Beyond the Prison Gates
Beyond the Prison Gates

Author: Warren Rosenblum

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2012-09-01

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 1469606763

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Germany today has one of the lowest incarceration rates in the industrialized world, and social welfare principles play an essential role at all levels of the German criminal justice system. Warren Rosenblum examines the roots of this social approach to criminal policy in the reform movements of the Wilhelmine and Weimar periods, when reformers strove to replace state institutions of control and incarceration with private institutions of protective supervision. Reformers believed that private charities and volunteers could diagnose and treat social pathologies in a way that coercive state institutions could not. The expansion of welfare for criminals set the stage for a more economical system of punishment, Rosenblum argues, but it also opened the door to new, more expansive controls over individuals marked as "asocial." With the reformers' success, the issue of who had power over welfare became increasingly controversial and dangerous. Other historians have suggested that the triumph of eugenics in the 1890s was predicated upon the abandonment of liberal and Christian assumptions about human malleability. Rosenblum demonstrates, however, that the turn to "criminal biology" was not a reaction against social reform, but rather an effort to rescue its legitimacy.

On the Outside
On the Outside

Author: David J. Harding

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2019-02-21

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 022660764X

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One of the Vera Institute of Justice’s Best Criminal Justice Books of 2019 America’s high incarceration rates are a well-known facet of contemporary political conversations. Mentioned far less often is what happens to the nearly 700,000 former prisoners who rejoin society each year. On the Outside examines the lives of twenty-two people—varied in race and gender but united by their time in the criminal justice system—as they pass out of the prison gates and back into the world. The book takes a clear-eyed look at the challenges faced by formerly incarcerated citizens as they try to find work, housing, and stable communities. Standing alongside these individual portraits is a quantitative study conducted by the authors that followed every state prisoner in Michigan who was released on parole in 2003 (roughly 11,000 individuals) for the next seven years, providing a comprehensive view of their postprison neighborhoods, families, employment, and contact with the parole system. On the Outside delivers a powerful combination of hard data and personal narrative that shows why our country continues to struggle with the social and economic reintegration of the formerly incarcerated. For further information, including an instructor guide and slide deck, please visit: http://ontheoutsidebook.us/home/instructors

My Fellow Prisoners
My Fellow Prisoners

Author: Mikhail Khodorkovsky

Publisher: ABRAMS

Published: 2015-02-24

Total Pages: 60

ISBN-13: 1468311611

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The Russian oil mogul and activist offers reflections on his decades-long incarceration under Putin in this “illuminating and brave” prison memoir (The Washington Post). Mikhail Khodorkovsky was Russia’s most successful businessman—and an outspoken critic of the Kremlin. As his oil company Yukos revived the Russian oil industry, Khodorkovsky began sponsoring programs to encourage civil society and fight corruption. Then he was arrested at gunpoint. Sentenced to ten years in a Siberian penal colony on fraud and tax evasion charges in 2003, Khodorkovsky was put on trial again in 2010 and sentenced to fourteen years on new charges that contradicted the previous ones. While imprisoned, Khodorkovsky fought for the rights of his fellow prisoners, going on hunger strike four times. After he was pardoned in 2013, he vowed to continue fighting for prisoners’ rights, and this book is dedicated to that work. A moving portrait of the prisoners Khodorkovsky met, My Fellow Prisoners is an eye-opening account of Russia’s brutal prison system. “Vivid, humane and poignant” —Financial Times

Beyond the Spiral Gates
Beyond the Spiral Gates

Author: Mutch Katsonga

Publisher: Austin Macauley

Published: 2017-09

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 9781787104464

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Wickfields was the name of an institution that housed children deemed too dangerous to live in regular society. Beyond the Spiral Gates is a raw coming-of-age odyssey, a first-hand account of one boy's experiences at the archaic Wickfields School for Criminal Children. From the idyllic sun-drenched fields of Hayvern to the shadowy hallways of Wickfields, the story delves deep into the epicentre of the human psyche. Starting in the present day with the protagonist as an elderly man and chronic insomniac who struggles to come to terms with his own mortality as he confronts the demons of his youth spent at Wickfields, the story spins us back through the years to where it all began. It's a tale of self-exploration, a redemptive narrative as well as a harrowing love story that does not spare raw emotion as the protagonist grapples with the trauma of the events that shaped that period of his adolescent life. Beyond The Spiral Gates is a gut-wrenching account of one boy's journey of self-discovery, told in an unflinching and engaging voice.

Behind the Gates of Gomorrah
Behind the Gates of Gomorrah

Author: Stephen Seager

Publisher: Allen & Unwin

Published: 2015-01-02

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 1743438974

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A extraordinary, eye-opening look behind the razor wire into life inside the walls of one of the most notorious hospitals for the criminally insane, a hellish world inhabited by mass murderers, serial killers, and other figures from our nightmares. Psychiatrist Stephen Seager was no stranger to locked psych wards when he accepted a job at California's Gorman State hospital, known locally as 'Gomorrah', but nothing could have prepared him for what he encountered when he stepped through its gates, a triple sally port behind the twenty-foot walls topped with shining coils of razor wire. Gorman State is one of the nation's largest forensic mental hospitals, dedicated to treating the criminally insane. Unit C, where Seager was assigned, was reserved for the 'bad actors', the mass murderers, serial killers, and the real-life Hannibal Lecters of the world. Against a backdrop of surreal beauty - a campus-like setting where peacocks strolled the well-kept lawns - is a place of remarkable violence, a place where a small staff of clinicians are expected to manage a volatile population of prison-hardened ex-cons, where lone therapists lead sharing circles with psychopaths, where homemade weapons and contraband circulate freely, and where patients and physicians often measure their lives according to how fast they can run. Behind the Gates of Gomorrah affords an eye-opening look inside a facility to which few people have ever had access. Honest, reflective, and at times darkly funny, Seager's gripping account of his experiences at Gorman State hospital give us an extraordinary insight into a unique and terrifying world, inhabited by figures from our nightmares.

The Culture of Punishment
The Culture of Punishment

Author: Michelle Brown

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2009-10-15

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 081479145X

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America is the most punitive nation in the world, incarcerating more than 2.3 million people—or one in 136 of its residents. Against the backdrop of this unprecedented mass imprisonment, punishment permeates everyday life, carrying with it complex cultural meanings. In The Culture of Punishment, Michelle Brown goes beyond prison gates and into the routine and popular engagements of everyday life, showing that those of us most distanced from the practice of punishment tend to be particularly harsh in our judgments. The Culture of Punishment takes readers on a tour of the sites where culture and punishment meet—television shows, movies, prison tourism, and post 9/11 new war prisons—demonstrating that because incarceration affects people along distinct race and class lines, it is only a privileged group of citizens who are removed from the experience of incarceration. These penal spectators, who often sanction the infliction of pain from a distance, risk overlooking the reasons for democratic oversight of the project of punishment and, more broadly, justifications for the prohibition of pain.

Decades Behind Bars
Decades Behind Bars

Author: Gaye D. Holman

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2017-04-11

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 1476628483

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More than two million people are incarcerated in America's prisons--one in nine is serving a life sentence. Mass long-term imprisonment devours state budgets, adversely affects community well-being and skews our collective moral compass. This study examines the human costs of keeping the convicted out of sight, out of mind. Beginning in 1994, the author began recording the personal stories of 50 incarcerated felons--17 of them were still in prison 20 years later. The men candidly discuss what it means to commit a serious crime and to be confined for perhaps the remainder of their lives. Their stories are balanced by conversations with correctional officers, prison administrators, chaplains and parole board members. The author identifies circumstances that ruin some prisoners and save others and presents insights for possible improvements in the criminal justice system.

Barred
Barred

Author: Daniel S. Medwed

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 2022-09-20

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 1541675908

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A groundbreaking exposé of how our legal system makes it nearly impossible to overturn wrongful convictions Thousands of innocent people are behind bars in the United States. But proving their innocence and winning their release is nearly impossible. In Barred, legal scholar Daniel S. Medwed argues that our justice system’s stringent procedural rules are largely to blame for the ongoing punishment of the innocent. Those rules guarantee criminal defendants just one opportunity to appeal their convictions directly to a higher court. Afterward, the wrongfully convicted can pursue only a few narrow remedies. Even when there is strong evidence of a miscarriage of justice, rigid guidelines, bias, and deference toward lower courts all too often prevent exoneration. Offering clear explanations of legal procedures alongside heart-wrenching stories of their devastating impact, Barred exposes how the system is stacked against the innocent and makes a powerful call for change.

But They All Come Back
But They All Come Back

Author: Jeremy Travis

Publisher: The Urban Insitute

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 424

ISBN-13: 9780877667506

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The iron law of imprisonment is that “they all come back”. In 2002, more than 630,000 individuals left U.S. federal and state prisons. Thirty years ago, only 150,000 did. In this study, Travis decribes the new realities of imprisonment, and explores the impact of returning prisoners on seven policy domains: public safety, families and children, work, housing, public health, civic identity, and community capacity. Travis proposes a new architecture for the criminal justice system, organized around five principles of reentry, to encourage change and spur innovation.

The Girl Behind the Gates
The Girl Behind the Gates

Author: Brenda Davies

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Published: 2020-05-28

Total Pages: 389

ISBN-13: 1529374553

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***TOP TEN BESTSELLER*** 'Compelling. Poignant. Haunting. Heart wrenching. Just beautiful. Everyone needs to read this wonderful book.' - Renita D'Silva, bestselling author of The Forgotten Daughter 1939. Seventeen-year-old Nora Jennings has spent her life secure in the certainty of a bright, happy future - until one night of passion has more catastrophic consequences than she ever could have anticipated. Labelled a moral defective and sectioned under the Mental Deficiency Act, she is forced to endure years of unspeakable cruelty at the hands of those who are supposed to care for her. 1981. When psychiatrist Janet Humphreys comes across Nora, heavily institutionalised and still living in the hospital more than forty years after her incarceration, she knows that she must be the one to help Nora rediscover what it is to live. But as she works to help Nora overcome her past, Janet realises she must finally face her own. Based on a true story, The Girl Behind the Gates is perfect for fans of The Girl in the Letter and Philomena. Further praise for THE GIRL BEHIND THE GATES: 'The Girl behind the Gates absorbed me from the start. A haunting, heart-wrenching but ultimately heart-warming novel.' - Gill Thompson, bestselling author of The Oceans Between Us 'The Girl Behind the Gates is a powerful, emotional novel. I was moved to tears by the ending and will certainly not hesitate to recommend it.' - Jill Childs, bestselling author of Gracie's Secret 'A powerful story of trust, compassion, healing - and the transforming power of love, that can give new life to a broken spirit.' - Sharon Maas, bestselling author of The Violin Maker's Daughter Readers LOVE The Girl Behind the Gates! 'The best book of the year. I read 125 books a year and this is the best I have read' - 5 STARS 'I can't stop crying having just finished the book. It's an incredible piece of literary genius' - 5 STARS 'A story that needs to be told' - 5 STARS 'An inspirational and very moving story' - 5 STARS 'Just brilliant. I wholeheartedly recommend this book' - 5 STARS 'I hardly ever write a review but if you read one book this year this is it' - 5 STARS 'A very moving and heartbreaking story' - 5 STARS 'I would have given this book 10 STARS if I could' - 5 STARS 'This book is beautifully written and captivating in every way' - 5 STARS