This is a case study of the violence and disorder that have become endemic in U. S. prisons. The 1980 riot at the Penitentiary of New Mexico was one of the worst riots in prison history. Thirty-three inmates were killed and hundreds were injured. The author demonstrates how this riot, and the growing disorder that preceded it, reflect important shifts in the organizational structure and philosophy of prison management in the U. S. The Penitentiary in Crisis analyzes how shifts in prisoner control strategies disrupted important power relations between inmates and staff and created disorder. The author’s experiences as a corrections counselor and planner in New Mexico corrections and his later role as principal researcher for the official investigation of the riot give him a unique perspective for understanding the riot and the prison’s organization and history.
This is a case study of the violence and disorder that have become endemic in U. S. prisons. The 1980 riot at the Penitentiary of New Mexico was one of the worst riots in prison history. Thirty-three inmates were killed and hundreds were injured. The author demonstrates how this riot, and the growing disorder that preceded it, reflect important shifts in the organizational structure and philosophy of prison management in the U. S. The Penitentiary in Crisis analyzes how shifts in prisoner control strategies disrupted important power relations between inmates and staff and created disorder. The author's experiences as a corrections counselor and planner in New Mexico corrections and his later role as principal researcher for the official investigation of the riot give him a unique perspective for understanding the riot and the prison's organization and history.
This is a case study of the violence and disorder that have become endemic in U. S. prisons. The 1980 riot at the Penitentiary of New Mexico was one of the worst riots in prison history. Thirty-three inmates were killed and hundreds were injured. The author demonstrates how this riot, and the growing disorder that preceded it, reflect important shifts in the organizational structure and philosophy of prison management in the U. S. The Penitentiary in Crisis analyzes how shifts in prisoner control strategies disrupted important power relations between inmates and staff and created disorder. The author's experiences as a corrections counselor and planner in New Mexico corrections and his later role as principal researcher for the official investigation of the riot give him a unique perspective for understanding the riot and the prison's organization and history.
This book is about human breakdown under stress. It is the first attempt comprehensively to map the variety of forms that despair can take, to reconstruct the ineffable shapes of human extremity as fully and faithfully as possible. Presenting the results of one of the largest studies ever undertaken, the book is based on well over 600 interviews (and related background material) dealing with the self-destructive acts of men and women in prison. It is thus also a portrait of the impact of incarceration, bringing to life the prison world as seen through the eyes of those who suffer in confinement. Hundreds of inmates, speaking in their own words, here present a firsthand view of their experience with all its nuances and pathos. Following an introductory chapter on the scope and methods of the research, the first part of the book presents the major themes of coping that emerged from the study--the fundamental concerns of people under stress (potency, fear, need for support) as they are manifested in difficulties with the environment, with perception of the self and others, and with impulse management. Part Two takes up the questions of how typical are inmates who injure themselves and in what ways they differ from their peers--and major differences in risk and in themes of coping are shown to be related to age, sex, ethnic background, previous experiences with drugs and with personal violence, and incarceration in jails before sentence and in prisons. Part Three presents detailed psychological autopsies of men who ended their lives in prison cells, providing a convincing (and heart-rending) view of the process of human breakdown as it unfolds over time. The book will be important not only to criminologists and penologists but also--and because of its profound general implications--to all those sociologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and administrators of institutions who wish to understand and effectively to deal with the tragic problems of human breakdown. Hans Toch is professor of psychology in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Albany. He is an elected fellow of the American Psychological Association as well as the American Society of Criminology. He has been president of the American Association of Forensic Psychology. He was also the Project Co-Director of the Institute for the Study of Crime and Delinquency at Sacramento, California.
Elsner presents an extraordinary, comprehensive, shocking expos of the American prison system. Readers learn why the prison epidemic matters to them, even if they've never met anyone who's gone to jail, and learn what it's really like on the inside with racial gangs, corruption, and sickness.
Prison officials are in the midst of the biggest prison crisis. This book looks at prison life and conditions. It reviews ideas and policies, both at home and from abroad, that can be used to alleviate the crisis if we are able to muster the political courage and public support to put them into effect.
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
‘So far we have successfully avoided loss of life during serious disturbances but if the present trend continues there will be a serious loss of control... In such circumstances there is a probability of both staff and prisoners being killed.’ This dramatic warning, given by the prison governors to the Labour Home Secretary, Mr Merlyn Rees, stimulated the setting up of the May Committee in 1978. That Committee then reported and revealed how dangerously explosive the prison system had become. The time was exactly right therefore for a book like Prison Crisis, originally published in 1980, to draw together all of the issues to provide an agenda for public and politicians to use this best chance in one hundred years for a major reform of the prison system. One issue above all symbolises those which affect the prison system and the prison service, and of course the prisoners themselves; for it exposes why the system is dangerously close to breakdown:- ‘The extent of prison overcrowding is a national disgrace. In 1978, for the first time, as many as 16,000 inmates in some of the most primitive of Britain’s prisons were forced to live two or three to a cell which the Victorians had built to hold one. They have not even washbasins in their cells, let alone lavatories... Sometime prisoners are locked in together for twenty-three hours out of twenty-four, sleeping, smoking eating, urinating and defecating without privacy in sickening sight, smell and sound of each other.’ The author, who had been Home Affairs Correspondent of The Times for ten years, raises, as Sir Robert Marks puts it in his Foreword, ‘all sorts of issues which could and should be of great interest to a caring public’ and which now demand decision and action: how best to hold the top-security prisoners, including terrorists, how prisons are often forced, with psychiatric cases, to do the job of hospitals; ‘the academies of crime’, detention centres and borstals; the rise in female, and particularly juvenile crime; violence in prisons and riot control; the prisoners’ rights movement; discontent among prison officers not just over pay but over the status of their job and the importance of their role in re-educating prisoners; the governors’ position of responsibility without power; the low political priority given by Government. Finally, in a chapter aptly called ‘Rescuing the Prisons’, Peter Evans conducts a wide-ranging, well informed and radical debate on what, at different levels, needed to be done to make a system rooted in the nineteenth century fit for the twenty-first century and still retain the sense that prisons are above all a moral issue.
Lockdown America documents the horrors and absurdities of militarized policing, prisons, a fortified border, and the war on drugs. Its accessible and vivid prose makes clear the links between crime and politics in a period of gathering economic crisis.
'At a time when activists, elected officials, and concerned individuals should be countering these trends with demands for jobs, education and serious alternatives to imprisonment, there is relative silence. Criminal Injustice, which explores the connections between imprisonment, racism, class domination, misogyny, and homophobia, offers us invaluable information and compelling arguments for placing prison issues on the agenda of every progressive organization.' Angela Y. DavisThis remarkable anthology exposes and uncovers the economic and political realities behind the imprisonment of astounding numbers of the working class, working poor, and people of color.
