From Executive summary: This report focuses on the government's efforts to enforce federal civil rights laws prohibiting religious discrimination in the administration and management of federal and state prisons. Prisoners in federal and state institutions retain certain religious exercise rights under the Constitution and statutes including the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUPIPA), the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), and the Civil rights of Institutionalized Persons Act (CRIPA). Many states have similar provisions in their state constitutions and in state law modeled on RFRA. These rights must be balanced with the legitimate concerns of prisons officials, including cost, staffing, and most importantly, prison safety and security. Reconciling these rights and concerns can be a significant challenge for penal institutions, as well as courts.

Amy E. Lerman examines the shift from rehabilitation to punitivism that has taken place in the politics and practice of American corrections.

'This voluminous reference is, indeed, a handbook...But what distinguishes the collection is not its breadth but its continuity.' -- American Bar Foundation Research Journal, 1981

On 3 September 1996, Bill C-41 was proclaimed in force, initiating one significant step in the reform of sentencing and parole in Canada. This is the first book that, in addition to providing an overview of the law, effectively presents a sociological analysis of the legal reforms and their ramifications in this controversial area. The commissioned essays in this collection cover such crucial issues as options and alternatives in sentencing, patterns revealed by recent statistics, sentencing of minority groups, Bill C-41 and its effects, conditional sentencing, and the structure and relationship between parole and sentencing are clearly presented. An introduction, editorial comments beginning each chapter, and a concluding chapter draw the essays together resulting in a timely, comprehensive and extremely readable work on this critical topic. Broad in scope and perspective, this major new socio-legal study of the law of sentencing will be illuminating to students, members of the legal profession, and the general reader.

This report describes the results of a research project designed to determine the potential benefits of selective incapacitation. The data for this research consist of a survey administered to approximately 2,100 male prison and jail inmates in three states--California, Michigan, and Texas. They also include information from official records for the prison inmates. Section II reviews prior research on criminal careers and then describes the survey data on which this study is based. Section III introduces and describes the concept of selective incapacitation. Section IV summarizes findings on the distribution of individual offenses and describes a predictive scale for identifying high-rate offenders. Section V estimates the potential impacts of selective incapacitation policies. The final section summarizes what the authors think they have learned about selective incapacitation and suggests the kind of research that remains to be done.