Smart Decarceration is a forward-thinking, practical volume that provides innovative concepts and concrete strategies for ushering in an era of decarceration -- a proactive and effective undoing of the era of mass incarceration. The text grapples with tough questions and takes up the challenge of transforming America's approach to criminal justice in the 21st century. This timely work consists of chapters written from multiple perspectives and disciplines including advocates, rese...

Norman Parker spent twenty-five years of his life in a high security Category A prison. Convicted of murder and manslaughter in the 1970s, he was sentenced to life at the notorious Parkhurst Prison. An institution filled with the most sinister and violent criminals, Parkhurst is certainly not for the faint-hearted. Norman Parker has certainly seen a lot during his time on the inside, and this is his complete collection of tales from behind the bars. During his gruelling years on the inside...

Once a murderer, always a murderer? Or can a murderer be redeemed? Who do they really become after they have served decades in prison? What does it take for a killer to be accepted back into society? What is the chance that he will kill again?Award-winning journalist Nancy Mullane found herself facing these questions when she accepted an assignment to report on the exploding costs of incarceration. But the men she met behind the walls astonished her with their remorse, introspectio...

Never before had Daniel Bergner seen a spectacle as bizarre as the one he had come to watch that Sunday in October. Murderers, rapists, and armed robbers were competing in the annual rodeo at Angola, the grim maximum-security penitentiary in Louisiana. The convicts, sentenced to life without parole, were thrown, trampled, and gored by bucking bulls and broncos before thousands of cheering spectators. But amid the brutality of this gladiatorial spectacle Bergner caught surprising glimpses o...

WINNER OF THE CRIME WRITERS' ASSOCIATION GOLD DAGGER FOR NON-FICTION 2017'In its tragic absurdity, Close But No Cigar reads like a Graham Greene story, with a cast of characters to make Hemingway proud' Daily TelegraphFor over a decade Stephen Purvis had been a pillar of Havana's expat community, one of many foreign businessmen investing in Cuba's crawl from Cold War communism towards modernity. But for reasons unknown to ...

Indigenous peoples are vastly overrepresented in the Canadian criminal justice system. The Canadian government has framed this disproportionate victimization and criminalization as being an "Indian problem."In The Colonial Problem, Lisa Monchalin challenges the myth of the "Indian problem" and encourages readers to view the crimes and injustices affecting Indigenous peoples from a more culturally aware position. She analyzes the consequences of assimilation policies, disho...

This book distils thirty years of research on the impacts of jail and prison environments. The research program began with evaluations of new jails that were created by the US Bureau of Prisons, which had a novel design intended to provide a non-traditional and safe environment for pre-trial inmates and documented the stunning success of these jails in reducing tension and violence. This book uses assessments of this new model as a basis for considering the nature of environment and behavi...

At the heart of his book is his conclusion that prison simply does not work, failing on three fundamental levels. The view of the popular media is that when prisoners are locked up they cannot commit crime. This is not true. Podmore shows how crime actually proliferates in prison, how serious organised crime is allowed to flourish there through bad management, and how the UK's prisons are a multi-million pound investment bank for the black economy. The public sees prison as a deterrent. Th...

In the archives of the Memorial International Human Rights Centre in Moscow is an extraordinary diary, a rare first-person testimony of a commander of guards in a Soviet labour camp.Ivan Chistyakov was sent to the Gulag in 1935, where he worked at the Baikal-Amur Corrective Labour Camp for over a year. Life at the Gulag was anathema to Chistyakov, a cultured Muscovite with a nostalgia for pre-revolutionary Russia, and an amateur painter and poet. He recorded its horrors with an unm...

"If you do the crime you gotta do the time." This adage reflects the overall attitude most Americans have about crime and the criminal justice system. Implicit in this adage is the notion that once "the time" is done, the individual is free to re-enter society and resume a normal life. In Prisoner Re-entry and Social Capital, authors Earl Smith and Angela J. Hattery challenge this myth. Prisoner Re-entry and Social Capital takes as its starting point interviews with twent...

Death and Redemption offers a fundamental reinterpretation of the role of the Gulag--the Soviet Union's vast system of forced-labor camps, internal exile, and prisons--in Soviet society. Soviet authorities undoubtedly had the means to exterminate all the prisoners who passed through the Gulag, but unlike the Nazis they did not conceive of their concentration camps as instruments of genocide. In this provocative book, Steven Barnes argues that the Gulag must be understood primarily...

Conceived in the immediate aftermath of the humiliations and killings of prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq, of the suicides and hunger strikes at Guantanamo Bay and of the disappearances of detainees through extraordinary rendition, this book explores the connections between these shameful events and the inhumanity and degradation of domestic prisons within the 'allied' states, including the USA, Canada, Australia, the UK and Ireland.The central theme is that the revelations of ext...