Opening a new area in Latin American studies, The Birth of the Penitentiary in Latin America showcases the most recent historical outlooks on prison reform and criminology in the Latin American context. The essays in this collection shed new light on the discourse and practice of prison reform, the interpretive shifts induced by the spread of criminological science, and the links between them and competing discourses about class, race, nation, and gender. The book shows how the seemingly clear redemptive purpose of the penitentiary project was eventually contradicted by conflicting views about imprisonment, the pervasiveness of traditional forms of repression and control, and resistance from the lower classes. The essays are unified by their attempt to view the penitentiary (as well as the variety of representations conveyed by the different reform movements favoring its adoption) as an interpretive moment, revealing of the ideology, class fractures, and contradictory nature of modernity in Latin America. As such, the book should be of interest not only to scholars concerned with criminal justice history, but also to a wide range of readers interested in modernization, social identities, and the discursive articulation of social conflict. The collection also offers an up-to-date sampling of new historical approaches to the study of criminal justice history, illuminates crucial aspects of the Latin American modernization process, and contrasts the Latin American cases with the better known European and North American experiences with prison reform.

Is it time to give up on rehabilitating criminals? Record numbers of Americans are going to prison, and most of them will eventually return to society with a high chance of becoming repeat offenders. But a decision to abandon rehabilitation programs now would be premature warns Ann Chih Lin, who finds that little attention has been given to how these programs are actually implemented and why they tend to fail. In Reform in the Making, she not only supplies much-needed information on the process of program implementation but she also considers its social context, the daily realities faced by prison staff and inmates. By offering an in-depth look at common rehabilitation programs currently in operation--education, job training, and drug treatment--and examining how they are used or misused, Lin offers a practical approach to understanding their high failure rate and how the situation could be improved. Based on extensive observation and over 350 interviews with staff and prisoners in five medium-security male prisons, the book contrasts successfully implemented programs with subverted, abandoned, or neglected programs (those which staff reject or which do not teach prisoners anything useful). Lin explains that staff and prisoners have little patience with programs aimed at long-range goals when they must face the ongoing, immediate challenge of surviving prison life. Finding incentives to make both sides participate fully in rehabilitation is among the book's many contributions to improving prison policy.

This book provides in-depth, orignal and critical analyses by leading scholars of the penal systems of 16 nations around the world, focusing on changes in social structure, culture and punishment since 1975. Contributors provide an international and comparative context in which to understand the impact of recent profound economic, social and political changes on penal theory and practice.

A CounterPunch Best Book of the Year A Lone Star Policy Institute Recommended Book “If you care, as I do, about disrupting the perverse politics of criminal justice, there is no better place to start than Prisoners of Politics.” —James Forman, Jr., author of Locking Up Our Own The United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. The social consequences of this fact—recycling people who commit crimes through an overwhelmed system and creating a growing class of permanently criminalized citizens—are devastating. A leading criminal justice reformer who has successfully rewritten sentencing guidelines, Rachel Barkow argues that we would be safer, and have fewer people in prison, if we relied more on expertise and evidence and worried less about being “tough on crime.” A groundbreaking work that is transforming our national conversation on crime and punishment, Prisoners of Politics shows how problematic it is to base criminal justice policy on the whims of the electorate and argues for an overdue shift that could upend our prison problem and make America a more equitable society. “A critically important exploration of the political dynamics that have made us one of the most punitive societies in human history. A must-read by one of our most thoughtful scholars of crime and punishment.” —Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy “Barkow’s analysis suggests that it is not enough to slash police budgets if we want to ensure lasting reform. We also need to find ways to insulate the process from political winds.” —David Cole, New York Review of Books “A cogent and provocative argument about how to achieve true institutional reform and fix our broken system.” —Emily Bazelon, author of Charged

The purpose of American Penology is to provide a story of punishment's past, present, and likely future. The story begins in the 1600s, in the setting of colonial America, and ends in the present. As the story evolves through various historical and contemporary settings, America's efforts to understand and control crime unfold. The context, ideas, practices, and consequences of various reforms in the ways crime is punished are described and examined. Though the book's broader scope and purpose can be distinguished from prior efforts, it necessarily incorporates many contributions from this rich literature. While this enlarged second edition incorporates select descriptions and contingencies in relation to particular eras and punishment ideas and practices, it does not limit itself to individual "histories" of these eras. Instead, it uses history to frame and help explain particular punishment ideas and practices in relation to the period and context from which they evolved. The authors focus upon selected demographic, economic, political, religious, and intellectual contingencies that are associated with historical and contemporary eras to show how these contingencies shaped America's punishment ideals and practices. In offering a new understanding of received notions of crime control in this edition, Blomberg and Lucken not only provide insights into the future of punishment, but also show how the larger culture of control extends beyond the field of criminology to have an impact on declining levels of democracy, freedom, and privacy.

The author, himself a former inmate in the American Corrections System, writes about the state of the American prisons and the justice system and the American public's misconceptions about the system.

This book explores how Irish prison policy has come to take on its particular character, with comparatively low prison numbers, significant reliance on short sentences and a policy-making climate in which long periods of neglect are interspersed with bursts of political activity all prominent features. Drawing on the emerging scholarship of policy analysis, the book argues that it is only through close attention to the way in which policy is formed that we will fully understand the nature of prison policy.