Behind These Prison Walls

Behind These Prison Walls "Life Inside Rikers Island" gives a photographic journey into the nation's most violent adolescent jail on Rikers Island. Former New York City Corrections officer and visual artist gives viewers a first-hand account into the horrors and dangers officers and detainees were subjected to daily. Former New York City Corrections officer and visual artist Lorenzo Steele Jr. uses art as a medium to change habits and behaviors that can lead to criminal activity. Lorenzo served 12 years as an officer on Rikers Island (1987-1999) and his mission through the arts is to deter youth from making choices and decisions that can have a devastating effect on their lives. It's an educational book that's grade appropriate and can be used in public-schools, churches, colleges and art galleries.

Despite falling crime rates, more rights for inmates, and better training for correctional officers, Canada’s prisons are overflowing, and outbreaks of violence continue to grab headlines. Applying Goffman’s frame theory and drawing on interviews with inmates and correctional officers in provincial and federal prisons, Michael Weinrath offers an unprecedented look at how inmates and officers perceive themselves, their relationships with others, and new developments and ongoing issues in prisons, including boundary violations by officers and the rise of prison gangs. Although progress has been made, prisons continue to be plagued by problems that prevent inmates from forging positive relationships among themselves and with correctional officers.

After explaining ‘What is transgender?’ this first book on transgender in a prison setting looks at the entire HM Prison Service regime for such people. Ranging from hard information about rules and regulations, the transition process and how to access it to practical suggestions about clothing, wigs and hairpieces, make-up and coming out, the book also deals with such matters as change of name, gender identity clinics, hormones, medication and use of prison showers and toilets. Covering the entire transition process the book contains contributions from a number of transgender prisoners as well as extracts from reports showing how those in transition still tend to attract a negative portrayal. Also included are the special security implications of related procedures and descriptions of the attitudes to transgender inmates of other prisoners and staff. It contains a number of appendices dealing with the latest 2016 HM Prison Service Instruction on transgender prisoners and a range of support mechanisms including a list of specialists in the field and other useful reference sources and contacts. It also contains Sarah Jane Baker’s account of her own male-to-female transition and the difficulties she has faced behind bars. The first book of its kind. Written by a transgender life-sentence prisoner. Includes key extracts from official publications. With a graphic account of the author’s own transition journey. Contains practical information and tips. Reviews ‘An important contribution to current debates on the treatment of transgender prisoners’— Mia Harris, Oxford University. ‘I was heartbroken. It felt like a bereavement. The young man I had come to love as a son had disappeared overnight, and been replaced by a girl who was not my daughter, but, I felt, a stranger’— Pam Stockwell (From the Foreword)

Written by a Texas inmate trained as a reporter, this book gives practical advice on how inmates live, eat, play, work, and die in the Texas prison system. It spotlights the day-to-day workings of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice--what's good, what's bad, which programs work and which ones do not, and examines if practice really follows official policy. "While the book is meant to be a primer for those with loved ones in prison, it should be required reading for any attorney involved in criminal law."--Texas Lawyer de Novo Magazine

If you want to know what today's murderers, gangbangers and street predators are really like, take a step behind prison walls. A veteran prison guard reveals the truth behind staff rivalries, incarcerated killers, old-time cons, racial tension, inmate threats and ingenuity, and the darker sides of prisoner behavior.

Prison. Just reading the word conjures up mental images of harshness and negativity. While the word 'criminal' summons feelings of fear, disgust, anger, aggression, and revenge. These near-universal feelings about criminals are the foundation of prisons as places where harm, through neglect, indifference, and paucity, festers and replicates like a virus. For this reason, any conversation about prison and its potential for anything other than harm must start with the people who live there. In The Shadow of Childhood Harm, Wolff, using a balance of compassion and evidence, takes readers through the lives of people who end up inside prison. Guided by the words of those who have lived the experience of harm, she weaves an expansive body of research that lays bare the harm that began in childhood (the curse) and its subsequent shadow that later, during adolescence and adulthood, manifests as harm to self and others, eventually culminating in crime that results in incarceration, where harm there, once again, repeats like a bad dream. With authority and rigor, Wolff uses ethics, law, science, and compassion, to call out the anti-humanism roots underpinning the (un)intelligent design of the current correctional system and rings in a new way of intelligently designing and maintaining a just, fair, and person-centered system of asylum of and for humanity.

Behind Prison Walls: Inmate Number 27773-016 is my expression and experience in prison. During my wilderness experience, I had to rely on God like never before. It was my breaking point; God was then able to speak to me where I wasn't able to run. I tried boxing with God, but I soon realized my arms where to short to box with God, so I begin to let go and let God.