Governing Prisons

Challenging the accepted notions about prisons, Dilulio argues that, far from being traps for society's refuse, they must and can be made safely humane. He shows that the key to better prisons is a highly disciplined constitutional government employing prison managers who are strong enough to control the inmates yet obliged to control themselves. The book illustrates how the use of such a governing system can provide order, encourage civilized behaviour, and enforce punishment that is just, as well as merciful.

A look at some current forms of penal governance in Canadian federal women's prisons and a suggestion that the prison system itself, given its primary functions of custody and punishment, is consistent in thwarting attempts at progressive reform.

This edited collection addresses the topic of prison governance which is crucial to our understanding of contemporary prisons in Latin America. It presents social research from Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, Uruguay and Argentina to examine the practices of governance by the prisoners themselves in each unique setting in detail. High levels of variation in the governance practices are found to exist, not only between countries but also within the same country, between prisons and within the same prison, and between different areas. The chapters make important contributions to the theoretical concepts and arguments that can be used to interpret the emergence, dynamics and effects of these practices in the institutions of confinement of the region. The book also addresses the complex task of explaining why these types of practices of governance happen in Latin American prisons as some of them appear to be a legacy of a remote past but others have arisen more recently. It makes a vital contribution to the fundamental debate for prison policies in Latin America about the alternatives that can be promoted.

In the past 30 years, the population of prisoners in the United States has expanded almost 5-fold, correctional facilities are increasingly overcrowded, and more of the country's disadvantaged populations—racial minorities, women, people with mental illness, and people with communicable diseases such as HIV/AIDS, hepatitis C, and tuberculosis—are under correctional supervision. Because prisoners face restrictions on liberty and autonomy, have limited privacy, and often receive inadequate health care, they require specific protections when involved in research, particularly in today's correctional settings. Given these issues, the Department of Health and Human Services' Office for Human Research Protections commissioned the Institute of Medicine to review the ethical considerations regarding research involving prisoners. The resulting analysis contained in this book, Ethical Considerations for Research Involving Prisoners, emphasizes five broad actions to provide prisoners involved in research with critically important protections: • expand the definition of "prisoner"; • ensure universally and consistently applied standards of protection; • shift from a category-based to a risk-benefit approach to research review; • update the ethical framework to include collaborative responsibility; and • enhance systematic oversight of research involving prisoners.

“Few people can talk about prisons with the authority and experience thatAndrew Coyle brings to his subject. A former prison governor, an academicauthor, an international activist and a practical reformer, Professor Coyleknows prisons inside and out, home and abroad, past and present. InUnderstanding Prisons he uses his impressive expertise to guide researchersthrough the changing world of the English prison. The result is an accessible,up-to-date, and highly informative book that will be welcomed by studentsand practitioners alike.” David Garland, NYU, author of The Culture of Control “Andrew Coyle has drawn on his lifelong experience of governing prisons inScotland and England and, as the former Director of the International Centrefor Prison Studies, Kings College, London, studying prisons worldwide. Hehas written a comprehensive account of the use of imprisonment and thecharacter of prisons. He persuasively argues that our continued, extensiveuse of imprisonment cannot simply be explained or justified by the incidenceof crime and could otherwise. His book merits close attention.” Rod Morgan, Chairman, Youth Justice Board There are over nine million men, women and children in prison around the world, and the number of people in prison in England and Wales has increased significantly in recent years. Yet in many respects prison remains the last secretive public institution in our society. Understanding Prisons provides a unique, in-depth examination of prisons – how they function, what they achieve, and their historical and political context. The book: Describes how prisons developed into their present form Looks at who is sent to prison and what happens to them while they are there Explains how the prison system and staff in England and Wales are organised Examines how order and control is maintained and how high security prisons operate Looks at prisoners’ families and the wider community Offers a future vision of the prison system This is essential reading for criminology and sociology students and researchers, criminal justice practitioners, the media and members of the public who are interested in learning more about the closed world of the prison.

Disruptive Prisoners reconstitutes the history of Canada’s federal prison system in the mid-twentieth century through a process of collective biography – one involving prisoners, administrators, prison reformers, and politicians. This social history relies on extensive archival research and access to government documents, but more importantly, uses the penal press materials created by prisoners themselves and an interview with one of the founding penal press editors to provide a unique and unprecedented analysis. Disruptive Prisoners is grounded in the lived experiences of men who were incarcerated in federal penitentiaries in Canada and argues that they were not merely passive recipients of intervention. Evidence indicates that prisoners were active agents of change who advocated for and resisted the initiatives that were part of Canada’s "New Deal in Corrections." While prisoners are silent in other criminological and historical texts, here they are central figures: the juxtaposition of their voices with the official administrative, parliamentary, and government records challenges the dominant tropes of progress and provides a more nuanced and complicated reframing of the post-Archambault Commission era. The use of an alternative evidential base, the commitment of the authors to integrating subaltern perspectives, and the first-hand accounts by prisoners of their experiences of incarceration makes this book a highly readable and engaging glimpse behind the bars of Canada’s federal prisons.

In "Punishment in Disguise", Kelly Hannah-Moffat presents a look at some current forms of penal governance in Canadian federal women's prisons. Hannah-Moffat uses women's imprisonment to theorize the complexity of penal power and to show how the meaning and content of women's penal governance changes over time, how penal reform strategies intersect and evolve into complex patterns of governing, how governing is always gendered and racialized, and how expert, non-expert, and hybrid forms of power and knowledge inform penal strategies.The author posits that although there has been a series of distinct phases in the imprisonment of women, the prison system itself, given its primary functions of custody and punishment, is consistent in thwarting attempts at progressive reform. While each distinct phase has its own corresponding ideology and discourse, the individual discourses have internal complexities and contradictions, which have not been adequately recognized in the general literature on penology.Avoiding universal and reductionist claims about women's oppression, Hannah-Moffat argues that relations of power are complex and fractured and that there is a need to explore the specific elements of institutional power relations. Backed by solid research, "Punishment in Disguise" makes a strong contribution to criminology and feminist theory by providing an alternative approach to analysing the governance of women by other women and by the state.