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Every year millions of families are affected by the imprisonment of a family member. Children of imprisoned parents alone can be counted in millions in the USA and in Europe. It is a bewildering fact that while we have had prisons for centuries, and the deprivation of liberty has been a central pillar in the Western mode of punishment since the early nineteenth century, we have only relatively recently embarked upon a serious discussion of the severe effects of imprisonment for the families and relatives of offenders and the implications this has for society. This book draws together some of the excellent research that addresses the impact of criminal justice and incarceration in particular ...
Solitary confinement is used for a variety of different reasons in many prison systems all over the world, despite the fact that research shows that these practices have widespread and pronounced negative health effects. Besides the death penalty, solitary confinement is arguably the most punitive and dangerous intervention available to state authorities in democratic nations. This broad and interdisciplinary book draws together research and personal experience from neuroscientists, high level prison officials, social and political scientists, medical doctors, lawyers, and former prisoners and their families from different countries in order to address the effects and practices of prolonged solitary confinement and to strengthen the movement for its reform and eventual abolition.
This book draws on historical and cross-disciplinary studies to critically examine penal practices in Scandinavia. The Nordic countries are often hailed by international observers as ‘model societies’, with egalitarian welfare policies, low rates of poverty, humane social policies and human rights oriented internal agendas. This book, however, paints a much more nuanced picture of the welfare policies, ideologies and social control in strong centralistic states. Based on extensive new empirical data, leading Nordic and international scholars discuss the relationship between prison conditions in Scandinavia and Scandinavian social policy more generally, and argue that it is not always liberating and constructive to be embraced by a powerful welfare state. This book is essential reading for researchers of state punishment in Scandinavia, and it is highly relevant for anyone interested in the ‘Nordic Model’ of social policy.
There are millions of children experiencing parental imprisonment all over the world. This book is about their problems, human rights and how they are treated throughout the justice process from the arrest of a parent to imprisonment and release.
Written by leading prison scholars from the Nordic countries as well as selected researchers from the English-speaking world 'looking in', this book explores and discusses the Nordic jurisdictions as contexts for the specific penal policies and practices that may or may not be described as the 'exception from the rule'.
This handbook brings together the international research focussing on prisoners’ families and the impact of imprisonment on them. Under-researched and under-theorised in the realm of scholarship on imprisonment, this handbook encompasses a broad range of original, interdisciplinary and cross-national research. This volume includes the experiences of those from countries often unrepresented in the prisoner’s families’ literature such as Russia, Australia, Israel and Canada. This broad coverage allows readers to consider how prisoners’ families are affected by imprisonment in countries embracing very different penal philosophies; ranging from the hyper-incarceration being experienced i...
Why do some modern societies punish their offenders differently to others? Why are some more punitive and others more tolerant in their approach to offending and how can these differences be explained? Based on extensive historical analysis and fieldwork in the penal systems of England, Australia and New Zealand on the one hand and Finland, Norway and Sweden on the other, this book seeks to answer these questions. The book argues that the penal differences that currently exist between these two clusters of societies emanate from their early nineteenth-century social arrangements, when the Anglophone societies were dominated by exclusionary value systems that contrasted with the more inclusio...
The use of solitary confinement in prisons became common with the rise of the modern penitentiary during the first half of the nineteenth century and his since remained a feature of many prison systems all over the world. Solitary confinement is used for a panoply of different reasons although research tells us that these practices have widespread negative health effects. Besides the death penalty it is arguably the most punitive and dangerous intervention available to state authorities in democratic nations. Nevertheless, in the United States there is currently an estimated 80-100,000 prisoners in small cells for more than 22 hours per day with little or no social contact and no physical co...
Mass incarceration is one of the most pressing ethical and political issues of our time. In this volume, philosophers join activists and those incarcerated on death row to grapple with contemporary U.S. punishment practices and draw out critiques around questions of power, identity, justice, and ethical responsibility. This work takes shape against a backdrop of disturbing trends: The United States incarcerates more of its own citizens than any other country in the world. A disproportionate number of these prisoners are people of color, and, today, a black man has a greater chance of going to prison than to college. The United States is the only Western democracy to retain the death penalty,...
This book brings to life the experiences of children affected by maternal imprisonment, and provides unique, in-depth analysis of judicial thinking on this issue. It explores the experiences of children whose mothers are sentenced to imprisonment in England and Wales and contrasts their state-sanctioned separation from their mothers in the criminal courts (where the court may not even be aware of the existence of a child) to the state-sanctioned separation of children from their parents in the family courts, where the child has legal representation and their best interests are the court’s paramount consideration. Drawing on detailed empirical research with children, caregivers, and Crown Court judiciary, Maternal Sentencing and the Rights of the Child brings together relevant literature on law, criminology, and human rights to provide insight into the reasons for the differentiated treatment and its implications for children, their caregivers, and wider society.