Parole And Beyond

This book provides an assessment of contemporary international knowledge about the experiences of life after release from prison. For over 100 years people leaving prison have been supervised by probation services, but little has been written about how those who are supervised experience this process, or how this process influences experiences post-release. Research suggests that the success or failure of supervision in terms of reoffending may be related to how it is experienced, but little has been written about how supervision interacts with these experiences. Despite this lack of grounded knowledge, post-prison supervision continues to grow internationally. This book addresses issues relating to life after release through providing a vision of contemporary life after prison in different social and economic climates from those who are the subjects of this growing and changing form of penal power. An engaging and timely study, this book will be of particular interest to scholars of criminal justice and punishment.

Just as Canada’s population has changed in the past four decades, so has its prison population. The increasing diversity among prisoners raises important questions about how we punish those who break the law. Parole in Canada is the first book to explore how concerns about Aboriginality, gender, and the multicultural ideal of “diversity” have been interpreted and used to alter parole policy and practice. Using the Parole Board of Canada as a case study, this book shows how some offender differences are selectively included in conditional release decision making, while the structures, practices, and power arrangements that would enable fundamental change remain unaltered.

A former parole officer shines a bright light on a huge yet hidden part of our justice system through the intertwining stories of seven parolees striving to survive the chaos that awaits them after prison in this illuminating and dramatic book. Prompted by a dead-end retail job and a vague desire to increase the amount of justice in his hometown, Jason Hardy became a parole officer in New Orleans at the worst possible moment. Louisiana’s incarceration rates were the highest in the US and his department’s caseload had just been increased to 220 “offenders” per parole officer, whereas the national average is around 100. Almost immediately, he discovered that the biggest problem with our prison system is what we do—and don’t do—when people get out of prison. Deprived of social support and jobs, these former convicts are often worse off than when they first entered prison and Hardy dramatizes their dilemmas with empathy and grace. He’s given unique access to their lives and a growing recognition of their struggles and takes on his job with the hope that he can change people’s fates—but he quickly learns otherwise. The best Hardy and his colleagues can do is watch out for impending disaster and help clean up the mess left behind. But he finds that some of his charges can muster the miraculous power to save themselves. By following these heroes, he both stokes our hope and fuels our outrage by showing us how most offenders, even those with the best intentions, end up back in prison—or dead—because the system systematically fails them. Our focus should be, he argues, to give offenders the tools they need to re-enter society which is not only humane but also vastly cheaper for taxpayers. As immersive and dramatic as Evicted and as revelatory as The New Jim Crow, The Second Chance Club shows us how to solve the cruelest problems prisons create for offenders and society at large.

This book is a study of the workings of the Discretionary Lifer Panels of the Parole Board, the body charged with the responsibility for making decisions on the release of discretionary life sentence prisoners. It traces the origins and development of the Discretionary Lifer Panels following the landmark Weeks and Thynne decisions of the European Court of Human Rights which led to the establishment of DLPs, and examines the way in which the DLPs developed subsequently - often rather differently to what was originally envisaged as necessary to comply with the decision of the ECHR. This book provides a fascinating case study of a little-known part of the criminal justice system, and explores at the same time the wider issues that have arisen - in particular the impact of the ECHR and the Human Rights Act on the criminal justice system; the relationship between the Parole Board and the Prison and Probation Services; the differences between release procedures for different categories of life sentence prisoner, and those detained compulsorily under the Mental Health Act;the broader social, legal and political context in which DLPs operate, and the nature of discretionary decision-making in the criminal justice system field. the first detailed study - from a leading authority in the field - of the way decisions are reached on discretionary life sentence prisoners explores the impact of the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights and the Human Rights Act on the working of the criminal justice system of interest to practitioners and academics concerned with the criminal justice system.

The first book to comprehensively describe the history, theory, and application of prosecutorial discretion in immigration law When Beatles star John Lennon faced deportation from the U.S. in the 1970s, his lawyer Leon Wildes made a groundbreaking argument. He argued that Lennon should be granted “nonpriority” status pursuant to INS’s (now DHS’s) policy of prosecutorial discretion. In U.S. immigration law, the agency exercises prosecutorial discretion favorably when it refrains from enforcing the full scope of immigration law. A prosecutorial discretion grant is important to an agency seeking to focus its priorities on the “truly dangerous” in order to conserve resources and to bring compassion into immigration enforcement. The Lennon case marked the first moment that the immigration agency’s prosecutorial discretion policy became public knowledge. Today, the concept of prosecutorial discretion is more widely known in light of the Obama Administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA program, a record number of deportations and a stalemate in Congress to move immigration reform. Beyond Deportation is the first book to comprehensively describe the history, theory, and application of prosecutorial discretion in immigration law. It provides a rich history of the role of prosecutorial discretion in the immigration system and unveils the powerful role it plays in protecting individuals from deportation and saving the government resources. Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia draws on her years of experience as an immigration attorney, policy leader, and law professor to advocate for a bolder standard on prosecutorial discretion, greater mechanisms for accountability when such standards are ignored, improved transparency about the cases involving prosecutorial discretion, and recognition of “deferred action” in the law as a formal benefit.

1. Digest of federal and state laws on release pocedures.--2. Probation.--3. Pardon.--4. Parole.--5. Prisons.

Challenges the foundation of recent literary and language-based theory, offering instead a syntagmatic approach to language. Covers `post-Chomskyan' linguistics, deconstruction, analytic and speech-act theory.