Guard Unions and the Future of the Prisons

Guard Unions and the Future of the Prisons

Author: James B. Jacobs

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 1978

Total Pages: 68

ISBN-13:

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Monograph on trade unionization and collective bargaining activities of public servants employed as prison guards in the USA - examines bargaining and different labour relations contexts in new york state prisons, and general effects of bargaining on prison administrative aspects and penal policy towards prisoners.


Labor in the Correctional State

Labor in the Correctional State

Author: Leon Fink

Publisher:

Published: 2011-12-01

Total Pages: 112

ISBN-13: 9780822367581

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Two and a half million men and women are under lock and key in the US prison system, including nearly 5 percent of the adult African American male population. The prison security workforce employs more people than Ford, General Motors, and Walmart combined. This issue ofLaboroffers a systematic historical and economic overview of the state that structures the working lives of millions of Americans: the correctional state. From post-slavery "convict lease" to the privatization of prison management by giant corporations, prison labour has a long history. To fill in the gaps of that history, contributors to this issue focus on the changing work experience and behaviour of prisoners, examining the labour history of the their keepers as well as the relationship between political and economic developments inside and outside prison walls. One contributor studies both prisoner and prison guard attempts toward self-organization and unionism, including a series of labour strikes among prisoners in the 1960s and 1970s, and surveys the strength of the police and prison guard organization, which has grown even as unionism has waned in the workforce as a whole. Another contributor concentrates on the political ambivalence of police and prison guard unions, as well as on their dependence on "law and order" backlash to prison reform and other welfare demands.


The Future of Imprisonment

The Future of Imprisonment

Author: Michael Tonry

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2004-04-08

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0190289813

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The imprisonment rate in America has grown by a factor of five since 1972. In that time, punishment policies have toughened, compassion for prisoners has diminished, and prisons have gotten worse-a stark contrast to the origins of the prison 200 years ago as a humanitarian reform, a substitute for capital and corporal punishment and banishment. So what went wrong? How can prisons be made simultaneously more effective and more humane? Who should be sent there in the first place? What should happen to them while they are inside? When, how, and under what conditions should they be released? The Future of Imprisonment unites some of the leading prisons and penal policy scholars of our time to address these fundamental questions. Inspired by the work of Norval Morris, the contributors look back to the past twenty-five years of penal policy in an effort to look forward to the prison's twenty-first century future. Their essays examine the effects of current high levels of imprisonment on urban neighborhoods and the people who live in them. They reveal how current policies came to be as they are and explain the theories of punishment that guide imprisonment decisions. Finally, the contributors argue for the strategic importance of controls on punishment including imprisonment as a limit on government power; chart the rise and fall of efforts to improve conditions inside; analyze the theory and practice of prison release; and evaluate the tricky science of predicting and preventing recidivism. A definitive guide to imprisonment policies for the future, this volume convincingly demonstrates how we can prevent crime more effectively at lower economic and human cost.


The Toughest Beat

The Toughest Beat

Author: Joshua Page

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 0199985073

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The Toughest Beat uses the rise of the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, the state's powerful prison officers' union, to explore the actors and interests that have created, shaped, and protected the Golden State's sprawling, dysfunctional penal system -- and how it might yet be transformed.


Coxsackie

Coxsackie

Author: Joseph F. Spillane

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2014-06-15

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 1421413221

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How progressive good intentions failed at Coxsackie, once a model New York State prison for youth offenders. Should prisons attempt reform and uplift inmates or, by means of principled punishment, deter them from further wrongdoing? This debate has raged in Western Europe and in the United States at least since the late eighteenth century. Joseph F. Spillane examines the failure of progressive reform in New York State by focusing on Coxsackie, a New Deal reformatory built for young male offenders. Opened in 1935 to serve “adolescents adrift,” Coxsackie instead became an unstable and brutalizing prison. From the start, the liberal impulse underpinning the prison’s mission was overwhelmed by challenges it was unequipped or unwilling to face—drugs, gangs, and racial conflict. Spillane draws on detailed prison records to reconstruct a life behind bars in which “ungovernable” young men posed constant challenges to racial and cultural order. The New Deal order of the prison was unstable from the start; the politics of punishment quickly became the politics of race and social exclusion, and efforts to save liberal reform in postwar New York only deepened its failures. In 1977, inmates took hostages to focus attention on their grievances. The result was stricter discipline and an end to any pretense that Coxsackie was a reform institution. Why did the prison fail? For answers, Spillane immerses readers in the changing culture and racial makeup of the U.S. prison system and borrows from studies of colonial prisons, which emblematized efforts by an exploitative regime to impose cultural and racial restraint on others. In today’s era of mass incarceration, prisons have become conflict-ridden warehouses and powerful symbols of racism and inequality. This account challenges the conventional wisdom that America’s prison crisis is of comparatively recent vintage, showing instead how a racial and punitive system of control emerged from the ashes of a progressive ideal.


SNI

SNI

Author: National Criminal Justice Reference Service (U.S.)

Publisher:

Published: 1979

Total Pages: 646

ISBN-13:

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Are Prisons Obsolete?

Are Prisons Obsolete?

Author: Angela Y. Davis

Publisher: Seven Stories Press

Published: 2011-01-04

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 1609801040

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With her characteristic brilliance, grace and radical audacity, Angela Y. Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of the prison. As she quite correctly notes, American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. For generations of Americans, the abolition of slavery was sheerest illusion. Similarly,the entrenched system of racial segregation seemed to last forever, and generations lived in the midst of the practice, with few predicting its passage from custom. The brutal, exploitative (dare one say lucrative?) convict-lease system that succeeded formal slavery reaped millions to southern jurisdictions (and untold miseries for tens of thousands of men, and women). Few predicted its passing from the American penal landscape. Davis expertly argues how social movements transformed these social, political and cultural institutions, and made such practices untenable. In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Professor Davis seeks to illustrate that the time for the prison is approaching an end. She argues forthrightly for "decarceration", and argues for the transformation of the society as a whole.


Breakout

Breakout

Author: Newt Gingrich

Publisher: Regnery Publishing

Published: 2014-10-07

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 1621572811

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It is not between the Left and the Right, but between the past and the future. America is on the edge of a breakout. In fact, we are poised for one of the most spectacular leaps in human well-being in history. Pioneers of the future—innovators and entrepreneurs—are achieving breakthroughs in medicine, transportation, energy, education, and other fields that will make the world a dramatically different and better place. Unless the “prison guards” of the past stop them. Every American must choose a side. Will you be a champion of the future or a prisoner of the past? Every potential breakthrough has to get past a host of individuals and institutions whose power and comfort depend on the status quo. These prison guards of the past will strangle every innovation that threatens to change the way things have always been done—if we let them.