USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP

By Oleg V. Khlevniuk. Translated by Vadim A. Staklo. With editorial assistance and commentary by David J. Nordlander. Foreword by Robert Conquest

FROM THE FOREWORD: “Although it is sometimes suggested that the Gulag was in some way derived from an older Russia, one has only to read about Dostoevsky's experiences as a political prisoner in The House of the Dead to find many differences. By the early twentieth century a number of Russian people--far fewer of them in any case than in Soviet times--were either in prison or in "exile." The latter penalty, whose victims included Lenin and Stalin, simply meant forced residence at some distant village, with a monetary allowance, sometimes with wives, but with no barbed wire or penal labor. The Gulag is only one example of how the Soviet regime represented a huge decline in civilization in Russia. But it is a revealing one. Areas of the Stalinist experience still remain obscure…”

NY. Yale University Press. 2004. 449p.

USED BOOK. MAY CONTAIN MARK-UP

By Karlo Stajner. Translated By Joel Agee. With An Introduction By Danilo Kis

AUTHOR'S NOTE: “I was born Karl Steiner on January 15, 1902, in Vienna. After moving to Zagreb, the capital of the Yugoslav Republic of Croatia, in 1922, I adopted the Serbo-Croation spelling of my name, Karlo Stajner. In 1932, I emigrated to the Soviet Union, where I remained until 1956. Because of my Austrian origin, I was accused of being a Nazi agent and condemned to ten years at hard labor; a second ten-year term was later added to my sentence. After my release from prison in 1956, I returned to Yugoslavia and continued calling myself by my Serbo-Croatian name: Karlo Stajner. K.S.”

NY. Farrar Straus Giroux. 1988. 408p.

By Ulla V. Bondeson

From the cover: “Prisoners in Prison Societies is a study of criminal career patternsover time, demonstrating specifically how and in what ways imprisonment has a positive correlation with later recidivism. The book combines original research and a ten-year follow-up study of Swedish inmates, surveying their attitudes o neverything from political ide- ology to prison reform. The work is m u c h more than a survey of prisoner attitudes, however; it includes official statements and administrative staff assessments at the in- stitutions examined. As a result, it is many sided and avoidsthe usual specialpleading of criminological writings. Among its unique features, Prisoners in Prison Societies analyzes thirteen correctional institutions, ranging from training schools to youth and adult prisons as well as a preventive detention facility.”

New Brunswick. Transaction Publishers . 1989. 364p. CONTAINS MARK-UP

By Karina Biondi and John F. Collins

The Primeiro Comando do Capital (PCC) is a Sao Paulo prison gang that since the 1990s has expanded into the most powerful criminal network in Brazil. Karina Biondi's rich ethnography of the PCC is uniquely informed by her insider-outsider status. Prior to his acquittal, Biondi's husband was incarcerated in a PCC-dominated prison for several years. During the period of Biondi's intense and intimate visits with her husband and her extensive fieldwork in prisons and on the streets of Sao Paulo, the PCC effectively controlled more than 90 percent of Sao Paulo's 147 prison facilities.

Available for the first time in English, Biondi's riveting portrait of the PCC illuminates how the organization operates inside and outside of prison, creatively elaborating on a decentered, non-hierarchical, and far-reaching command system. This system challenges both the police forces against which the PCC has declared war and the methods and analytic concepts traditionally employed by social scientists concerned with crime, incarceration, and policing. Biondi posits that the PCC embodies a "politics of transcendence," a group identity that is braided together with, but also autonomous from, its decentralized parts. Biondi also situates the PCC in relation to redemocratization and rampant socioeconomic inequality in Brazil, as well as to counter-state movements, crime, and punishment in the Americas.

Chapel, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. 194p.

By Coretta Phillips

The Multicultural Prison: Ethnicity, Masculinity, and Social Relations among Prisoners presents a unique sociological analysis of the daily negotiation of ethnic difference within the closed world of the male prison. At a time when issues of race, multiculture, and racialization inside the prison have been somewhat neglected, this book considers how multiple identities configure social interactions among prisoners in late modern prisoner society, whilst also recognising the significance of religion, age, masculinity, national, and local identifications. Contemporary political policies, which sees racialised incarceration together with penal expansion, has fostered the disproportionate incarceration of diverse British national, foreign, and migrant populations - all of whom are brought into close proximity within the confines of the prison.

Using rich empirical material drawn from extensive qualitative research in Rochester Young Offenders' Institution and Maidstone prison, the author presents vivid prisoner accounts from both white and minority ethnic participants, describing economically and socially marginalised lives outside. In turn, these stories provide a backdrop to the inside - the interior world of the prison where ethnicity still shapes social relations but in a contingent fashion. Addressing both the negotiation and tensions inherent in conducting such research, the central discussion evolves from a frank dialogue about ethnic, faith, and masculine identities, constituted through loose solidarities based on 'postcode identities', to a more startling comprehension of such divisions as, in some cases, a means for cultural hybridity in prison cultures. More commonly, though, these divisions act as a familiar fault line, creating wary, unstable, and antagonistic relations among prisoners. Providing an arresting insight into how race is written into prison social relations, <em>The Multicultural Prison adds a unique and outstanding voice to the challenging issues of discrimination, inequality, entitlement, and preferential treatment from the perspective of diverse groups of prisoners.

London; New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. 267p.

By Stanton Wheeler , Hugh F. Cline , David J. Armor

This book presents the formerly-unpublished manuscript by Wheeler and Cline detailing the landmark, comparative prisons study they conducted in the 1960s which examined fifteen Scandinavian prisons and nearly 2000 inmates across four Nordic countries. At the time, it was the largest comparative study of prisons and inmate behavior ever undertaken and despite 15 years of analysis and write-up it was never published but it influenced many other important prison studies that followed. This book engages with the functionalist perspectives that were widespread in the 1960s, and tries to answer some of the classical questions of prison sociology such as how prisoners adapt to imprisonment and the degree to which prisoner adaptations can be attributed to characteristics of prisoners and prisons. It examines the nature and structure of prisons, the effect of that structure on individual prisoners and the other factors that may influence the way that they respond to confinement. It also includes discussion about the prisoners’ considerations of justice and fairness and a explanation of the study design and data which was highly unique at the time. The Scandinavian Prison Study brings Wheeler and Cline's pioneering work into the present context with a preface and an introduction which discuss the questions and claims raised in the book still relevant to this day.

Cham, SWIT: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 390p. 386p.

By Joshua M. Price

The United States imprisons more of its citizens than any other nation in the world. To be sentenced to prison is to face systematic violence, humiliation, and, perhaps worst of all, separation from family and community. It is, to borrow Orlando Patterson’s term for the utter isolation of slavery, to suffer “social death.” In Prison and Social Death, Joshua Price exposes the unexamined cost that prisoners pay while incarcerated and after release, drawing upon hundreds of often harrowing interviews conducted with people in prison, parolees, and their families. Price argues that the prison separates prisoners from desperately needed communities of support from parents, spouses, and children. Moreover, this isolation of people in prison renders them highly vulnerable to other forms of violence, including sexual violence. Price stresses that the violence they face goes beyond physical abuse by prison guards and it involves institutionalized forms of mistreatment, ranging from abysmally poor health care to routine practices that are arguably abusive, such as pat-downs, cavity searches, and the shackling of pregnant women. And social death does not end with prison. The condition is permanent, following people after they are released from prison. Finding housing, employment, receiving social welfare benefits, and regaining voting rights are all hindered by various legal and other hurdles. The mechanisms of social death, Price shows, are also informal and cultural. Ex-prisoners face numerous forms of distrust and are permanently stigmatized by other citizens around them. A compelling blend of solidarity, civil rights activism, and social research, Prison and Social Death offers a unique look at the American prison and the excessive and unnecessary damage it inflicts on prisoners and parolees.

New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015. 2122p.