Summary
Contents
Subject index
For the first time in four decades, prison populations are declining and politicians have reached the consensus that mass imprisonment is no longer sustainable. At this unique moment in the history of corrections, the opportunity has emerged to discuss in meaningful ways how best to shape efforts to control crime and to intervene effectively with offenders. This breakthrough book brings together established correctional scholars to imagine what this prison future might entail. Each scholar uses his or her expertise to craft—in an accessible way for students to read—a blueprint for how to create a new penology along a particular theme. For example, one contributor writes about how to use existing research expertise to create a prison that is therapeutic and another provides insight on how to create a “feminist” prison. In the final chapter the editors pull together the “lessons learned” in a cohesive, comprehensive essay.
The Private Prison
The Private Prison
Editors' Introduction
The American prison was founded with inordinate optimism. It was to be a place of national pride, a forward-looking invention that would replace barbaric punishments with life in an environment designed to reform the very spirit of offenders. Much contemporary scholarship on prisons, however, is devoted to illuminating how the correctional enterprise has fallen far short of this grand goal. In fact, books on imprisonment often read much like a social problems text, showing how the society of captives is marked by severe crowding, insufficient programs if not idleness, gangs and racial conflict, inmate-on-inmate victimizations, and a correctional staff whose primary orientation is to ensure custodial order at all costs. ...
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