Prison Violence

Prison Violence

Author: Kristine Levan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-08

Total Pages: 166

ISBN-13: 131707579X

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Drawing on a range of research and media sources to provide an international perspective on the topic of prison violence, this book focuses on the impact of such violence on the individual both while he or she is incarcerated and upon his or her release from prison, as well as on society as a whole. With a special emphasis on comparisons of violence among incarcerated populations in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, Prison Violence: Causes, Consequences and Solutions explores the various systems that exist to combat the problem, whilst also considering public perceptions of offenders and punishment, as influenced by media and coverage of high-profile cases. Providing a comprehensive analysis of prison violence on national and international levels, this book examines the extent of the problem, theoretical understandings of the issue and concrete solutions designed to prevent and handle such violence. As such, it will be of interest to policy makers as well as scholars of sociology, criminology and penology.


We Are Not Slaves

We Are Not Slaves

Author: Robert T. Chase

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2019-11-21

Total Pages: 543

ISBN-13: 1469653583

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Hank Lacayo Best Labor Themed Book, International Latino Book Awards Best Book Award, Division of Critical Criminology and Social Justice, American Society of Criminology In the early twentieth century, the brutality of southern prisons became a national scandal. Prisoners toiled in grueling, violent conditions while housed in crude dormitories on what were effectively slave plantations. This system persisted until the 1940s when, led by Texas, southern states adopted northern prison design reforms. Texas presented the reforms to the public as modern, efficient, and disciplined. Inside prisons, however, the transition to penitentiary cells only made the endemic violence more secretive, intensifying the labor division that privileged some prisoners with the power to accelerate state-orchestrated brutality and the internal sex trade. Reformers' efforts had only made things worse--now it was up to the prisoners to fight for change. Drawing from three decades of legal documents compiled by prisoners, Robert T. Chase narrates the struggle to change prison from within. Prisoners forged an alliance with the NAACP to contest the constitutionality of Texas prisons. Behind bars, a prisoner coalition of Chicano Movement and Black Power organizations publicized their deplorable conditions as "slaves of the state" and initiated a prison-made civil rights revolution and labor protest movement. These insurgents won epochal legal victories that declared conditions in many southern prisons to be cruel and unusual--but their movement was overwhelmed by the increasing militarization of the prison system and empowerment of white supremacist gangs that, together, declared war on prison organizers. Told from the vantage point of the prisoners themselves, this book weaves together untold but devastatingly important truths from the histories of labor, civil rights, and politics in the United States as it narrates the transition from prison plantations of the past to the mass incarceration of today.


All Our Trials

All Our Trials

Author: Emily L Thuma

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2019-03-02

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0252051173

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During the 1970s, grassroots women activists in and outside of prisons forged a radical politics against gender violence and incarceration. Emily L. Thuma traces the making of this anticarceral feminism at the intersections of struggles for racial and economic justice, prisoners’ and psychiatric patients’ rights, and gender and sexual liberation. All Our Trials explores the organizing, ideas, and influence of those who placed criminalized and marginalized women at the heart of their antiviolence mobilizations. This activism confronted a "tough on crime" political agenda and clashed with the mainstream women’s movement’s strategy of resorting to the criminal legal system as a solution to sexual and domestic violence. Drawing on extensive archival research and first-person narratives, Thuma weaves together the stories of mass defense campaigns, prisoner uprisings, broad-based local coalitions, national gatherings, and radical print cultures that cut through prison walls. In the process, she illuminates a crucial chapter in an unfinished struggle––one that continues in today’s movements against mass incarceration and in support of transformative justice.


Building the Prison State

Building the Prison State

Author: Heather Schoenfeld

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2018-02-19

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 022652101X

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The United States incarcerates more people per capita than any other industrialized nation in the world—about 1 in 100 adults, or more than 2 million people—while national spending on prisons has catapulted 400 percent. Given the vast racial disparities in incarceration, the prison system also reinforces race and class divisions. How and why did we become the world’s leading jailer? And what can we, as a society, do about it? Reframing the story of mass incarceration, Heather Schoenfeld illustrates how the unfinished task of full equality for African Americans led to a series of policy choices that expanded the government’s power to punish, even as they were designed to protect individuals from arbitrary state violence. Examining civil rights protests, prison condition lawsuits, sentencing reforms, the War on Drugs, and the rise of conservative Tea Party politics, Schoenfeld explains why politicians veered from skepticism of prisons to an embrace of incarceration as the appropriate response to crime. To reduce the number of people behind bars, Schoenfeld argues that we must transform the political incentives for imprisonment and develop a new ideological basis for punishment.


The Culture of Prison Violence

The Culture of Prison Violence

Author: James Michael Byrne

Publisher: Allyn & Bacon

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13:

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The articles in this collection examine recent research on the causes, prevention and control of prison violence. Experts discuss new work being done on inmate, staff, and management culture, the links between prison and community culture and violence, and identify best practices and ‘what works’ in reducing violence and changing offender behaviour.


Prison and Social Death

Prison and Social Death

Author: Joshua M. Price

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2015-07

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 0813565596

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The United States imprisons more of its citizens than any other nation in the world. To be sentenced to prison is to face systematic violence, humiliation, and, perhaps worst of all, separation from family and community. It is, to borrow Orlando Patterson’s term for the utter isolation of slavery, to suffer “social death.” In Prison and Social Death, Joshua Price exposes the unexamined cost that prisoners pay while incarcerated and after release, drawing upon hundreds of often harrowing interviews conducted with people in prison, parolees, and their families. Price argues that the prison separates prisoners from desperately needed communities of support from parents, spouses, and children. Moreover, this isolation of people in prison renders them highly vulnerable to other forms of violence, including sexual violence. Price stresses that the violence they face goes beyond physical abuse by prison guards and it involves institutionalized forms of mistreatment, ranging from abysmally poor health care to routine practices that are arguably abusive, such as pat-downs, cavity searches, and the shackling of pregnant women. And social death does not end with prison. The condition is permanent, following people after they are released from prison. Finding housing, employment, receiving social welfare benefits, and regaining voting rights are all hindered by various legal and other hurdles. The mechanisms of social death, Price shows, are also informal and cultural. Ex-prisoners face numerous forms of distrust and are permanently stigmatized by other citizens around them. A compelling blend of solidarity, civil rights activism, and social research, Prison and Social Death offers a unique look at the American prison and the excessive and unnecessary damage it inflicts on prisoners and parolees.


Prisons, State and Violence

Prisons, State and Violence

Author: Maria João Guia

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2019-10-16

Total Pages: 183

ISBN-13: 3030130770

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This book provides a unique analysis of prisons and the violence at work inside them. It not only addresses aspects such as racial discrimination, especially in US prisons, but also gender differences, specific criminal groups operating within prisons, the reintegration processes and its failures. Combining works by various authors, it presents diverse perspectives on prison violence: in countries ranging from the USA to Australia, crossing European countries such as Portugal and Spain, among others, but also specific aspects such as prohibitions on phone calls, the economic crisis, and the current challenges of mass incarceration. As such, it offers a broad overview of several problems relevant to all scholars interested in deepening their understanding of violence in prisons.


Prison Violence

Prison Violence

Author: Kimmett Edgar

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-02-04

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1317829107

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Prisons are dangerous places, and assaults, threats, theft and verbal abuse are pervasive - attributable both to the characteristics of the captive population and to an institutional sub culture which promotes violence as a means of resolving conflicts. Yet the crimes perpetrated by prisoners on other prisoners have attracted little interest, and criminological research has contributed little to an understanding of situations in which violence arises in penal institutions. This book seeks to remedy this, and to address and answer a number of key questions: how do features of the prison social setting shape conflicts?; what social norms guide the decision to use violence?; what are the personal and social consequences of spending months or years in places where distrust and anxiety are normal?; how do staff respond to the dangers that are part of daily life in many prisons?; is it possible to identify factors associated with risk and resilience?; and what methods of handling conflicts do prisoners use that could prevent violence? Prison Violence adopts a distinctive approach to answering these questions, and is based on extensive research, including interviews with both victims and perpetrators of prison violence; it pioneers a conflict-centred approach, seeking to understand the pathways into and out of situations where there is potential for violence, focusing on interpersonal and institutional dynamics rather than on individual psychological factors.


Abolition. Feminism. Now.

Abolition. Feminism. Now.

Author: Angela Y. Davis

Publisher: Haymarket Books

Published: 2022-01-18

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 1642593788

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Abolition. Feminism. Now. is a celebration of freedom work, a movement genealogy, a call to action, and a challenge to those who think of abolition and feminism as separate—even incompatible—political projects. In this remarkable collaborative work, leading scholar-activists Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie surface the often unrecognized genealogies of queer, anti-capitalist, internationalist, grassroots, and women-of-color-led feminist movements, struggles, and organizations that have helped to define abolition and feminism in the twenty-first century. This pathbreaking book also features illustrations documenting the work of grassroots organizers embodying abolitionist feminist practice. Amplifying the analysis and the theories of change generated out of vibrant community based organizing, Abolition. Feminism. Now. highlights necessary historical linkages, key internationalist learnings, and everyday practices to imagine a future where we can all thrive.


Prison Violence in America

Prison Violence in America

Author: Michael Braswell

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 454

ISBN-13:

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Topics covered include interpersonal violence, sexual violence, staff violence, rape.