In a series of newly commissioned essays from the leading scholars and advocates in criminal justice, Invisible Punishment explores, for the first time, the far-reaching consequences of our current criminal justice policies. Adopted as part of “get tough on crime” attitudes that prevailed in the 1980s and '90s, a range of strategies, from “three strikes” and “a war on drugs,” to mandatory sentencing and prison privatization, have resulted in the mass incarceration of American citizens, and have had enormous effects not just on wrong-doers, but on their families and the communities they come from. This book looks at the consequences of these policies twenty years later.

View this manual, a reference in the School's Indigent Defense Manual Series, free of charge at defendermanuals.sog.unc.edu. The North Carolina Civil Commitment Manual is designed to assist the attorney representing a respondent or minor in civil commitment proceedings. It reviews North Carolina mental health and substance abuse laws pertaining to inpatient and outpatient commitments and admissions. It analyzes in depth the relevant statutes in Chapter 122C of the North Carolina General Statutes and applicable case law. It also discusses the collateral consequences resulting from commitment and the special provisions on commitment of respondents involved with the criminal justice system. Although the manual's focus is on commitments and admissions requiring judicial review, and thus on proceedings requiring the appointment of counsel, the manual is a clear, usable resource for anyone who works in this challenging area of law.

Smart Decarceration is a forward-thinking, practical volume that provides concrete strategies for an era of decarceration. This timely work consists of chapters written from multiple perspectives and disciplines including scholars, practitioners, and persons with incarceration histories. The text grapples with tough questions and builds a foundation for the decarceration field.

At the start of the twenty-first century, 1 percent of the U.S. population is behind bars. An additional 3 percent is on parole or probation. In all but two states, incarcerated felons cannot vote, and in three states felon disenfranchisement is for life. More than 5 million adult Americans cannot vote because of a felony-class criminal conviction, meaning that more than 2 percent of otherwise eligible voters are stripped of their political rights. Nationally, fully a third of the disenfranchised are African American, effectively disenfranchising 8 percent of all African Americans in the United States. In Alabama, Kentucky, and Florida, one in every five adult African Americans cannot vote. Punishment and Inclusion gives a theoretical and historical account of this pernicious practice of felon disenfranchisement, drawing widely on early modern political philosophy, continental and postcolonial political thought, critical race theory, feminist philosophy, disability theory, critical legal studies, and archival research into state constitutional conventions. It demonstrates that the history of felon disenfranchisement, rooted in postslavery restrictions on suffrage and the contemporaneous emergence of the modern “American” penal system, reveals the deep connections between two political institutions often thought to be separate, showing the work of membership done by the criminal punishment system and the work of punishment done by the electoral franchise. Felon disenfranchisement is a symptom of the tension that persists in democratic politics between membership and punishment. This book shows how this tension is managed via the persistence of white supremacy in contemporary regimes of punishment and governance.

Mele and Miller offer a timely, insightful analysis of the continuing challenges faced by ex-felons upon re-entry into society. Such penalties include a lifetime ban on receiving welfare and food stamps for individuals convicted of drug felonies as well as barriers to employment, child rearing, and housing opportunities. This much-needed work contains pieces by scholars in law, criminology, and sociology, including: Scott Christianson, Michael Lichter, and Daniel Kanstroom.