Perpetual Prisoner Machine

Author : Joel Dyer
Publisher : Westview Press
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 344 pages
Book Rating : 4.68/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Perpetual Prisoner Machine written by Joel Dyer and published by Westview Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critical look at the United States' criminal justice system, raising an obvious question: If crime rates aren't going up, why is the prison population?

Author : Joel Dyer
Publisher : Basic Books
ISBN 13 : 9780813338705
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.00/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Perpetual Prisoner Machine written by Joel Dyer and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2000-12-08 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Perpetual Prisoner Machine, author Joel Dyer takes a critical look at the United States' criminal justice system as we enter the new millennium. America has more than tripled its prison population since 1980 even though crime rates have been either flat or declining. The U.S. now incarcerates nearly two million people in its prisons and jails on any given day and over five million of its citizens are currently under some form of justice department supervision. These facts raise an obvious question: If crime rates aren't going up, why is the prison population? The Perpetual Prisoner Machine provides the answer to this question and, shockingly, it has little to do with crime or justice. The answer is “profit.”In the 1990s, through their mutual and pension funds, millions of American investors are now unwittingly profiting from crime. As a result of America's controversial push towards the privatization of its justice system, a growing number of well-known and politically influential U.S. Corporations—and subsequently their shareholders—are now cashing in on a prison trade whose profit potential is tied directly to the growth of the prison population. A disturbing realization, when you consider the influence that these same multi-national companies now have over our government's policy-making process by way of their lobbyists and their ability to fill campaign coffers.The Perpetual Prisoner Machine explains how the new prison-industrial complex has capitalized upon the public's fear of crime—which has its origins in violent media content—to help bring about the “hard on crime” policies that have led to our prison-filling, and therefore profitable, “war on crime.” In addition to a quest for profits, Dyer describes an astounding chain of events including media consolidation and globalization, advances in communication technology, and the increasing political dependence upon public opinion polls and campaign funding that have led to the creation of what the author calls “the perpetual prisoner machine,” a mechanism designed to suck the funds from social programs that diminish the crime-enhancing power of poverty and spit them into the bank accounts of those who own stock in the prison-industrial complex.Dyer concludes that powerful, market-driven forces have manipulated America into fighting a very real war against an imaginary foe. “Unfortunately,” says Dyer, “real wars have real casualties. And in this case, the victims are America's poor, particularly those segments of our black and Hispanic population who live in poverty and who now comprise the vast majority of the new human commodity.”

Author : Mark Cowling
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 0230234712
Total Pages : 292 pages
Book Rating : 4.10/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Marxism and Criminological Theory written by Mark Cowling and published by Springer. This book was released on 2008-11-03 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume looks at Marxist thought in criminology, the work of Willem Bonger, Georg Rusche and Otto Kircheimer, and assesses the role of Marxist analysis in areas such as Critical Criminology and Left Realism. Arguing that Marxism is relevant in the post-Soviet era, it offers a 'toolkit' of Marxist theories and how to use them.

Author : Loïc Wacquant
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 0822392259
Total Pages : 410 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Punishing the Poor written by Loïc Wacquant and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2009-05-22 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The punitive turn of penal policy in the United States after the acme of the Civil Rights movement responds not to rising criminal insecurity but to the social insecurity spawned by the fragmentation of wage labor and the shakeup of the ethnoracial hierarchy. It partakes of a broader reconstruction of the state wedding restrictive “workfare” and expansive “prisonfare” under a philosophy of moral behaviorism. This paternalist program of penalization of poverty aims to curb the urban disorders wrought by economic deregulation and to impose precarious employment on the postindustrial proletariat. It also erects a garish theater of civic morality on whose stage political elites can orchestrate the public vituperation of deviant figures—the teenage “welfare mother,” the ghetto “street thug,” and the roaming “sex predator”—and close the legitimacy deficit they suffer when they discard the established government mission of social and economic protection. By bringing developments in welfare and criminal justice into a single analytic framework attentive to both the instrumental and communicative moments of public policy, Punishing the Poor shows that the prison is not a mere technical implement for law enforcement but a core political institution. And it reveals that the capitalist revolution from above called neoliberalism entails not the advent of “small government” but the building of an overgrown and intrusive penal state deeply injurious to the ideals of democratic citizenship. Visit the author’s website.

Author : Gregg Barak
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN 13 : 1461636663
Total Pages : 404 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Criminology written by Gregg Barak and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2009-09-16 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Barak provides the first integrated analysis of crime, criminal justice, and criminology through a global lens, revealing the importance of a global perspective for the study of crime and justice in the 21st century. While moving seamlessly from the micro bio-psychological, interactive-social process to the macro cultural-structural forces that shape crime and our responses to it, the author presents the reader with a feast of the latest criminological ideas in this sumptuous tome.

Author : Rima L. Vesely-Flad
Publisher : Fortress Press
ISBN 13 : 1506420508
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.09/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Racial Purity and Dangerous Bodies written by Rima L. Vesely-Flad and published by Fortress Press. This book was released on 2017-06-15 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the center of contemporary struggles over aggressive policing practices is an assumed association in U.S. culture of blackness with criminality. Rima L. Vesely-Flad examines the religious and philosophical constructs of the black body in U.S. society, examining racialized ideas about purity and pollution as they have developed historically and as they are institutionalized today in racially disproportionate policing and mass incarceration. These systems work, she argues, to keeps threatening elements of society in a constant state of harassment and tension so that they are unable to pollute the morals of mainstream society. Policing establishes racialized boundaries between communities deemed “dangerous” and communities deemed “pure” and, along with prisons and reentry policies, sequesters and restrains the pollution of convicted “criminals,” thus perpetuating the image of the threatening black male criminal. Vesely-Flad shows how the anti-Stop and Frisk and the Black Lives Matter movements have confronted these systems by exposing unquestioned assumptions about blackness and criminality. They hold the potential, she argues, to reverse the construal of “pollution” and invasion in America’s urban cores if they extend their challenge to mass imprisonment and the barriers to reentry of convicted felons.

Author : Gregory S. Taylor
Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 0807174874
Total Pages : 327 pages
Book Rating : 4.76/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Central Prison written by Gregory S. Taylor and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2021-04-07 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gregory S. Taylor’s Central Prison is the first scholarly study to explore the prison’s entire history, from its origins in the 1870s to its status in the first decades of the twenty-first century. Taylor addresses numerous features of the state’s vast prison system, including chain gangs, convict leasing, executions, and the nearby Women’s Prison, to describe better the vagaries of living behind bars in the state’s largest penitentiary. He incorporates vital elements of the state’s history into his analysis to draw clear parallels between the changes occurring in free society and those affecting Central Prison. Throughout, Taylor illustrates that the prison, like the state itself, struggled with issues of race, gender, sectionalism, political infighting, finances, and progressive reform. Finally, Taylor also explores the evolution of penal reform, focusing on the politicians who set prison policy, the officials who administered it, and the untold number of African American inmates who endured incarceration in a state notorious for racial strife and injustice. Central Prison approaches the development of the penal system in North Carolina from a myriad of perspectives, offering a range of insights into the workings of the state penitentiary. It will appeal not only to scholars of criminal justice but also to historians searching for new ways to understand the history of the Tar Heel State and general readers wanting to know more about one of North Carolina’s most influential—and infamous—institutions.

Author : James A. Holstein
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 1479868302
Total Pages : 332 pages
Book Rating : 4.08/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Is There Life After Football? written by James A. Holstein and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2016-08-02 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Draws upon the experiences of hundreds of former players as they describe their lives after their football days are over. It also incorporates stories about their playing careers, even before entering the NFL, to provide context for understanding their current situations. The authors begin with an analysis of the 'bubble'-like conditions of privilege that NFL players experience while playing, conditions that often leave players unprepared for the real world once they retire and must manage their own lives. The book also examines the key issues affecting former NFL players in retirement: social isolation, financial concerns, inadequate career planning, psychological challenges, and physical injuries"--Amazon.com.

Author : Jill A. McCorkel
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 0814761488
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Breaking Women written by Jill A. McCorkel and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2013-08-05 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the 1980s, when the War on Drugs kicked into high gear and prison populations soared, the increase in women’s rate of incarceration has steadily outpaced that of men. In Breaking Women, Jill A. McCorkel draws upon four years of on-the-ground research in a major US women’s prison to uncover why tougher drug policies have so greatly affected those incarcerated there, and how the very nature of punishment in women’s detention centers has been deeply altered as a result. Through compelling interviews with prisoners and state personnel, McCorkel reveals that popular so-called “habilitation” drug treatment programs force women to accept a view of themselves as inherently damaged, aberrant addicts in order to secure an earlier release. These programs work to enforce stereotypes of deviancy that ultimately humiliate and degrade the women. The prisoners are left feeling lost and alienated in the end, and many never truly address their addiction as the programs’ organizers may have hoped. A fascinating and yet sobering study, Breaking Women foregrounds the gendered and racialized assumptions behind tough-on-crime policies while offering a vivid account of how the contemporary penal system impacts individual lives. Jill A. McCorkel is Associate Professor of Sociology at Villanova University.

Author : Ikponwosa Ekunwe
Publisher : University of Tampere
ISBN 13 : 9514483499
Total Pages : 953 pages
Book Rating : 4.93/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Global Perspectives on Re-entry written by Ikponwosa Ekunwe and published by University of Tampere. This book was released on 2011 with total page 953 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Global Perspectives on Re-Entry explores the challenges facing ex-prisoners as they attempt to return to society after serving time in prison. The problem of re-entry is of growing interest to academics, correctional professionals and policy makers who are concerned with high rates of incarceration and the increase in the numbers of prisoners caught up in the revolving door of criminal justice. This book is the first attempt to explore the problem of re-entry from an international perspective. The focus of this book is on strategies utilized in various parts of the Western world that shed light on the struggles facing ex-prisoners upon re-entry, as well as on the way different countries have attempted to solve these problems. The book seeks to address the important set of issues involved by bringing together the best of recent research and ideas on the subject of desistance from crime around the world, with a distinct focus on how research might impact upon the implementation of ex-offender reintegration policies. The book is divided into two sections. The chapters in the first part, Societal / Institutional Perspective, consider the societal and institutional issues in different countries. The chapters in the second part of the book, Perspective of the Ex-Offender, present various viewpoints of experts with first-hand accounts of the re-entry experiences of ex-convicts."--Publisher's description.