Showing results for "Prison" in Criminology

Did you know that 48 percent of the women in prison have committed an offence in order to support the drug use of someone else? That 46 percent of women in prison report having attempted suicide once in their lifetime? Or that over half of the women in prison have been victims of more serious crimes than the ones they've been convicted of? But this isn't a book about statistics. It's a book about the individual stories of women caught up in our creaking and under-resourced prison system.

Doing Time: For the prison writers whose work is included in this anthology, it means more than "serving a sentence"; it means staying alive and sane, preserving dignity, reinventing oneself, and somehow retaining one's humanity. For the last quarter century the prestigious writers' organization PEN has sponsored a contest for writers behind bars to help prisoners face these challenges. The contest honors the best short stories, plays, essays, and poems among hundreds submitted annually by men and women nationwide.

What is it like for a convicted murderer who has spent decades behind bars to suddenly find himself released into a world he barely recognizes? What is it like to start over from nothing? To answer these questions Sabine Heinlein followed the everyday lives and emotional struggles of Angel Ramos and his friends Bruce and Adam - three men convicted of some of society's most heinous crimes - as they return to the free world.

Prison is harsh enough, but as a foreigner ( farang) in a strange land, jail time is an even more horrifying reality. Rotting in the Bangkok Hilton is a collection of short stories chronicling T. M. Hoy’s descent into the harrowing world of Southeast Asian prison life. Through his eyes, listeners will experience the bizarre events of daily life in a Thai maximum security prison: feel the weight of the chains he wears; the stomachaches from lack of food; witness the murders, drug overdoses, torture, and unbridled cruelty that ensues.

The sun is shining through the bars of my window on what must be a glorious summer day. I've been incarcerated in a cell five paces by three for twelve and a half hours, and will not be let out again until midday; eighteen and a half hours of solitary confinement. There is a child of seventeen...

Prison abolition and decarceration are increasingly debated, but it is often without taking into account the largest exodus of people from carceral facilities in the 20th century: the closure of disability institutions and psychiatric hospitals. Decarcerating Disability provides a much-needed corrective, combining a genealogy of deinstitutionalization with critiques of the current prison system.

In the first edition of A Country Called Prison, Mary Looman and John Carl presented persuasive data calling for downsizing of America's prisons. Their novel approach continues in their second edition, shifting the beliefs many people have about prisons and their role in the American society. Since the original edition was published, the landscape of incarceration has been changing.

This anthology, with stories set in different prisons across the US, presents an absolutely new perspective on prison literature. Featuring brand-new stories by: Christopher M. Stephen, Sin Soracco, Scott Gutches, Eric Boyd, Ali F. Sareini, Stephen Geez, B.M. Dolarman, Zeke Caligiuri, Marco Verdoni, Kenneth R. Brydon, Linda Michelle Marquardt, Andre White, Timothy Pauley, Bryan K. Palmer, and William Van Poyck.

An interdisciplinary work that brings life writing scholarship into conversation with prison studies and law and literature studies, Prison Life Writing theorizes how life writing works in prison, explains literature’s complicated entanglements with institutional power, and demonstrates the political and aesthetic innovations of one of America’s most fascinating literary genres.

An enraging, necessary look at the private prison system, and a convincing clarion call for prison reform.” —NPR.org New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2018 * One of President Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2018 * Winner of the 2019 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize * Winner of...

In September of 2022, twenty-five years after Leonard Peltier received a life sentence for the murder of two FBI agents, the Democratic National Committee unanimously passed a resolution urging President Joe Biden to release him. Peltier has affirmed his innocence ever since his sentencing in 1977—his case was made fully and famously in Peter Matthiessen’s best-selling In the Spirit of Crazy Horse—and many remain convinced he was wrongly convicted. A wise and unsettling book, Prison Writings is both memoir and manifesto, chronicling Peltier’s life in Leavenworth Prison in Kansas.

An eye-opening, thought-provoking and mind-blowing account from a genuine prison governor of what it's really like behind bars. The Secret Prison Governor has spent decades surrounded by every type of prisoner known to man, from petty thieves and common drug dealers to crime bosses and dangerous serial killers. Since starting as a rookie, he has experienced the reality of the UK's harsh prison system and the hard challenge of ruling those within it. In his own words, the Secret Prison Governor spares no detail of prison life.

Despite its omnipresence and long history, imprisonment is a deeply troubling practice. In the United States and elsewhere, prison conditions are inhumane, prisoners are treated without dignity, and sentences are extremely harsh. Mass incarceration and its devastating impact on black communities have been widely condemned as neoslavery or “the new Jim Crow.” Can the practice of imprisonment be reformed, or does justice require it to be ended altogether?

An accessible guide for activists, educators, and all who are interested in understanding how the prison system oppresses communities and harms individuals. The United States incarcerates more of its residents than any other nation. Though home to 5% of the global population, the United States...

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. 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.

'Pentridge was a place of murder and mayhem. A bluestone hell. The worst prison Australia has ever seen.' Andrew Kirby, former inmate Welcome to Pentridge, Australia's most infamous prison. In the long-awaited return to his bestselling true crime series on life behind bars, James Phelps has...

A riveting account of the two years literary scholar Mikita Brottman spent reading literature with criminals in a maximum-security men’s prison outside Baltimore, and what she learned from them—Orange Is the New Black meets Reading Lolita in Tehran. On sabbatical from teaching literature to...

At the age off twenty-one, Leslie Van Houten was sentenced to death, along with Charles Manson and his other disciples, for the infamous murder rampage spanning two nights in August 1969. Leslie, who was present at the Rosemary and Leno LaBianca stabbings, serenely accepted her sentence, wishing...

Justin Brooks has spent his career freeing innocent people from prison. With You Might Go to Prison, Even Though You're Innocent, he offers up-close accounts of the cases he has fought, embedding them within a larger landscape of innocence claims and robust research on what we know about the causes of wrongful convictions.

In 2001, John J. Lennon killed a man on a Brooklyn Street. Now he’s a journalist, working from behind bars, trying to make sense of it all. The Tragedy of True Crime is a first-person journalistic account of the lives of four men who have killed, written by a man who has killed. Lennon entered...