The Prison and the Gallows
The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America

Marie Gottschalk, University of Pennsylvania

Over the last three decades the United States has built a carceral state that is unprecedented among Western countries and in US history. Nearly one in 50 people, excluding children and the elderly, is incarcerated today, a rate unsurpassed anywhere else in the world. What are some of the main political forces that explain this unprecedented reliance on mass imprisonment? Throughout American history, crime and punishment have been central features of American political development. This book examines the development of four key movements that mediated the construction of the carceral state in important ways: the victims' movement, the women's movement, the prisoners' rights movement, and opponents of the death penalty. This book argues that punitive penal policies were forged by particular social movements and interest groups within the constraints of larger institutional structures and historical developments that distinguish the United States from other Western countries.

Errors of Justice
Nature, Sources and Remedies

Brian Forst, American University, Washington DC

Winner of the 2006 Outstanding Book Award of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences

Written by a scholar with extensive research experience, this book applies an original approach to assessing criminal justice policies, based on their impact on errors of justice. The study covers the error of failing to bring offenders to justice as well as the errors of imposing costs on innocent people and excessive costs on offenders. Ultimately, it develops a new framework for each major sector of the justice system: policing, prosecution, adjudication and the jury, sentencing and corrections.

Marking Time in the Golden State
Women's Imprisonment in California

Candace Kruttschnitt, University of Minnesota
Rosemary Gartner, University of Toronto

The nature of criminal punishment has undergone profound change in the United States in recent decades. This case study of women serving time in California in the 1960s and 1990s examines this recent history. Drawing on archival data, interviews, and surveys, the authors' analysis considers the relationships among official philosophies and practices of imprisonment, women's responses to the prison regime, and relations between women prisoners.

What Works in Corrections
Reducing Recidivism

Doris Layton MacKenzie, University of Maryland, College Park

What Works in Corrections examines the impact of correctional interventions, management policies, treatment and rehabilitation programs on the recidivism of offenders and delinquents. The book reviews different strategies for reducing recidivism and describes how the evidence for effectiveness is assessed. Thousands of studies were examined in order to identify those of sufficient scientific rigor to enable conclusions to be drawn about the impact of various interventions, policies and programs on recidivism. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses were performed to further examine these results. This book assesses the relative effectiveness of rehabilitation programs (e.g., education, life skills, employment, cognitive behavioral), treatment for different types of offenders (e.g. sex offenders, batterers, juveniles), management and treatment of drug-involved offenders (e.g., drug courts, therapeutic communities, outpatient drug treatment) and punishment, control and surveillance interventions (boot camps, intensive supervision, electronic monitoring). Through her extensive research, MacKenzie illustrates which of these programs are most effective and why.

Punishment
A Comparative Historical Perspective

Terance D. Miethe, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Hong Lu, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

This book identifies and examines the sources of similarities and differences in types of economic punishments, incapacitation devices and structures, and lethal and non-lethal forms of corporal punishment over time and place. The authors survey punishment responses to crime and deviance across different regions of the world and in specific countries like the United States, China, and Saudi Arabia.

Prisoner Reentry and Crime in America

Edited by Jeremy Travis
Edited by Christy Visher

What are the public safety consequences of the fourfold increase in the number of individuals entering and leaving the nation's prisons each year? Many have speculated about the nexus between prisoner reentry and public safety. Law enforcement officials have attributed increases in violence in their communities to the influx of returning prisoners. Politicians have recommended policies that keep former prisoners out of high crime neighborhoods in the belief that crime would be reduced. The chapters in this book address these issues and suggest policies that will keep released prisoners from committing new crimes.