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Prison conditions similar to those of supermax prisons have been instituted on several occasions in the past, in the course of early experiments with prison design. In several instances, supermax-like conditions were abandoned because pre/postintervention data demonstrated that social isolation and enforced inactivity could produce symptoms of mental illness, which could be ameliorated when confinement conditions were relaxed. Such experiences carry implications for current correctional administrators.

The consistent challenge posed by supermax settings is their demonstrably adverse impact on the mental health of difficult, but vulnerable prisoners. These high-tech segregation settings also pose additional problems having to do with regimes that include gratuitous stressors and custodial overkill, and treatment liable to enhance rather than reduce the violence potential of inmates. To survive ongoing and future litigation, supermax confinement settings will have to undertake serious proactive ameliorative reforms.

Politicians are responding to perceptions of a primitive, bloodthirsty electorate by advancing proposals for harsher and more austere prisons. However, studies show the public to be decidedly optimistic about the prospects for change during incarceration, particularly as a result of hard work and self-discipline. In this context, long-term inmates pose the biggest challenge for correctional administrators. A "career-planning" model, centered around notions of advancement, progression, continuity, choice, and achievement, is advocated. Six essential elements of "career planning" for inmates are proposed.

Experiments in prison reform have often included efforts to democratize prisons. Such experiments were especially popular during the progressive era. Today, democratization efforts are congruent with management literature that describes employee participation and total quality of management initiatives through which organizations try to improve the quality of their products and services. Prison democratization can combine opportunities for staff involvement with enhanced prisoner participation. Inmates can be afforded a greater role in classification and programming decisions, and in determining policies that affect the quality of prison life. Such participatory approaches help to normalize prison life and contribute to the resocialization of offenders.

Who constitutes the subset of mentally ill who behave violently? Which criminal offenders are disturbed? Using case histories that serve as vivid depictions of disturbed violent offenders and their offenses, [the authors] address these and other questions on the way to answering the central question of the book: What are the relationships between emotional disorders and violence? By analyzing the results of a study they conducted of inmates in the New York state prison system, the authors . . . shed new light on the relationship between mental illness and violent behavior. Through use of cluster analysis resulting in a number of specific typologies, they are able to make detailed connections between offenders with mental disorders and the behavioral paths they may follow. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved)

"This book is about an innovative approach that lets members of progressive organizations function as applied scientists and problem solvers. This means that in such organizations work becomes more mindful. Decisions can be made based on inventories of information and analysis of data-couched tentatively, to be sure, subject to ratification through additional study. At the working level, planning and action can become linked, and the organization thereby becomes problem-oriented rather than crisis-reactive. It is ironic that this problem-oriented approach has evolved most explicitly and self-consciously in policing. We tend to think of police in terms of brawn rather than brains, and we may conceive of police officers as spending time wrestling with suspects and engaged in hot pursuits of fleeing felons. Police are perceived as the embodiment of blind reactivity, and yet an applied social-scientific focus on work has sprung up and taken root within the ranks of police. This book is addressed to those interested in the process of organizational change in settings in which a problem-oriented focus may be relevant. I am interested, therefore, in making the process of problem-oriented activity come alive and in conveying some sense of what such activity means to those who engage in its exercise"--Introd. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2005 APA, all rights reserved)