We all did time, staff and prisoners. Each of us had a number; each of us wanted the finality of getting out that gate.When John Cuffe entered Mountjoy as a young prison officer in May 1978, he stepped back into Victorian times. He knew nothing about jails, apart from what he had seen in black-and-white films on RTE: 'good' sheriffs and 'bad' hombres. He quickly learned that behind bars there is no black and white: the 'bad' guy often comes in the guise of officialdom. Here, he reveals the...

A vivid history of America's biggest, baddest prison system and how it came to lead the nation's punitive revolutionIn the prison business, all roads lead to Texas. The most locked-down state in the nation has led the way in criminal justice severity, from assembly-line executions to isolation supermaxes, from prison privatization to sentencing juveniles as adults. Texas Tough, a sweeping history of American imprisonment from the days of slavery to the pres...

The first full reckoning of what actually happened at Abu Ghraib prison-"one of the most devastating of the many books on Iraq" (The New York Times Book Review)A relentlesly surprising and perceptive account of the front lines of the war on terror, Standard Operating Procedure is a war story that takes its place among the classics. Acclaimed author Philip Gourevitch presents the story behind a defining moment in the war, and a defining moment in o...

Paddy Armstrong was one of four people falsely convicted of The Guildford Bombing in 1975. He spent fifteen years in prison for a crime he did not commit. Today, as a husband and father, life is wonderfully ordinary, but the memory of his ordeal lives on. Here, for the first time and with unflinching candour, he lays bare the experiences of those years and their aftermath. Life after Life is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the power of forgiveness. It reminds us of th...

How did it feel to be faced with the prospect of being branded, pressed to death or boiled alive in oil?In this classic account of the history of torture, Geoffrey Abbott guides us through some of the worst torture methods known to man, from chilli powder punishment to needles under nails, with a style both chilling and full of dark humour. Prepare to be shocked to the core with this gruesome collection of tormenting tales that span from the early days of the Normans right up to the...

Collects three comic books published by the Real Cost of Prison project.

"There was a time I believed prisons existed to rehabilitate people, to make our communities safer. . . . When I saw for the first time (but not the last) a mother sobbing and clutching her son when visiting hours were up, only to be physically pried off and escorted out by guards, I knew nothing about that made me safer. This is the heart of this country's prison system. And the prison system has become the heart of America."—Walidah Imarisha, from the introduction.This is no roma...

On Easter Sunday in 1993, prisoners seized a major area of the prison at the maximum-security Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville. More than 400 prisoners, including an unlikely alliance between two usually opposing gangs - the 'Aryan Brotherhood' and the 'Gangsta Disciples' - held L block for 11 days, during which nine prisoners alleged to have been informants and one hostaged correctional officer were murdered. Lucasville gives an in-depth account of the causes of the distu...

An ideal first source of reference for practitioners, judges, and legal representatives working on any case affecting prisoners, Blackstone's Prison Law Handbook is a complete practical guide to the main areas that give rise to prisoner complaints which include sentence calculation, Independent Adjudications, licence recall, and Parole Board hearings. The Handbook emphasises practical considerations which the practitioner should take into account and refers to the most re...

Every day children exiled to prison are exposed to abusive and neglectful treatment, yet their plight is hidden. Based on wide-ranging research and first-person interviews, this passionately argued book presents the shocking truth about the lives and deaths of children in custody.Drawing on human rights legislation and progress in the care and treatment of vulnerable children elsewhere, it outlines the harsh realities of penal child custody including hunger, denial of fresh air, cr...

In recent years as countries around the globe have begun to move from dictatorial to more democratic systems of governance, no more traumatic (or dramatic) ethical problem has arisen than what to do with the previous regime’s torturers. In most cases, the security and military apparatuses, responsible for the overwhelming majority of human-rights abuses, still retain tremendous power—and will not abide any settling of accounts.Now, New Yorker staff reporter Lawrence Weschl...

The Struggle Within is an accessible yet wide-ranging historical primer about how mass imprisonment has been a tool of repression deployed against diverse left-wing social movements over the last fifty years. Berger examines some of the most dynamic social movements across half a century: black liberation, Puerto Rican independence, Native American sovereignty, Chicano radicalism, white antiracist and working-class mobilizations, pacifist and antinuclear campaigns, and earth liber...