Bøger af John Irwin

While prison populations in the U.S. increased almost tenfold from 1980 to 2000, studies of men's prisons have dwindled. For this reason, eminent criminologist John Irwin was impelled to examine imprisonment during this period, and he chose Solano State Prison as the site for his study. Solano is a typical example of a prison in which new, popular forms of technology and prison regimens have been instituted. The facility houses up to 6,000 prisoners at middle-security levels--II and III in California's range of custodies. (The high-security supermax prisons are level IV.) Irwin found that prison planners and administrators have developed a system that keeps the facility's 6,000 prisoners almost completely controlled--crowded together in limited space and with limited access to rehabilitative and recreational programs. This control is accomplished through the physical design of the prison, the rigid enforcement of an extensive set of rules, and a simplified protocol for transferring troublesome prisoners to supermax prisons. Irwin also discovered that while the prisoners--most of whom are serving sentences of more than five years--are not brutalized, they suffer profoundly under this new form of imprisonment and experience tremendous readjustment difficulties when they are released back into society. In her Afterword, criminologist Barbara Owen investigates the conditions in women's correctional facilities and concludes that female prisoners endure even more abysmal treatment than the men. This book examines the forces that have made the United States the most punitive nation in the world--and perhaps in all of history. Irwin's accessible writing style brings a real-world, insider's perspective to his depiction of prison life. Quotations from individuals within the correctional system further enliven this intriguing text. The Warehouse Prison is a unique study of the modern prison and essential reading for students of corrections and criminal justice.

Traces the career paths of such criminal types as the thief, the hustler, and the junkie, as well as the non-criminal 'square john'. This book explores the career of the felon, from early environment to crime to prison to parole, from the point of view of the felon himself.

Combining extensive interviews with his own experience as an inmate, John Irwin constructs a powerful and graphic description of the big-city jail. Unlike prisons, which incarcerate convicted felons, jails primarily confine arrested persons not yet charged or convicted of any serious crime. Irwin argues that rather than controlling the disreputable, jail disorients and degrades these people, indoctrinating new recruits to the rabble class. In a forceful conclusion, Irwin addresses the issue of jail reform and the matter of social control demanded by society. Reissued more than twenty years after its initial publication with a new foreword by Jonathon Simon, The Jail remains an extraordinary account of the role jails play in America's crisis of mass incarceration.

Tackles the issue of imprisonment with the conventional wisdom on homicide, society's purposes of imprisonment, and offenders' reformability. This book reveals what happens to prisoners serving very long sentences in correctional facilities and what this should tell us about effective sentencing policy.