By James Austin

This study examined the extent to which the Prisoner Classification Management (PMC) system improved prison operations and reduced violence between inmates. The PMC system classifies inmates into one of five categories: selective intervention -- situational (SI-S); selective intervention -- treatment (SI-T); casework control (CC); environmental structure (ES); and limit setting (LS). Data were collected from records kept by the Research and Planning Section of Washington's Department of Corrections. Data included inmate characteristics (JU67W.DAT), work assignment records (JU68W.DAT), disciplinary records (JU69W.DAT), assignment records (JU70W.DAT), and housing assignment records (JU71W.DAT). Data were also collected from a long (JUnW.DAT) and short (JU73W.DAT) PMC questionnaire. Checks for out-of-range values revealed that the data are free of detectable coding errors.

San Francisco: National Council on Crime and Delinquency, 1990. 100p.

By Mark S. Fleisher and Jessie L. Krienert

The Myth of Prison Rape provides a nuanced glimpse into the complex sexual dynamics of the American prison. Drawing on results from the most comprehensive study of inmate sexuality to date, the authors analyze the intricacies of sexuality and sexual violence in daily inmate life. Dynamic case studies and interview excerpts enliven this cultural study of sexuality, safety, and violence in American prisons

Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009. 219p.

By Elaine Crawley

Prisons are at once extraordinary and ordinary institutions. They are extraordinary in that they are places in which large numbers of strangers are forced to live, in close proximity with each other, often for sustained periods. On entry to the prison, these strangers are stripped, searched and relieved of their personal possessions by other strangers - prison officers acting on behalf of the state. These officers are obliged to regulate prisoners' behaviour and ensure that they do not escape. Once inside, assigned to a cell and dressed in prison clothing, the strangers-nowprisoners are under almost constant surveillance, and instructed as to how they should conduct themselves, what is expected of them, and at what time, throughout the period of their sentences. In old prisons which stand in the centre of towns, all this may take place only yards from where people are freely going about their daily business - shopping, visiting the hairdressers or the pub, taking children to school, walking in the park. Whenever I step into the sunshine after spending the day in one prison or other, I rarely fail to be struck by this thought and by the apparent invisibility of this other world to passers-by. Yet in many respects, prisons are also very ordinary. They are ordinary in that much of prison life, especially long-term prison life, revolves around those mundane matters which concern all of us in our non-prison lives - eating, sleeping, cleaning and tidying, doing the laundry, working (or looking for work), thinking about family and friends, attempting to alleviate boredom. All these concerns occupy prisoners because the prison is where prisoners must live and, as such, the prisoner is a member of what Clemmer (1940) terms the prison 'community'.

Cullompton, Devon, UK: Willan Publishing, 2004. 298p.

By F. Cilluffo, G.B. Saathoff, et. al

The potential for radicalization of prison inmates in the United States poses a threat of unknown magnitude to the national security of the U.S. Prisons have long been places where extremist ideology and calls to violence could find a willing ear, and conditions are often conducive to radicalization. With the world’s largest prison population (over 2 million – ninety-three percent of whom are in state and local prisons and jails)1 and highest incarceration rate (701 out of every 100,000) , America faces what could be an enormous challenge – every radicalized prisoner becomes a potential terrorist recruit. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales recently stated that “[t]he threat of homegrown terrorist cells – radicalized online, in prisons and in other groups of socially isolated souls – may be as dangerous as groups like al Qaeda, if not more so. They certainly present new challenges to detection.” The London transit bombings of 2005 and the Toronto terrorist plot of 2006, to name just two incidents, illustrate the threat posed by a state’s own radicalized citizens. By acting upon international lessons learned, the U.S. may operate from a proactive position.

Washington, DC: Homeland Security Policy Institute, The George Washington University; Charlottesville, VA: The Critical Incident Analysis Group (CIAG) University of Virginia School of Medicine, 2006. 39p.

By InSight Crime and American University’s Center for Latin American & Latino Studies - CLALS

Over the past thirty years, the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) has emerged as one of the most powerful criminal organizations in South America. From its founding in São Paulo’s prison system, it has spread rapidly across southern Brazil, contested trafficking routes in Brazil’s northern and northeastern regions, and become a potent force in Paraguay. Drawing on a variety of case studies developed from research in Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina, the report describes the origins of the PCC, its unique model of organization, and its ability to regulate criminal markets in the areas it controls. The report analyzes the forces that have facilitated the PCC’s rise and expansion, as well as the constraints to its further spread, including increased law enforcement, the rise of rival organizations, and the organizational challenges of expansion. We conclude that although the PCC is facing unprecedented challenges, the organization is resilient to many law enforcement pressures, and the PCC “model” of criminal organization is increasingly being emulated by other criminal groups in the region.

Washington, DC: InSight Crime and CLALS (American University), 2020. 66p.

By Steven Dudley and Juan José Martínez d’Aubuisson

El Salvador’s prison system is the headquarters of the country’s largest gangs. It is also where one of these gangs, the MS13, is fighting amongst itself for control of the organization.

Washington, DC: Insight Crime, 2017. 20p.

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.

By Human Rights Watch

The 36-page report, “Prison or Exile: Cuba’s Systematic Repression of July 2021 Demonstrators,” documents a wide range of human rights violations committed in the context of the protests, including arbitrary detention, abuse-ridden prosecutions, and torture. The government’s repression and its apparent unwillingness to address the underlying problems that drove Cubans to the streets, including limited access to food and medicine, have generated a human rights crisis that dramatically increased the number of people leaving the country.

New York: HRW, 2022. 36p.

By E.A.C. Raaijmakers

In thinking about punishment, and imprisonment in particular, the concept of severity plays a central role. After all, the severity of imprisonment is assumed to deter offenders from committing crime and is used as the vehicle to express a proportionate amount of blame and censure to the offender. Unfortunately, the concept of severity as it has been understood for the past three centuries, mostly pertains to the objective severity of imprisonment. Severity in this view is considered to be merely dependent upon objective properties of punishment, most notably its duration. A prison sentence for instance, is considered to be more aversive simply insofar as it is longer rather than shorter. The severity as experienced by inmates themselves, however, has barely been explored. This thesis assesses the determinants of the subjectively experienced severity of imprisonment, and its consequences for the remembered severity of imprisonment, and post-release offending behavior. The findings reveal that inmates differ markedly in their experienced severity of imprisonment. In addition, inmates’ experienced severity of imprisonment changes substantially over the course of incarceration. While the severity as experienced while being incarcerated is strongly related to the severity as remembered following release, it is not related to post-release offending behavior.

Leiden, Netherlands: Leiden University, 2017. 153p.

By Andrew Silke and John Morrison

Recent cases of attacks by released terrorist prisoners highlight issues around the risk of re-offending posed by former terrorist prisoners. What are the appropriate processes and systems for managing and risk assessing such individuals, and to what extent is rehabilitation possible in the context of terrorist offending? This Policy Brief will explore these and related issues to help inform wider discussion and debates on appropriate policy in this area. In this Policy Brief, the authors critically analyse the definition of ‘recidivism’, and demonstrate the need for a concrete operational definition before one is able to truly analyse recidivist activity. Following this, the authors discuss terrorist recidivism in a range of international contexts, ranging from Northern Ireland to Sri Lanka, the United States to Israel. By taking this broader perspective it allows the reader to gain a greater understanding of what factors related to recidivism rates may be context-specific, and which are universal.

The Hague: International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, 2020. 13p.

By Rafael Di Tella and Juan Dubra

We describe the evolution of selective aspects of punishment in the United States over the period 1980–2004. We note that imprisonment increased around 1980, a period that coincides with the ‘‘Reagan revolution’’ in economic matters. We build an economic model where beliefs about economic opportunities and beliefs about punishment are correlated. We present three pieces of evidence (across countries, within the United States, and an experimental exercise) that are consistent with the model.

Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2011. 53p.

By John McElroy.

A Story of Rebel Military Prisons By John McElroy, late of Co.L. 16th III Can. 15 months a guest of the so-called Southern Confederacy. A Private soldiers experience in Richmond, Andersonville, Savannah, Millen Blackshear and Florence.

Harrow and Heston Classic Reprint. (1879) 675 pages.

By Andrew Silke and John Morrison

Recent cases of attacks by released terrorist prisoners highlight issues around the risk of re-offending posed by former terrorist prisoners. What are the appropriate processes and systems for managing and risk assessing such individuals, and to what extent is rehabilitation possible in the context of terrorist offending? This Policy Brief will explore these and related issues to help inform wider discussion and debates on appropriate policy in this area.

In this Policy Brief, the authors critically analyse the definition of ‘recidivism’, and demonstrate the need for a concrete operational definition before one is able to truly analyse recidivist activity. Following this, the authors discuss terrorist recidivism in a range of international contexts, ranging from Northern Ireland to Sri Lanka, the United States to Israel. By taking this broader perspective it allows the reader to gain a greater understanding of what factors related to recidivism rates may be context-specific, and which are universal.

The Hague: International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT), 2020. 13p.

By Rachel E. Bennett.

Capital punishment has a long and storied global history. Within the annals of this penal narrative, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have offered a sustained attraction to historians of Western Europe. However, studies of the Scottish capital punishment experience have remained limited by comparison. This book seeks to redress this scholarly lacuna. Based upon an extensive gathering and analysis of previously untapped resources, it takes the reader on a journey from the courtrooms of Scotland to the theatre of the gallows. It introduces them to several of the malefactors who faced the hangman’s noose and explores the traditional hallmarks of the spectacle of the scaffold. The study demonstrates that the period between 1740 and 1834 was one of discussion, debate and fundamental change in the use of the death sentence and how it was staged in practice. In addition, it contextualises the use of capital punishment against the backdrop of key events in Scottish history in this period including Anglo-Scottish relations in the wake of the 1707 Act of Union, the aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion and the rapid industrialisation and urbanisation witnessed by the country. In doing so, the current study goes beyond redressing a scholarly gap and instead demonstrates that an exploration of Scotland’s unique capital punishment history enhances the current feld in some areas but provides a crucial caveat to the broader narrative in others. Finally, this study writes the post-mortem punishment of the criminal corpse into Scotland’s capital punishment history. In demonstrating that the journey of several capitally convicted offenders, predominantly murderers, did not end upon the scaffolds of Scotland, it takes the reader from the theatre of the gallows to the dissection tables of Scotland’s main universities and to the foot of the gibbets from which criminal bodies were displayed. In doing so it identifes an intermediate stage in the long-term disappearance of public bodily punishment.

Basingstoke, UK: Springer Nature, 2018. 243p.

By Clementine van Eck.

Honour Killings amongst Turks in the Netherlands.

Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2002. 304p.

By Sarah Tarlow and Emma Battell.

This open access book is the culmination of many years of research on what happened to the bodies of executed criminals in the past. Focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it looks at the consequences of the 1752 Murder Act. These criminal bodies had a crucial role in the history of medicine, and the history of crime, and great symbolic resonance in literature and popular culture. Starting with a consideration of the criminal corpse in the medieval and early modern periods, chapters go on to review the histories of criminal justice, of medical history and of gibbeting under the Murder Act, and ends with some discussion of the afterlives of the corpse, in literature, folklore and in contemporary medical ethics. Using sophisticated insights from cultural history, archaeology, literature, philosophy and ethics as well as medical and crime history, this book is a uniquely interdisciplinary take on a fascinating historical phenomenon.

Lowman. Palgrave (2018) 277 pages.

By Floris Tomasini.

Posthumous Punishment, Harm and Redemption over Time. “In the main, this book is a cross-fertilisation of history and philosophy in the broadest possible sense. Ideas of death, posthumous harm, punishment and redemption germinate in both the conceptual ground of philosophical analysis and the empirical ground of historical case study.”

Palgrave (2017) 106p.

Edited by Ksenya Kiebuzinski and Alexander Motyl.

A Sourcebook. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, executed a staggering number of political prisoners in Western Ukraine-somewhere between 10,000 and 40,000-in the space of eight days, in one of the greatest atrocities perpetrated by the Soviet state. Yet the Great West Ukrainian Prison Massacre of 1941 is largely unknown. This sourcebook aims to change that, offering detailed scholarly analysis, eyewitness testimonies and profiles of known victims, and a selection of fiction, memoirs, and poetry that testifies to the lasting impact of the massacre in the collective memory of Ukrainians.

Amsterdam University Press. (217) 433 pages.

By Sarah Tarlow.

”The story of Tom Otter, a murderer who was executed and gibbeted in 1806, has many striking features. Not least, this form of brutal and bodily post-mortem punishment seems rather anachronistic during a period often described in terms of increasing gentility and humanity. It took place within the legal context of the Murder Act (1752), which specified that the bodies of murderers had to be either dissected or hung in chains. Other aggravated death penalties were applied to those convicted of treason and suicide. A number of common misconceptions about the gibbet need to be corrected.” Palgrave (2017) 163p.

By Graeme R. Newman.

This is a classic reprint of the original edition of The Punishment Response, originally published in 1976. An acclaimed treatise on the history,  philosophy and psychology of punishment. "...read with enormous appreciation for its erudition and method of analysis..." -- Michel Foucault.

Harrow and Heston Classic Reprint. 1985.312p.