This book provides an overview of the criminal justice system of the United States. It is intended to provide the introductory student a concise yet balanced introduction to the workings of the legal system as well as policing, courts, corrections, and juvenile justice. Six chapters, each divided into five sections, provide the reader a consistent, comfortable format as well as providing the instructor with a consistent framework for ease of instructional design.
Unlike other textbooks on the subject, Criminal Justice Policy and Planning: Planned Change, Fifth Edition, presents a comprehensive and structured account of the process of administering planned change in the criminal justice system. Welsh and Harris detail a simple yet sophisticated seven-stage model, which offers students and practitioners a full account of program and policy development from beginning to end. The authors thoughtfully discuss the steps: analyzing a problem; setting goals and objectives; designing the program or policy; action planning; implementing and monitoring; evaluating outcomes; and reassessing and reviewing. Within these steps, students focus on performing essential procedures, such as conducting a systems analysis, specifying an impact model, identifying target populations, making cost projections, collecting monitoring data, and performing evaluations. In reviewing these steps and procedures, students can develop a full appreciation for the challenges inherent in the process and understand the tools that they require to meet those challenges. To provide for a greater understanding of the material, the text uses a wide array of real-life case studies and examples of programs and policies. Examples include policies such as Restorative Justice, Justice Reinvestment, Stop-and-Frisk, and the Brady Act, and programs such as drug courts, community-based violence prevention, and halfway houses. By examining the successes and failures of various innovations, the authors demonstrate both the ability of rational planning to make successful improvements and the tendency of unplanned change to result in undesirable outcomes. The result is a powerful argument for the use of logic, deliberation, and collaboration in criminal justice innovations.
A powerful, bracing and deeply spiritual look at intensely, troubled youth, Last Chance in Texas gives a stirring account of the way one remarkable prison rehabilitates its inmates. While reporting on the juvenile court system, journalist John Hubner kept hearing about a facility in Texas that ran the most aggressive–and one of the most successful–treatment programs for violent young offenders in America. How was it possible, he wondered, that a state like Texas, famed for its hardcore attitude toward crime and punishment, could be leading the way in the rehabilitation of violent and troubled youth? Now Hubner shares the surprising answers he found over months of unprecedented access to the Giddings State School, home to “the worst of the worst”: four hundred teenage lawbreakers convicted of crimes ranging from aggravated assault to murder. Hubner follows two of these youths–a boy and a girl–through harrowing group therapy sessions in which they, along with their fellow inmates, recount their crimes and the abuse they suffered as children. The key moment comes when the young offenders reenact these soul-shattering moments with other group members in cathartic outpourings of suffering and anger that lead, incredibly, to genuine remorse and the beginnings of true empathy . . . the first steps on the long road to redemption. Cutting through the political platitudes surrounding the controversial issue of juvenile justice, Hubner lays bare the complex ties between abuse and violence. By turns wrenching and uplifting, Last Chance in Texas tells a profoundly moving story about the children who grow up to inflict on others the violence that they themselves have suffered. It is a story of horror and heartbreak, yet ultimately full of hope.
Beyond Violence: A Prevention Program for Women is a forty-hour, evidence-based, gender-responsive, trauma-informed treatment program specifically developed for women who have committed a violent crime and are incarcerated. This program offers counselors, mental health professionals, and program administrators the tools they need to implement a gender-responsive, trauma-informed treatment program within the criminal justice system. This Participant Workbook helps participants understand the relationships between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors; learn new skills, including communication, conflict resolution, decision making, and calming soothing techniques; and become part of a group of women working to create a less violent world.
When the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts erupted in violent protest in August 1965, the uprising drew strength from decades of pent-up frustration with employment discrimination, residential segregation, and poverty. But the more immediate grievance was anger at the racist and abusive practices of the Los Angeles Police Department. Yet in the decades after Watts, the LAPD resisted all but the most limited demands for reform made by activists and residents of color, instead intensifying its power. In Policing Los Angeles, Max Felker-Kantor narrates the dynamic history of policing, anti–police abuse movements, race, and politics in Los Angeles from the 1965 Watts uprising to the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion. Using the explosions of two large-scale uprisings in Los Angeles as bookends, Felker-Kantor highlights the racism at the heart of the city's expansive police power through a range of previously unused and rare archival sources. His book is a gripping and timely account of the transformation in police power, the convergence of interests in support of law and order policies, and African American and Mexican American resistance to police violence after the Watts uprising.
