and physical illnesses, and lack of work preparation or experience. The growth of incarceration in the United States during four decades has prompted numerous critiques and a growing body of scientific knowledge about what prompted the rise and what its consequences have been for the people imprisoned, their families and communities, and for U.S. society. The Growth of Incarceration in the United States examines research and analysis of the dramatic rise of incarceration rates and its affects. This study makes the case that the United States has gone far past the point where the numbers of people in prison can be justified by social benefits and has reached a level where these high rates of incarceration themselves constitute a source of injustice and social harm. The Growth of Incarceration in the United States examines policy changes that created an increasingly punitive political climate and offers specific policy advice in sentencing policy, prison policy, and social policy. The report also identifies important research questions that must be answered to provide a firmer basis for policy. This report is a call for change in the way society views criminals, punishment, and prison. This landmark study assesses the evidence and its implications for public policy to inform an extensive and thoughtful public debate about and reconsideration of policies.
Author: Christine S. Scott-Hayward
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2019-09-24
Total Pages: 309
ISBN-13: 0520970497
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Most people in jail have not been convicted of a crime. Instead, they have been accused of a crime and cannot afford to post the bail amount to guarantee their freedom until trial. Punishing Poverty examines how the current system of pretrial release detains hundreds of thousands of defendants awaiting trial. Tracing the historical antecedents of the US bail system, with particular attention to the failures of bail reform efforts in the mid to late twentieth century, the authors describe the painful social and economic impact of contemporary bail decisions. The first book-length treatment to analyze how bail reproduces racial and economic inequality throughout the criminal justice system, Punishing Poverty explores reform efforts, as jurisdictions begin to move away from money bail systems, and the attempts of the bail bond industry to push back against such reforms. This accessibly written book gives a succinct overview of the role of pretrial detention in fueling mass incarceration and is essential reading for researchers and reformers alike.
