The New Convict Code

The US prison industrial complex is in desperate need of repair. Corrections has become big business in America and a young, misguided generation is fueling a system built to fail. More and more kids are hitting the streets and lining up to go behind the razor wire. What is the solution? What if reformed felons could change the future of the next generation? Kit Cummings' bold vision-borne out of twelve years working with more than ten thousand offenders-flips the script on prison reform and disrupts the pipeline from schools to prisons. He replaces the current gang-inspired convict code with one that integrates respect, integrity, and dignity, giving prisoners the freedom to dream big dreams and become positive role models to a young generation at risk. Brothers who have been behind the wire share powerful lessons with our youth, redirecting their path and ending the violence in the streets and in their hearts. The proven success of Kit's Power of Peace Project lays the groundwork for a future with less violence, declining prison populations, and a more sound and just prison system.In 2010, Kit Cummings founded the Power of Peace Project. Using the experience he gained resolving conflict in some of the most dangerous areas in the world, he applies his principles to bring about change in prisons, schools, corporations, and the faith-based community. Kit has worked with the incarcerated in over a hundred prisons, jails, detention centers, and rehab facilities and served over ten thousand prisoners. The New Convict Code brings solutions to the growing epidemic of crime and violence we are witnessing among today's youth.

NUCLEAR LOCKDOWN When a plot to unleash weapons of mass destruction on U.S. soil is discovered in a coded message, all clues lead to the country’s most notorious prison. With time running out, Mack Bolan goes in undercover as an inmate to find out who’s behind the attack and stop it from happening. Surrounded by corrupt guards and convicted killers who want him dead, Bolan can’t trust anybody—and one wrong move could be lethal. Weaponless and cut off from the outside world, he’s aware that the only tools he has to track down the nuclear devices hidden in the prison walls are psychological warfare and hand-to-hand combat. This high-security facility may have been designed to keep the deadliest criminals in check, but nothing can keep the Executioner down.

The author used qualitative data collected in 2005 and 2006 in California to explore how former inmates (men and women) understand and explain prison violence and inmate culture.--Chapter 1.

This book presents a series of studies that investigate individual identity transformation from offender status to pro-social, non-offending roles highlighting the perspectives of the men and women who are current or were formerly incarcerated.

This thought-provoking book examines gang history in the region encompassing West Texas, Southern New Mexico, and Northern Chihuahua, Mexico. Known as the El Paso-Juárez borderland region, the area contains more than three million people spanning 130 miles from east to west. From the badlands--the historically notorious eastern Valle de Juárez--to the Puerto Palomas port of entry at Columbus, New Mexico, this area has become more militarized and politicized than ever before. Mike Tapia examines this region by exploring a century of historical developments through a criminological lens and by studying the diverse subcultures on both sides of the law. Tapia looks extensively at the role of history and geography on criminal subculture formation in the binational urban setting of El Paso-Juárez, demonstrating the region's unique context for criminogenic processes. He provides a poignant case study of Homeland Security and the apparent lack of drug-war spillover in communities on the US-Mexico border.

"Past and present efforts to reform prisons and mental hospitals are haunted by a desire to democratize custody. Embedded in this desire, Democracy in Captivity shows, is a persistent anxiety about who ought to govern ward life. Stuck in the middle of the social engineering efforts of both custodians and would-be democratic reformers are prisoners and patients themselves. Wards struggle for representation and, invariably, provoke backlash -- not only in the blunt forms of restraint chairs, riot gear, and a surgeon's scalpel, but also more covert sorts of maneuvering under the cover of 'democratic' management. Christopher D. Berk explains how these more subtle moves facilitate exploitation, entrench disenfranchisement, and naturalize authoritarian rule. In doing so, he uses custody as a lens to examine wider pathologies that have captured the politics of punishment today"--

Power on the Inside is the first book to examine the historical development of prison gangs worldwide, from those that emerged inside mid-nineteenth-century Neapolitan prisons to the new generation of younger inmates challenging the status quo within gang subcultures today. Historian-criminologist Mitchel P. Roth examines prison gangs throughout the world, from the Americas, Oceania, and South Africa to Southeast Asia, Europe, and beyond. The book examines the many variables that influence the evolution of prison subcultures, from colonialism and population demographics to prison architecture and staff-prisoner relations. Power on the Inside features eighty historical and contemporary images and will inform professionals in the field as well as general readers who want to know more about the realities of prison gangs today.

Can the morality of a nation really be judged by how it treats its prisoners? The United States has more people in prison than any other nation, and the nature of the American correctional system continues to be the subject of passionate debate. This unique combination of historical overview and personal testimony provides an unprecedented look at the U.S. correctional system. The first section of the book places the notion of corrections within an historical context. The second examines contemporary correctional issues. In the third and final section, Stephen Stanko, an inmate in the South Carolina correctional system, provides a detailed look at prison life from the inside. Stanko offers his perspective—in a voice that is blunt but never preachy—on the harsh realities of prison life, making this a rigorous exploration of our correctional system in both theory and practice.