Providing an examination of deaths in police, prison and special-hospital custody, including on remand and in police and court custody, this volume contains papers which were originally presented at the 3rd International Conference on Deaths in Custody, held at Brunel University under the auspices of the Institute for the Study and Treatment of Delinquency.

The United States imprisons more of its citizens than any other nation in the world. To be sentenced to prison is to face systematic violence, humiliation, and, perhaps worst of all, separation from family and community. It is, to borrow Orlando Patterson’s term for the utter isolation of slavery, to suffer “social death.” In Prison and Social Death, Joshua Price exposes the unexamined cost that prisoners pay while incarcerated and after release, drawing upon hundreds of often harrowing interviews conducted with people in prison, parolees, and their families. Price argues that the prison separates prisoners from desperately needed communities of support from parents, spouses, and children. Moreover, this isolation of people in prison renders them highly vulnerable to other forms of violence, including sexual violence. Price stresses that the violence they face goes beyond physical abuse by prison guards and it involves institutionalized forms of mistreatment, ranging from abysmally poor health care to routine practices that are arguably abusive, such as pat-downs, cavity searches, and the shackling of pregnant women. And social death does not end with prison. The condition is permanent, following people after they are released from prison. Finding housing, employment, receiving social welfare benefits, and regaining voting rights are all hindered by various legal and other hurdles. The mechanisms of social death, Price shows, are also informal and cultural. Ex-prisoners face numerous forms of distrust and are permanently stigmatized by other citizens around them. A compelling blend of solidarity, civil rights activism, and social research, Prison and Social Death offers a unique look at the American prison and the excessive and unnecessary damage it inflicts on prisoners and parolees.

Although prison suicide is a global problem, there is little knowledge about the investigations occurring after prison suicides. Addressing this gap, this book provides the first detailed case study of the investigations that follow prison suicides: using England and Wales. Despite the large range of institutions that monitor English and Welsh prisons, suicides reached a record high in 2016, with the rate having doubled since 2012. These deaths represent the sharp end of a continuum of suffering, self-harm, despair and distress within prisons, which affects prisoners, their families and prison staff. This book details and critiques the lengthy and expensive police, ombudsman and coroner investigations that follow prison suicides. Drawing on extensive document analysis, including analysis of over 100 Prison and Probation Ombudsman fatal incident investigations, and original semi-structured interviews with stakeholders undertaken between 2016-2017, this book provides a novel analysis of prison oversight.

This book is an in-depth critical examination of all pertinent aspects of life without parole (LWOP). Empirically assessing key arguments that advance LWOP, including as an alternative to the death penalty, it reveals that not only is the punishment cruel while not providing any societal benefits, it is actually detrimental to society. Over the last thirty years, the use of life without parole (LWOP) has exploded in the United States. While the use of capital punishment over that same time period has declined, it must be recognized that LWOP is in fact a hidden death sentence. It is, however, implemented in a way that allows society to largely ignore this truth. While capital punishment has rightfully been subject to intense debate and scholarship, LWOP has mostly escaped such scrutiny. In fact, LWOP has been touted by both death penalty abolitionists and by tough-on-crime conservatives, which has allowed it to flourish under the radar. Specifically, abolitionists have advanced LWOP as a palatable alternative to capital punishment, which they perceive as inhumane, error-prone, costly, and racially biased. Conservatives, meanwhile, advocate for LWOP as an effective means of fighting crime, a just form of retribution, and necessary tool for managing incorrigible offenders. This book seeks to tap into and help inform this growing debate by subjecting these key arguments to empirical scrutiny. The results of those analyses fail to produce any evidence in support of any of those various justifications and therefore suggest that LWOP should be abolished and replaced with life sentences that come with parole eligibility after a maximum of 25 years. The book will be of great interest to students and scholars of criminology & criminal justice and will also have cross-over appeal into the fields of law, political science, and sociology. It will also appeal to criminal justice professionals, lawmakers, activists, and attorneys, as well as death penalty abolitionists, opponents of mass incarceration, advocates for sentencing reform, and supporters of prisoners' rights.

There is no question that the death penalty is disproportionately imposed in cases involving defendants with mental disabilities. There is clear, systemic bias at all stages of the prosecution and the sentencing process – in determining who is competent to be executed, in the assessment of mitigation evidence, in the ways that counsel is assigned, in the ways that jury determinations are often contaminated by stereotyped preconceptions of persons with mental disabilities, in the ways that cynical expert testimony reflects a propensity on the part of some experts to purposely distort their testimony in order to achieve desired ends. These questions are shockingly ignored at all levels of the criminal justice system, and by society in general. Here, Michael Perlin explores the relationship between mental disabilities and the death penalty and explains why and how this state of affairs has come to be, to explore why it is necessary to identify the factors that have contributed to this scandalous and shameful policy morass, to highlight the series of policy choices that need immediate remediation, and to offer some suggestions that might meaningfully ameliorate the situation. Using real cases to illustrate the ways in which the persons with mental disabilities are unable to receive fair treatment during death penalty trials, he demonstrates the depth of the problem and the way it’s been institutionalized so as to be an accepted part of our system. He calls for a new approach, and greater attention to the issues that have gone overlooked for so long.

PROSE Award Finalist for Psychology This book synthesizes scholarly reflections with personal accounts from prison administrators and inmates to show the harsh reality of life on death row.