Beyond Mass Incarceration?

This article critically reflects upon the social work field engaging the issue of domestic violence and its relationship to the criminal legal system in the USA. The historical trajectory of the contemporary battered women's movement beginning in the 1970s parallels the rise of criminalisation and mass incarceration particularly impacting marginalised racial communities. In the USA, the passage of the Violence against Women Act (VAWA) in 1994 as a part of the Crime Bill symbolises the convergence of historical forces contributing to the growing collaboration between the feminist movement, social work engagement with gender-based violence and the carceral state. Since the late 1990s, new social movement forces including advocates and activists from anti-violence programmes in the USA have contested this unquestioned reliance upon criminal legal remedies and the professionalisation that has depoliticised the social movement. This critique has developed an intersectional analysis that challenges gender-based violence as well as state violence and advanced an alternative set of frameworks and practices. This article employs contributions of critical criminology, critical race theory and empirical examples from the field of domestic violence and new social movements to analyse the limitations of social work policy, practice and research and to suggest future productive directions.

Book Review - Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics

In “the land of the free,” there are 1.6 million people incarcerated in prison or jail as of 2023 (World Prison Brief n.d.). The United States system of mass incarceration disproportionately impacts communities of color and inflicts personal, social, and economic harm on incarcerated individuals. This paper examines the history of previous federal policies and funding that influenced the criminal justice system and how these legislative actions resulted in the era of mass incarceration in the US. This paper concludes that allocating federal funding to support reentry programs, establish universal voting rights, and increase monitoring of reform efforts, along with a coordinated policy response from state lawmakers, will propel lasting change in the criminal justice system.

This chapter seeks to recover and re-explore the central importance of the concept of legitimacy for criminological analysis. The chapter treats the idea of legitimacy as a political construct with critically important applications to the contemporary analysis of crime control. The chapter begins by noting what is seen as the problematic disconnect between two important bodies of work on legitimacy in criminal justice: one focused on the situational deployments of penal and policing power, the other on more macroscopic analyses of the emergence of late-modern (or ‘neoliberal’) penality. What falls between these preoccupations, the chapter suggests, is a closer analysis of the institutional arrangements for debating, deliberating, and deciding on what it is that criminal justice institutions are being tasked with and called upon to do.

An evidence-based roadmap for how the American criminal justice system can be reformed This important volume brings together today's leading criminal justice scholars and practitioners to offer a roadmap for those who want to change the face of the American criminal justice system. This collection of essays addresses thirteen significant issues in justice reform, starting from a suspect’s first interaction with the police and continuing to gun violence, prosecutorial innovation, sentencing reform, eliminating bail, recidivism and re-entry, collateral consequences of crime, and eliminating false convictions. A common theme emerges in this volume: the American criminal justice system is riddled with weaknesses that cause harm and require greater accountability. Each chapter is both educational and prescriptive, helping readers to understand the problems that plague the criminal justice system, how those problems can be addressed, and who should take responsibility for them. Part scholarly research, part account of the justice system’s workings and failings, and part agenda for action, Transforming Criminal Justice aims to educate and move readers to effect change.

In this article, we first describe the incidence and prevalence of incarceration and CPS involvement in the United States. Second, we outline the reasons that the same individuals and families may be at risk for involvement in both systems and review the limited existing research examining links between incarceration and CPS involvement. Third, we use unique longitudinal data from Wisconsin, spanning from 2004 to 2012, to describe intergenerational and intragenerational overlap in the two systems. Specifically, we calculate (1) the proportion of all CPS-involved children who have an incarcerated parent; (2) the proportion of incarcerated adults who have a CPS-involved child; (3) the proportion of incarcerated young men and women who were involved in the CPS system as adolescents; and (4) the proportion of CPS-involved adolescents who subsequently became incarcerated. We conclude with a discussion of potential directions for future research as well as implications for practice and policy.

Editorial Christina Larocco Recently, as I explained to an acquaintance where the Historical Society of Pennsylvania is located, she asked a question that surprised me: “Is that near the Daniel Faulkner plaque?” Indeed it is, though I had not realized it until recently. Every time I leave my office for a midday Target run or an Indian lunch buffet, I traverse the initial site of one of this state’s most controversial pieces of carceral history. In 1982, a jury convicted black civil rights activist and journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal of first-degree murder in the death of Faulkner, a white city police officer. Originally sentenced to death, Abu-Jamal is now serving a life sentence. Immediately, activists noted irregularities in the arrest, trial, and conviction, including possible connections to police abuse and corruption and a conflict of interest on the part of a state Supreme Court justice who heard the case on appeal. In 2019, Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner withdrew his objection to an opinion from the court of common pleas, clearing the way for a new appeal before the state Supreme Court. A case that began outside of HSP almost thirty-eight years ago will continue.1 Literally and symbolically surrounded by such stories, we have a responsibility to document their precursors. Thus this issue of the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography is dedicated to exploring the history of incarceration in Pennsylvania. Due in large part to its Quaker heritage, Pennsylvania has long been a center of prison reform movements. At HSP, for example, researchers can find the papers of the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons (later the Pennsylvania Prison Society), founded in 1787. Yet today Pennsylvania stands out as the state with the largest population of incarcerated individuals in the Northeast and the fifth-largest in the nation. The racial disparities, too, are striking: the state incarcerates African Americans and Latinos at rates of 8.9 and 3.3 times that of whites, respectively.2 [End Page 231] The development of a mass incarceration infrastructure was a multi-decade, bipartisan project. As a younger and more diverse constituency holds politicians accountable for policies they advocated and/or implemented in the 1990s, this history haunts Democratic Party candidates in particular—including Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Pennsylvania native Joe Biden today. These issues are particularly important in Pennsylvania, not only because carceral control defines the lives of so many of our neighbors but also, and relatedly, because of the state’s role as a fulcrum of national politics. As activists and scholars have pointed out for at least a decade, the prisons needed to house the burgeoning population of incarcerated individuals have overwhelmingly been built in rural areas. While incarcerated populations count toward congressional representation, these individuals cannot exercise the franchise. When racial disparities are taken into account, the carceral state thus echoes the Constitution’s three-fifths clause. It also increases the political clout of overwhelmingly white, rural areas vis-à-vis that of cities, which lose representation when the criminal justice system sends community members to otherwise less populous portions of the state.3 Beginning with a review essay by guest editor Jen Manion, the articles in this issue ask, among other questions, how we got here. While historians are not equipped to chart a path forward alone, we also believe that looking back is a necessary prerequisite for doing so. Ending the crisis of mass incarceration is no exception. [End Page 232] Footnotes 1. On Krasner’s withdrawn objection and a potential new appeal, see, for example, Chris Palmer, “Philly DA to Drop Challenge in Mumia Abu-Jamal Case, Clearing Appeal to Reach High Court,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Apr. 17, 2019. As a journalist, Abu-Jamal supported MOVE members in their 1978 standoff with police; see Tajah Ebram’s article in this volume, “ ‘You Can’t Jail the Revolution’: Policing, Protest, and the MOVE Organization in Philadelphia’s Carceral Landscape.” 2. ACLU Pennsylvania, “Ending Mass Incarceration in Pennsylvania,” accessed Aug. 28, 2019, https://www.aclupa.org/our-work/current-campaigns/smart-justice-pa!sentencing. 3. See Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New...

Black and brown men are negatively impacted by the criminal justice system and have been incarcerated at higher rates than any other group in the United States (Knafo, 2013). The United States criminal justice system is built on punishment and exploitation rather than rehabilitation, resulting in higher rates of incarceration and recidivism compared to other developed nations (Gilligan, 2012). Countries such as Norway and the United Kingdom take a more humane approach to their criminal justice system, resulting in low recidivism rates (Sterbenz, 2014). Implementing policies that aim to keep families connected with individuals who are incarcerated is a major way to reduce recidivism rates (Clarke, 2013). Using New York State as a case study, this paper will propose extending conjugal visits beyond medium and low-security prisons and implementing Skype technology in prisons and jails as policy solutions to promote the well-being of people who are incarcerated and keep them from returning to prison once they are released. Social workers can play a vital role in efforts made to shift the United States’ criminal justice system from a culture of punishment towards a restorative model.

Misaligned incentives and the scale of incarceration in the United States

This paper lays out a model of diminished citizenship as a tool for understanding the experiences of the large population of people who, at least in part by virtue of their relations with criminal justice apparatuses, do not benefit from the full complement of responsibilities and rights associated with citizenship in a modern democracy. The frame of diminished citizenship places mass incarceration within a larger historical and social context, moving ideas about “criminals” away from the individual focus of mainstream criminology and providing a useful framework for considering how a variety of marginalized groups navigate the American landscape. At the same time, the frame of mass incarceration offers insights into a crucial mechanism for constructing, diminishing and enforcing citizenship in the United States. Our argument draws on our decade-long ethnographic research with a cohort of women who had been released from prison in Massachusetts in 2007–2008.

Criminal justice institutions contain multiple access points for innovation, and the professionals working in them have normative, political, and economic motivations for improvement. While dominant tendencies incline toward managerial control and bureaucratic rigidity, pressures to rethink and reform criminal justice professionalism stem from deep concerns about the fairness, efficacy, and sustainability of mass incarceration and from citizen protests spotlighting racial bias and violence in conventional policing. This chapter considers four sites of innovation: community organizations developing restorative justice approaches, police departments using community policing, schools involved in participatory conflict resolution, and prisons opening up to higher education partnerships. Drawing from interviews with reformers, it discusses motivations for encouraging citizen participation, notes barriers to change, and identifies resources available to sustain and expand innovation. These innovative practices challenge prevailing assumptions that criminal justice institutions are inherently undemocratic and must involve coercion, hierarchy, and inequality.

Introducing the fundamentals of ethical theory, Ethics in Criminal Justice: In Search of the Truth, Seventh Edition, exposes the reader to the ways and means of making moral judgments by exploring the teachings of the great philosophers, sources of criminal justice ethics, and ethical issues in the criminal justice system. It is presented from two perspectives: a thematic perspective that addresses ethical principles common to all components of the discipline, and an area-specific perspective that addresses the state of ethics in criminal justice in the fields of policing, corrections, and probation and parole. The seventh edition features discussion of current critical issues in criminal justice: accusations of racism, police shootings, stop and frisk policy, marijuana laws, mass incarceration, life sentences, prison privatization, the swift and certain deterrence model of probation, excessive probation fees, and the Good Lives Model in corrections. The seventh edition also offers completely revised coverage of capital punishment and the rehabilitation debate, and a discussion of how juvenile justice often fails to live up to its ideals. Finally, the book features new case studies of recent ethical dilemmas in criminal justice to enhance students’ understanding of real-life ethics decision-making. Suitable for advanced undergraduates or graduate students in criminal justice programs in the US and globally, this text offers a classical view of ethical decision-making and is well-grounded in specific case examples.

Is violence the only option to obtain health for HIV prisoners?

The causes and correlates of disparities in the experiences of forensic mental health patients described in this book were myriad. Wells and Kavanaugh contextualised the US criminal justice system within its history of slavery, segregation and Jim Crow inspired laws old and current. In 2016, US former Attorney General Eric Holder said of this in an interview that ‘the arc bends toward justice, but it only bends toward justice because people pull it towards justice. Attitudes towards individuals from marginalised, vulnerable or minority groups produce and reinforce the differential experiences of criminal justice and forensic mental health care. Maclennan et al. wrote about the experiences of transgender inmates. Radical reconceptualisations of the methods and aims of contemporary western criminal justice rehabilitative agencies such as restorative justice or mental health and drug treatment courts are gaining increasing attention and evidence bases as successful alternatives to traditional criminal justice disposals.

The concept criminal insanity is discussed as being detrimental to the American system of criminal justice. Grounded in 13th Century ecclesiastic and legal thought-ways the present usage of legal interpretations (via rules of responsibility) of a medical diagnosis (insanity) is analyzed as yet another mechanism of social control and the extension of incarceration and punishment practices. The use of “therapeutic” medical milieu which function as detention facilities and the forensic use of medical opinions expressly to deny civil liberties and due process of law procedures are argued as undermining the American system of justice. Rules of responsibility are traced from their philosophical, moralistic beginnings and are linked to the denial of civil liberties, the incompatible marriage of forensic psychiatry and law, the dilemma posed by vested interests, and the cooperative effort by the judiciary and medical professions to establish a therapeutic state. Suggestions are posited as alternatives to present legal and psychiatric practices and recommendations offered for more enlightened criminal justice practices pursuant to alleviating a much maligned practice of forensic psychiatry.