Suchergebnisse

The voices of prisoners are seldom heard as contributors to the evaluation of imprisonment. Official discourse is hostile to their accounts. Prisoner autobiography is a small but established genre in prison writing. The article presents a critical introduction to the study of these texts. Two groups of authors are identified in a sample of post‐war British autobiographies. Several key themes are identified and it is argued that, although problematic, prisoner autobiography should receive more systematic attention as a contribution to the penological archive.

While Oscar Wilde is now strongly associated with the tone of whimsy that imbues his breezy, effortlessly witty epigrams and essays, the Irish writer and playwright was also a serious thinker who, having been sentenced to two years of hard labor as a punishment for his homosexuality, was deeply engaged with the social issues of his day. This essay, penned as a letter to a newspaper soon after Wilde's release from prison, takes up the moral issue of penal sentences for juveniles

This paper critically examines the claim made by Canadian Conservative politicians that prison expansion is likely to produce economic gains for Canadian prison towns. Such claims raise many questions about the actual beneficiaries of prison construction, and the depiction of prisons as "infrastructure" serving some public good or even promoting social justice. After reviewing relevant literature from American debates on this topic, I focus on more specific Canadian conditions, and use public tendering data to trace the path of prison spending. The evidence suggests that prison expansion is unlikely to benefit surrounding communities, although interests elsewhere tend to reap major gains.

The number of state and federal prisoners has increased dramatically over the past 30 years, but public willingness to finance prisons has not kept pace. One response has been a renewed interest in privately managed prisons. Proponents of privatization contend that private contractors, unencumbered by government procurement and personnel procedures, can provide better quality prison services at lower costs. This article uses the 1995 Census of State and Federal Adult Correctional Facilities to examine claims of improved quality. The authors find that privately managed prisons perform better on some, but not all, measures of quality of confinement. Specifically, bivariate comparisons suggest that private facilities outperform both state and federal facilities in terms of the proportion of institutions that are able to avoid inmate assaults on staff members or other inmates. Even when the authors controlled for other causal variables, private prisons remained significantly less likely than federal prisons to experience violence.

The article presents rituals frequently encountered in the world of prisons, from the initiation (baptism) in the adaptation of rebellion. Each type of ritual is described based on observation and interviews with various inmates, employees or specialists.

This paper finds qualified support for the use of Skarbek's (2011, 2014) governance theory to understand the emergence of prison gang-like groups in Kyrgyzstan, Northern Ireland and Brazil. However, Skarbek's (2011, 2014) governance theory has little to say about how many prison gangs emerge and how they organise comparatively outside the US context. This paper argues that variation in the number of gangs and their monopolization of informal governance can only be explained by considering importation and deprivation theories alongside governance theories. These theories factor in variation in prison environments and pre-existing societal divisions imported into prison, which affect the costs on information transmission and incentives for gang expansion. In particular, the paper pays attention to the wider role social and political processes play in influencing whether monopoly power by prison gangs is supported and legitimized or not.