Synthesizing the latest scholarship in law and the social sciences on criminal sentencing and corrections, this book provides a thorough, balanced, and accessible survey of the major policy issues in these fields of persistent public interest and political debate. After three decades of explosive growth, the American incarceration rate is impracticably high. Drawing on leading research in law and the social sciences, this book covers a range of topics in sentencing and corrections in America in a manner that is accessible and engaging for general readers. Tackling high-level issues in the criminal justice system, it outlines the scale and causes of mass incarceration in the United States. To complement this, it details the roles and relative power of judges and prosecutors, the severity of punishment for drug offenders and white-collar offenders, the abuse of prisoners and the enforcement of prisoner rights, and repeat offending by released prisoners. It examines challenges that come with a high incarceration rate, such as the management of mental illness in the criminal justice system, the management of sex offenders, and the impact of parental incarceration on children. Looking ahead, it considers prospects for reducing current incarceration levels, the availability and effectiveness of alternatives to incarceration, and the future of capital punishment.

Before the nineteenth century, American prisons were used to hold people for trial and not to incarcerate them for wrong-doing. Only after independence did American states begin to reject such public punishment as whipping and pillorying and turn to imprisonment instead. In this legal, social, and political history, Adam J. Hirsch explores the reasons behind this change. Hirsch draws on evidence from throughout the early Republic and examines European sources to establish the American penitentiary's ideological origins and parallel development abroad. He focuses on Massachusetts as a case study of the transformation and presents in-depth data from that state. He challenges the notion that the penitentiary came as a by-product of Enlightenment thought, contending instead than the ideological foundations for criminal incarceration had been laid long before the eighteenth century and were premised upon old criminological theories. According to Hirsch, it was not new ideas but new social realities--the increasing urbanization and population mobility that promoted rampant crime--that made the penitentiary attractive to postrevolutionary legislators. Hirsch explores possible economic motives for incarcerating criminals and sentencing them to hard labor, but concludes that there is little evidence to support this. He finds that advocates of the penitentiary intended only that the prison pay for itself through enforced labor. Moreover, prison advocates frequently involved themselves in other contemporary social movements that reflected their concern to promote the welfare of criminals along with other oppressed groups.

Synthesizing the latest scholarship in law and the social sciences on criminal sentencing and corrections, this book provides a thorough, balanced, and accessible survey of the major policy issues in these fields of persistent public interest and political debate. After three decades of explosive growth, the American incarceration rate is impracticably high. Drawing on leading research in law and the social sciences, this book covers a range of topics in sentencing and corrections in America in a manner that is accessible and engaging for general readers. Tackling high-level issues in the criminal justice system, it outlines the scale and causes of mass incarceration in the United States. To complement this, it details the roles and relative power of judges and prosecutors, the severity of punishment for drug offenders and white-collar offenders, the abuse of prisoners and the enforcement of prisoner rights, and repeat offending by released prisoners. It examines challenges that come with a high incarceration rate, such as the management of mental illness in the criminal justice system, the management of sex offenders, and the impact of parental incarceration on children. Looking ahead, it considers prospects for reducing current incarceration levels, the availability and effectiveness of alternatives to incarceration, and the future of capital punishment.

Over the last thirty years, the prison population in the United States has increased more than seven-fold to over two million people, including vastly disproportionate numbers of minorities and people with little education. For some racial and educational groups, incarceration has become a depressingly regular experience, and prison culture and influence pervade their communities. Almost 60 percent of black male high school drop-outs in their early thirties have spent time in prison. In Punishment and Inequality in America, sociologist Bruce Western explores the recent era of mass incarceration and the serious social and economic consequences it has wrought. Punishment and Inequality in America dispels many of the myths about the relationships among crime, imprisonment, and inequality. While many people support the increase in incarceration because of recent reductions in crime, Western shows that the decrease in crime rates in the 1990s was mostly fueled by growth in city police forces and the pacification of the drug trade. Getting "tough on crime" with longer sentences only explains about 10 percent of the fall in crime, but has come at a significant cost. Punishment and Inequality in America reveals a strong relationship between incarceration and severely dampened economic prospects for former inmates. Western finds that because of their involvement in the penal system, young black men hardly benefited from the economic boom of the 1990s. Those who spent time in prison had much lower wages and employment rates than did similar men without criminal records. The losses from mass incarceration spread to the social sphere as well, leaving one out of ten young black children with a father behind bars by the end of the 1990s, thereby helping perpetuate the damaging cycle of broken families, poverty, and crime. The recent explosion of imprisonment is exacting heavy costs on American society and exacerbating inequality. Whereas college or the military were once the formative institutions in young men's lives, prison has increasingly usurped that role in many communities. Punishment and Inequality in America profiles how the growth in incarceration came about and the toll it is taking on the social and economic fabric of many American communities.

In the past few years, the need for prison reform in America has reached the level of a consensus. We agree that many prison terms are too long, especially for nonviolent drug offenders; that long-term isolation is a bad idea; and that basic psychiatric and medical care in prisons is woefully inadequate. Some people believe that contracting out prison services to for-profit companies is a recipe for mistreatment. Robert Ferguson argues that these reforms barely scratch the surface of what is wrong with American prisons: an atmosphere of malice and humiliation that subjects prisoners and guards alike to constant degradation. Bolstered by insights from hundreds of letters written by prisoners, Ferguson makes the case for an entirely new concept of prisons and their purpose: an “inner architectonics of reform” that will provide better education for all involved in prisons, more imaginative and careful use of technology, more sophisticated surveillance systems, and better accountability.

After 300 years of the American struggle with crime and punishment-related issues, the nation seems less able to deal with them now than at any other time in history. Why have we failed? Is the worst yet to come?In Crisis and Reform, criminology expert Alexis M. Durham III explores the most serious problems currently plaguing America's correctional system, their historical background, and possible solutions.Topics covered include:--Prison Crowding-AIDS in Prison-Difficulties Associated with Older Inmates-Women in Prison-Changing the Offender-Alternatives to Incarceration, including Electronic Monitoring, Intensive Supervision, House Arrest, Community Services, and Day-Reporting Centers-Boot Camps-Prison Privatization-The Death Penalty

In Punishment in America Michael Welch gathers together his seminal contributions to the most crucial and controversial issues in criminal justice. Topics range from the war on drugs, boot camps and institutional violence, to AIDS and HIV, capital punishment and the entire corrections industry. This coherent, but critical vision of punishment and corrections emphasizes social control but takes account of key social forces such as politics, religion and morality.