Edited by Shlomo Giora Shoham, Ori Beck and Martin Kett

The first comparative study of this increasingly integral social subject, International Handbook of Penology and Criminal Justice provides a comprehensive and balanced review of the philosophy and practicality of punishment. Drawn from the expertise of scholars and researchers from around the world, this book covers the theory, practice, history, and empirical evidence surrounding crime prevention, identification, retribution, and incarceration. It analyzes the efficacy of both traditional methods and thinking as well as novel concepts and approaches. The book evaluates arguments regarding the world-wide abolition of capitol punishment from moral, utilitarian, and practical positions. It examines non-incarcerative and alternative punishments such as financial restoration and restrictions of liberty, as well as the positive effects of Victim Offender Mediation. It also considers several methods aimed at achieving measurable crime prevention including identifying at-risk juveniles and minimizing crimes of opportunity, as well as the pros and cons of employing the coercive power of police. Further essays consider subjects such as international policing, the roles of prosecution and defense attorneys, current discretionary sentencing practices, and the role and treatment of victims. The volume concludes with two chapters of case studies that provide a "hands-on" feel for the interplay of the concepts discussed.

Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2008. 802p.

By Hamid Reza Kusha

The growth of Islam both worldwide and particularly in the United States is especially notable among African-American inmates incarcerated in American state and federal penitentiaries. This growth poses a powerful challenge to American penal philosophy, structured on the ideal of rehabilitating offenders through penance and appropriate penal measures. "Islam in American Prisons" argues that prisoners converting to Islam seek an alternative form of redemption, one that poses a powerful epistemological as well as ideological challenge to American penology. Meanwhile, following the events of 9/11, some prison inmates have converted to radical anti-Western Islam and have become sympathetic to the goals and tactics of the Al-Qa'ida organization. This new study examines this multifaceted phenomenon and makes a powerful argument for the objective examination of the rehabilitative potentials of faith-based organizations in prisons, including the faith of those who convert to Islam.

Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate: 2009. 231p.

By Karol Lucken and Thomas G. Blomberg

The purpose of American Penology is to provide a story of punishment's past, present, and likely future. The story begins in the 1600s, in the setting of colonial America, and ends in the present As the story evolves through various historical and contemporary settings, America's efforts to understand and control crime unfold. The context, ideas, practices, and consequences of various punishment reforms are described and examined. Though the book's broader scope and purpose can be distinguished from prior efforts, it necessarily incorporates many contributions from this rich literature. These many contributions are explicitly discussed in the book, and their relationship to the story of American penology is self-evident (e.g., the rise of prisons, reformatories, probation, parole, and juvenile courts, the origins and functions of prison subcultures, the needs of special inmate populations, the effectiveness of community-based alternatives to incarceration). It is important to acknowledge that while this book incorporates selected descriptions of historical contingencies in relation to particular eras and punishment ideas and practices, it does not provide individual "histories" of these eras. Rather than doing history, this book uses history to frame and help explain particular punishment ideas and practices in relation to the period and context from which they evolved. The authors focus upon selected demographic, economic, political, religious, and intellectual con-tingencies that are associated with particular historical and contemporary eras to suggest how these contingencies shaped America's punishment ideas and practices. The purpose is to inform the reader about American penology's story as it evolved over several centuries. The focus is purposely narrowed to major punishment reform eras and selected historical influences. In offering a new understanding of received notions of crime control, Blomberg and Lucken not only provide insights into its future, but also show how the larger culture of control extends beyond the field of criminology to have an impact on declining levels of democracy, freedom, and privacy.

New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 2000. 400p.

By Bruce A. Arrigo and Dragan Milovanovic

Revolution in Penology is a thoroughly original and thought-provoking critique of penal harm, the recursive pains of imprisonment cycle, and the normalization of violence. Relying on selected insights derived from continental philosophy, cultural studies, and chaos theory, internationally renowned social theorists, Bruce A. Arrigo and Dragan Milovanovic, deconstruct the human agency/social structure duality that sustains the prison form, its parts and segments understood as correctional principles/practices, and the prison industrial complex that is informed by and stands above them all.

Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008. 237p.

By Gresham M. Sykes

The Society of Captives, first published in 1958, is a classic of modern criminology and one of the most important books ever written about prison.

Gresham Sykes wrote the book at the height of the Cold War, motivated by the world’s experience of fascism and communism to study the closest thing to a totalitarian system in American life: a maximum security prison. His analysis calls into question the extent to which prisons can succeed in their attempts to control every facet of life — or whether the strong bonds between prisoners make it impossible to run a prison without finding ways of “accommodating” the prisoners.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958. 168p.

By Thailand Institute of Justice

Prison health is extremely important to public health, not only because of the high prevalence of serious and often life threatening conditions among prisoners, but also because of the continuous exchange between those in prison and the communities outside. Since December 2019, the world has been grappling with a new global health threat: the outbreak of COVID-19 caused by the novel coronavirus. Prisons have turned into potential hot spots of the disease. Despite chronic overpopulation, resource constraints and other challenges, prisons around the world have tried to contain the spread of the virus through various measures. This report aims to highlight challenges, promising practices, lessons learned and recommendations on how prisons have dealt with COVID-19, using examples from around the world.

Bangkok:Thailand Institute of Justice, 2022. 72p.

By Maxim Ananyev and Michael Poyker

We investigate whether prisons contribute to homophobia in the general population given that inmates’ informal code often ascribes low status to persons perceived as ``passive’’ homosexuals. First, using Australian longitudinal survey data, we establish that prison experience prompts a higher level of anti-gay sentiments among males and their families, even though no discernible difference exists before incarceration. Second, to explore the transmission of anti-gay sentiments to the population, we use the Soviet amnesty of 1953, which released 1.2 million prisoners. We find that the municipalities in Russia more exposed to the influx of released individuals have more anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes, homophobic slurs on social media, and discriminatory attitudes in representative surveys. We offer suggestive evidence for the mechanisms by showing that in the aftermath of the amnesty more exposed locations had a larger increase in the number of thieves-in-law, career criminals upholding the inmate code, and descendants of Gulag prisoners have higher levels of anti-gay attitudes. Our results demonstrate a previously under-emphasized cost of mass incarceration: a higher level of homophobia.

Melbourne: University of Melbourne - Melbourne Institute: Applied Economic & Social Research; Nottingham, UK: University of Nottingham, School of Economics, 2022. 110p.

By Juditih Resnik, Skylar Albertson, Skylar Grace Li and Jennifer Taylor

Time-In-Cell 2021 is the only comprehensive, current national data on the number of prisoners in solitary confinement — or what prison directors call restrictive housing — and the length of time prisoners are housed under these conditions. As of the summer of 2021, an estimated 41,000 to 48,000 prisoners in the United States were held in isolation for an average of 22 hours a day for 15 days or more. Moreover, three states reported holding no one in that form of isolation in July 2021; two other states reported fewer than ten people in solitary; and ten states reported not using solitary in any of their women’s prisons. In contrast, as documented in the study published in 2014, every jurisdiction reported using solitary confinement, and an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 people were in solitary confinement in prisons throughout the United States.

This research intersects with efforts around the country—spearheaded by people in confinement, by communities, by many organizations including of correctional leaders, and by legislators—to limit or end the use of isolation in prison. National campaigns (“Unlock the Box,” “Stop Solitary”) have brought attention to the harms, as has the recent death of Albert Woodfox, author of Solitary, who spent more than forty years in isolation at Louisiana’s Angola prison before he was released in 2016. Time-in-Cell also examined the demographics of people held in isolation, including its continued use for people whom their own jurisdiction defines as having “serious mental illness.” Moreover, the number of Black women held in solitary was higher than the number of white women.

New Haven, CT: Arthur Liman Center for Public Interest Law at Yale Law School, 2022. 307p.

By Penal Reform International and Thailand Institute of Justice

Global Prison Trends 2022 is Penal Reform International’s annual flagship report, published with the Thailand Institute of Justice, identifying the key trends and challenges in prison systems worldwide.

Two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, despite repeated calls to reduce prison populations since the onset of the crisis, the global prison population has reached an all-time high. Global Prison Trends 2022 exposes that, rather than a decrease in prison numbers, many governments are instead increasing prison capacity, with a significant expansion in the global prison estate in the past year.

London: PRI and Thailand Institute of Justice 2022. 64p.

By UNODC, WHO, UNAIDS, UNDP, PRI

Transgender people often experience multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination, including in criminal justice systems. Evidence indicates that such marginalisation, criminalisation and discrimination can lead to greater vulnerability to and risk of long-term mental and physical health issues, including increased risk of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, and experience of sexual assault.

This technical brief sets out guiding principles and targeted interventions aimed at supporting countries in reducing the risk of HIV infection and transmission among, and ensuring adequate and accessible health care for, transgender people deprived of liberty by State authorities in prisons and other closed settings. Policymakers and prison authorities should understand the needs of transgender people and incorporate the proposed evidence- and human rights-based interventions and international standards into their prison policies and strategies, applying them to all people in prison.

Vienna: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2022. 12p.

By Ireland Department of Justice

The Programme for Government 2020: Our Shared future contains a broad range of policies and proposals that represent a coherent approach to enhancing and sustaining a more just and safe society. In September 2020, the Department of Justice established a working group including the Head of Criminal Justice Policy, the Director-General of the Irish Prison Service and the Director of the Probation Service to take forward the Government’s commitment to review policy options for prison and penal reform. The review considered commitments and ongoing developments across the justice sector and beyond, including those outlined in the Youth Justice Strategy 2021 - 2027, the Probation Service Strategy 2021-2024, the Irish Prison Service Strategic Plan 2019-2022, the Joint Irish Prison Service and Probation Service Strategic Plan 2018-2020, the Joint Action Plan on the Management of Offenders 2019-2021 and the Social Enterprise and Employment Strategy 2021 – 2023. The on-going work in relation to the Criminal Justice Sectoral Strategy and work on developing a Community Safety Policy was also taken into account.

Dublin: Ireland Department of Justice, 2022. 71p.

By Nicole D. Porter

Between 2000 and 2022, 21 states partially closed or fully closed at least one correctional facility and reduced correctional capacity in the United States by 81,444 prison beds, according to The Sentencing Project’s analysis of state records. …Key to successful prison closure efforts has been the reuse of former correctional facilities for purposes beneficial to communities. A community reinvestment approach redirects funds states spend on prisons to rebuild the social capital and local infrastructure – quality schools, community centers, and healthcare facilities – in high-incarceration neighborhoods. Such an approach acknowledges the collateral impacts of mass incarceration on many overly policed neighborhoods where persons lived prior to their sentencing. Repurposing closed prison facilities helps address how out of step the United States’ scale of incarceration is with the rest of the world and the unacceptable racial bias that dominates criminal legal practices.

Washington, DC: The Sentencing Project, 2022. 28p.

By Mackenzie Buday and Ashley Nellis

Private prisons incarcerated 99,754 American residents in 2020, representing 8% of the total state and federal prison population. Since 2000, the number of people housed in private prisons has increased 14%. Harmful crime policies of the 1980s and beyond fueled a rapid expansion in the nation’s prison population. The resulting burden on the public sector led to the modern emergence of for-profit prisons in many states and the federal system. Of the 1.2 million people in federal and state prisons, 8%, or 99,754 people, were in private prisons as of year-end 2020.

Washington, DC: The Sentencing Project, 2022. 3p.

By The Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform and Columbia University Justice Lab

New York State sends more people to prison for parole rules violations than any other state in the country. In 2019, 40 percent of the people sent to New York prisons were incarcerated not for a new felony conviction, but for parole violations such as not reporting to a parole officer, living at an unapproved residence, missing curfew, or failing drug or alcohol tests. Black and Latinx people are significantly more likely than white people to be incarcerated for parole violations. The fiscal impact on New York state and local taxpayers is enormous. In 2019, New York’s state and local governments collectively spent $683 million to incarcerate people on parole for rules violations, without evidence that this massive expenditure of resources meaningfully contributed to public safety. New York State spent $319 million in 2019 to incarcerate people for parole rule violations in state prisons. New York counties—excluding the five counties in New York City—collectively spent more than $91 million to jail people who were accused of technical violations ƒ New York City spent $273 million to jail people accused of technical violations

New York: Columbia University, Justice Lab, 2021. 23p.

By Caitlin Curry

Scholars have sought to understand the problem of racial disproportionality in U.S. imprisonment rates for over four decades, but current research has yet to identify the specific correctional mechanisms that exacerbate racial differences in incarceration (Garland, 2013). The rate of parole revocations increased markedly in the 1990s and 2000s, contributing to the growth in imprisonment in the US. Likewise, some research also finds that the likelihood of parole revocation varies by race, but we know little about the effect of parole revocations on imprisonment disparity (Huebner and Bynum, 2008). This study uses a sample of 24 states over a twenty year period (1990-2009) to test the hypothesis that parole revocation admissions contribute to disparity in imprisonment by race. Specifically, this study employs multilevel modeling to assess the extent to which parole revocations account for race differences in prisons admissions, when controlling for individual characteristics as well as state structural factors and policies

Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, 2016. 76p.

By The Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform

Over the past few years, New York City has significantly lowered the number of people held in its jails. Recent legislative reforms to pretrial laws promise further reductions. But one population in City jails has resisted these trends and poses a major barrier to closing the jails on Rikers Island: people accused of violations of community supervision, commonly referred to as parole. On any given day, 20 percent of the New York City jail population is made up of people accused of parole violations. 89 percent are people of color. Approximately 600 people are accused of non-criminal “technical” parole violations, such as being late for curfew, testing positive for drugs, or missing an appointment with a parole officer. Another 900 people are charged with new criminal offenses but are ineligible for bail or pretrial release, no matter how low-level the offense, because parole authorities have also issued a warrant. Jailing so many people on parole warrants does little for public safety and is counterproductive to the success of people who are reentering society from prison. It is also incredibly expensive: applying figures from the New York City Comptroller, the City spends more than $400 million per year to incarcerate people accused of parole violations. These problems are not limited to Rikers. On any given day, more than 1,000 people are held in other jails across the state solely because they are accused of technical parole violations. And almost 40 percent of the people sent to state prison each year in New York are not incarcerated for new criminal convictions, but rather for these technical parole violations.

Independent Commission on New York City Criminal Justice and Incarceration Reform, 2019. 22p.

By Vincent Schiraldi and Jennifer Arzu

As state and city leaders agree that the jail complex on Rikers Island should be closed, efforts have increased at the state and city level to reduce the New York City jail population (New York City Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice 2017a; Cuomo 2018). The population of New York City’s jails dipped below 9,000 recently for the first time in 35 years, even as crime in the city has continued to decline, allowing the City to announce the closure of one of Rikers Island’s nine jails (New York City Office of the Mayor 2017; Schiraldi 2018). But as the number of persons incarcerated pretrial for misdemeanors, non-violent and violent felonies, as well as the city sentenced population, have declined by double-digits over the past four years, only one population in the jail has increased, also by double digits: persons held in city jails for state parole violations (New York City Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice 2017b; New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services 2018). This brief will examine this issue in greater detail, focusing primarily on the impact it is having on the New York City jail population at this critical time. We will conclude with recommendations to reduce unnecessary incarceration of persons on parole and to shrink the overall parole population by incentivizing good behavior on parole, referring whenever possible to other jurisdictions that have successfully enacted parole reforms.

New York: Columbia University, Justice Lab, 2018. 14p.

By Kendra Bradner and Vincent Schiraldi

The scope and conditions of parole supervision in New York have profound impacts for people serving supervision sentences. Numerous conditions are a constraint on their liberty, serve as trip wires to incarceration, and can disrupt the process of community reintegration needed for successful reentry after leaving prison. Parole supervision also fuels mass incarceration everywhere, but particularly in New York, as New York sends more people back to prison for non-criminal, technical parole violations than any state except Illinois (Kaeble 2018, Appendix Table 7). Six times as many people are reincarcerated in state prisons for technical violations – such as missing an appointment, being out past curfew, or testing positive for alcohol – as are reincarcerated for a new criminal conviction (Commission 2019). Moreover, people held on parole violations are now the only population increasing in New York City jails, threatening plans to close the notorious Rikers Island jails complex (Schiraldi and Arzu 2018; Commission 2019). Together, incarceration for technical violations cost New York State and localities over $600 million annually (The Council of State Governments 2019; NYC Independent Budget Office 2019; NYS Bar Association 2019).

New York: Columbia University, Justice Lab, 2020. 24p.

By The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA): Linda Montanari, Luis Royuela, Ines Hasselberg and Liesbeth Vandam

This European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) Insights report provides a comprehensive overview of the current knowledge and latest developments in the field of drug use and prison in the 30 countries reporting to the EMCDDA up to the end of 2020: the 27 EU Member States, Norway, Turkey and the United Kingdom. It also identifies important gaps in our knowledge, challenges for better provision of interventions and implications for policy and practice. The report provides an overview of the current situation in the field of drugs and prison in the following areas: drug use and drug-related problems among the prison population; the availability of drug-related services in prison; the evidence available for effective interventions in the prison setting; drug supply and supply reduction interventions; and future challenges relating to prison and drugs.

People in prison report high levels of lifetime prevalence of substance use before imprisonment and increased levels of consumption, especially of heroin, cocaine and amphetamines, compared with the general population. Although many people will stop injecting drugs when they enter prison, for those that continue, the use and reuse of contaminated equipment is not uncommon, contributing to an increased risk of transmission of infectious diseases in these settings.

Lisbon: European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), 2022. 124p.

By The Southern Poverty Law Center

The detention of immigrants has skyrocketed in the United States. On a given day in August 2019, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) held over 55,000 people in detention – a massive increase from five years ago when ICE held fewer than 30,000 people. Unsurprisingly, the United States has the largest immigration incarceration system in the world. What’s more, the federal government spends more on immigration enforcement than for all principal federal law enforcement agencies combined, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General. As of April 2019, Florida had the sixth-largest population of people detained by ICE in the United States, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. On a daily basis, ICE currently detains more than 2,000 noncitizens in the state, mostly in South Florida, which is home to four immigration prisons: Krome Service Processing Center (Krome), owned by ICE; Broward Transitional Center (Broward), operated by GEO Group, a Boca Raton-based for-profit prison corporation; and two county jails, Glades County Detention Center (Glades) and Monroe County Detention Center (Monroe). Despite the fact that immigrants are detained on civil violations, their detention is indistinguishable from the conditions found in jails or prisons where people are serving criminal sentences. The nation’s immigration detention centers are little more than immigrant prisons, where detained people endure harsh – even dangerous – conditions. And reports of recent deaths have only heightened concerns.

Montgomery, AL: Southern Poverty Law Center, 2017. 104p.