Prison Reform Research Articles

Soldiering On? The Prison‐Military Complex and Ex‐Military Personnel as Prison Officers: Transition, Rehabilitation and Prison Reform

AbstractArguing that criminology has thus far inadequately theorised militarism as it relates to the prison system, this agenda‐setting article introduces the ‘prison‐military complex’ as a means to initiate examination of militarism in relation to institutions and practices of incarceration. In so doing, it identifies a key knowledge gap vis‐à‐vis the role of ex‐military personnel employed as prison staff; and poses key questions about the ways in which military staff and military methods are being directly targeted as a means to reform a prison service reeling from unprecedented levels of violence, self‐harm, riots, and escapes. Encouraging criminologists to think beyond stereotypical ideas about the military, the article revolves around a multiscalar articulation of the prison‐military complex, discussed here as it relates to reform of the prison system as a whole; the rehabilitation of offenders; and individuals’ ex‐military transitions to civilian life.

Representing Father–Son Relationships among African-American Muslim Men in Film and Television

ABSTRACTAfrican-American Muslims are well-known for their prison reform ministries and initiatives aimed at assisting disenfranchised men and women in inner city communities. In media discourse, the redemption narratives of young African-American Muslim men in these environments have often been stimulated by African-American Muslim leaders who function as highly influential fatherly figures that usually stress an importance of fatherhood in ameliorating juvenile delinquency and hopelessness. While fatherhood is a cherished institution among Muslim families, this analysis focuses on depictions of father-son relationships among African-American Muslim men in film and television. This study examines relationships between Muslim sons and non-Muslim fathers, Muslim fathers and non-Muslim sons, and fathers and sons who both embrace Islam throughout these visual narratives. In exploring these relationships, the article examines the impact of African-American Muslim fathers on their sons’ faith and spiritual development, negotiation of masculinity, management of racism, confrontation of Islamophobia, and maintenance of discipline, social mobility, and life skills.

Cold War carceral liberalism and other counternarratives: the case of Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country

ABSTRACTThis article traces a transnational cultural genealogy of postwar and early Cold War liberalism specifically shaped by prisons. Central to this genealogy is Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country, the South African novel that became a metonym for the tradition of South African political liberalism and liberal anti-apartheid fiction. The novel’s carceral aspects have never been discussed in relation to Paton’s prison reform articles from the same period, or within the framework of carceral studies. Reading the novel alongside Paton’s prison writings highlights the constitutive role of the carceral state – a regime of modern power spread across different sites – in liberal reformist agendas of the 1940s and 1950s. This case study traces Cold War carceral state building on a cultural terrain and provides opportunities to reflect on evolutions of present day “carceral solidarities” – modes of culture and politics mediated by an expanding and globalized carceral state.

Mental health and wellbeing benefits from a prisons horticultural programme

PurposeIn the context of current prison safety and reform, the purpose of this paper is to discuss findings of an impact evaluation of a horticultural programme delivered in 12 prisons in North West England.Design/methodology/approachThe programme was evaluated using quantitative and qualitative methods, including Green Gym© questionnaires, the Warwick Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale (WEMWBS) and Biographic-Narrative Interpretive Method interviews.FindingsAgainst a backdrop of high rates of suicide, self-harm and poor mental health, the horticultural programme studied proved beneficial to prisoner participants, the most marked effect was on mental health and wellbeing. In addition to data related to the original mental health outcome indicators, the study revealed multiple layers of “added value” related to mental health arising from horticultural work in a prison setting.Research limitations/implicationsThe main research limitations were the limited completion of follow-on questionnaires due to prisoners being released and the inability to conduct longitudinal data collection post-release. There was also concern about response bias and lack of resource to compare with the experience of prisoners not participating in the programme.Social implicationsPositive impacts on prisoners’ mental health and wellbeing included increased confidence, social interactions with staff and other prisoners and gaining skills and qualifications and work experience, increasing potential for post-release employment.Originality/valueBenefits of horticulture work on health are well established. However, to date, there is little research concerning the effects this work may have on mental wellbeing of prisoners both within prisons and more so upon their release back into the community.

Philosophical Implications of Taxpayer Funding for Prison Education

This paper attempts to address the question of whether it is fair to use US taxpayer dollars on prison education programs. Through a philosophical inquiry from a pragmatist lens and a feminine ethic of care, issues of fairness are clarified. Following the philosophical inquiry, a historical analysis provides some background on the issue of prison history and reform movements in America. Finally, I conclude by briefly highlighting the main arguments in favor of funding prison education programs with US tax payer dollars.

Pursuing the Horizon of Penal Abolition in Seth Kwame Boateng’s Documentaries

Two recent documentaries by award-winning journalist Seth Kwame Boateng, Locked and Forgotten (2015) and Left to Rot (2016), have played an important role in recent Ghanaian prison reform efforts. This paper identifies the ways these documentaries extend beyond a reformist agenda and move towards a more radical vision of penal abolition. By creating a dialogue between Boateng’s documentaries and the analyses and frameworks of penal abolitionism, this paper calls for a remapping of global abolitionist discourse to include critiques of ‘criminal justice’ that are articulated in diverse geographical, cultural and rhetorical locations.

Redesigning prison: the architecture and ethics of rehabilitation

Since 2011, the authors have been undertaking research-based activity to improve the environment of prisons for the people and communities they serve. Spanning two major projects concluding in 2017, the work has developed an evidence-base and practical proposals for design measures to support health and wellbeing, reduce reoffending and make the state assets of land and buildings more effective in delivering outcomes. Prisons sit within the wider regime of Justice in the UK and as such the organisational and operational context is key to the delivery of change in commissioning and design. A multidisciplinary, collaborative approach has been pursued, via small groups of experts to ensure the work is properly informed. Extensive stakeholder and user engagement have been central to the research, including with prison officers, management and staff, as well as prisoners. The work has significantly contributed to the prison reform agenda, though the architectural outcomes are yet to be realised. The paper argues that for true reform to be effective and sustainable, a reappraisal of the ethics of justice that reconsiders the status of people on custodial sentences is necessary. The current circumstances make such a public debate timely and capable of precipitating the proposed changes.

Just add water: Prisons, therapeutic landscapes and healthy blue space

‘Healthy prisons’ is a well-established concept in criminology and prison studies. As a guiding principle to prisoners’ quality of life, it goes back to the 18th century when prison reformer John Howard regarded the improvement of ventilation and hygiene as being essential in the quest for religious penitence and moral reform. In more recent, times, the notion of the ‘healthy prison’ has been more commonly associated with that which is ‘just’ and ‘decent’, rather than what is healthy in a medical or therapeutic sense. This article interrogates the ‘healthy prison’ more literally. Drawing on data gathered from a UK prison located on a seashore, our aim is to explore prisoners’ rational and visceral responses to water in a setting where the very nature of enforced residence can have negative effects on mental health. In expanding the possibilities for the theorization of the health benefits that waterscapes may generate, and moving the discussion from healthy ‘green space’ to healthy ‘blue space’, the article reveals some of the less well-known and under-researched interconnections between therapeutic and carceral geographies, and criminological studies of imprisonment.

First Step Act Is Start Toward Meaningful Prison Reform

Congress passes the most ambitious criminal justice and sentencing overhaul in decades, addressing some concerns of individuals with mental illness. Advocates hope reforms will trickle down to stat...

Penitentiaries, Punishment, and Military Prisons: Familiar Responses to an Extraordinary Crisis during the American Civil War by Angela M. Zombek

Reviewed by: Penitentiaries, Punishment, and Military Prisons: Familiar Responses to an Extraordinary Crisis during the American Civil War by Angela M. Zombek Sarah Purcell Penitentiaries, Punishment, and Military Prisons: Familiar Responses to an Extraordinary Crisis during the American Civil War. By Angela M. Zombek. ( Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2018. Pp. xxii, 287. $45.00, ISBN 978-1-60635-355-4.) Angela M. Zombek shows the value of fresh periodization and framing in this book on Civil War military prisons. Penitentiaries, Punishment, and Military Prisons: Familiar Responses to an Extraordinary Crisis during the American Civil War puts Civil War military prisons in the context of early republic and antebellum histories of incarceration in the United States, an early starting point that enables Zombek to provide some surprisingly insightful analysis. Zombek also shifts the frame of antebellum and Civil War prison scholarship away from some of the most famous and well-studied cases (other than the prison at Andersonville, Georgia, which is included) to focus on Camp Chase Prison (Ohio), Johnson's Island Prison (Ohio), Old Capitol Prison (Washington, D.C.), Castle Thunder Prison (Virginia), and Salisbury Prison (North Carolina) as well as the penitentiaries that preceded them in those states. Zombek avoids the northeastern United States to shift her analysis away from the well-known narratives of the dominant Pennsylvania and Auburn, New York, prison systems. Zombek uses these shifts to argue the somewhat startling premise that both Union and Confederate "wartime officials relied heavily on antebellum practices to manage thousands of captives. Antebellum assumptions about prison administration, the proper treatment of inmates, inmates' identity, and methods of punishment born in penitentiaries shaped the administration of both Union and Confederate military prisons" (p. x). Zombek finds that wartime prison officials relied on antebellum standards of humane treatment to pattern the punishments they fashioned for prisoners of war, wartime criminals, and civilians suspected of treasonous behavior. She stresses the commonality in goals—punishment—between antebellum penitentiaries and Civil War prisons, and she demonstrates well how continuities in penal theories and practices influenced everything from the Lieber Code to prison architecture. In carefully themed chapters, Zombek demonstrates how antebellum ideas about prisons shaped the experiences and identities of both prison officials and inmates. Chapter 1 charts how military, state, and federal officials (and some prison reformers) debated penal theories in the antebellum period, and chapter 2 examines how those debates influenced the building of penitentiaries in Ohio, Washington, D.C., Virginia, and Georgia before the war. In chapter 3 Zombek argues that both Union and Confederate officials assumed much power from the states in prison administration during the Civil War but continued to follow established antebellum patterns of administration and punishment. Chapter 4 employs creative use of prisoners' writings to argue that prisoners "manipulated [End Page 699] rules and shaped the internal dynamics of prisons," and in the process Zombek uncovers how military prisons shifted prisoners' own identities—often in ways comparable to prewar criminals (p. xix). Chapter 5 examines prisoners' correspondence and visitors to probe the prisons' wider social and political engagement. Even though outsiders were often concerned with prisoners' well-being, chapter 6 demonstrates that they retained a fear of escaped war prisoners, who were stigmatized as criminals. Despite stressing continuity, Zombek does chart some important areas of change. She argues in chapter 7 that the growth of the population of imprisoned women, who "faced an even harsher stigma than men," was one of the most significant changes of the wartime penal system (p. 158). Zombek could have analyzed race more closely but handles gender well. Chapter 8 details state and federal debates about prison reform after military prison closure, and the conclusion examines the failure of those reforms after the war, even as federal power was enhanced by prison control. Zombek's tightly written and argued account will be required reading for anyone interested in the penal system and should appeal to anyone open to seeing Civil War prisons in a new way. Sarah Purcell Grinnell College Copyright © 2019 The Southern Historical Association

Feet of Marble or Feet of Clay? John Howard and the origins of prison reform in Britain, 1773-1790

The publication of John Howard’s The State of the Prisons in England and Wales (1777) has traditionally been considered to mark the starting point of a concerted prison reform movement in Britain. However, for many recent commentators, Howard’s was simply one voice among a choir of critics of the unreformed prisons; and someone, moreover, whose personal failings limited his impact. It is further suggested that other factors – notably the rising prison population, the suspension of transportation and the outbreak of disease – were ultimately more important in explaining the emergence of a campaign for prison reform. Based on a new analysis of Howard’s seminal work and its context, this article will argue that neither recent nor more traditional accounts capture the full significance and impact of the man’s actions and writings in this period, and that the book’s striking combination of exposé and plan of action, of criticism and exhortation, succeeded in transforming the debate on penal questions.

Prison reforms in India: Emerging issues

Prison reforms in India: Emerging issues

Keeping Black Motherhood Out of Prison: Prison Reform and Woman Saving in the Progressive Era

Keeping Black Motherhood Out of Prison: Prison Reform and Woman Saving in the Progressive Era

For the Children? Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State by Erica R. Meiners (review)

Book Review: For the Children? Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State 170 For the Children? Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State Erica R. Meiners (2016) Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 255 pages£19.16 (paperback); ISBN 978 0 8166 9276 7 This is a really important book for childhood and educational researchers. Its central argument concerns how well-intentioned commitments and practices to protect children turn out to perpetuate all kinds of oppressions, especially for women, poor and minoritized populations, including children and youth. The particular focus is what Meiners calls the “carceral state,” drawing on analyses of the “prison-industrial complex.” This designation derives from Foucauldian analyses of disciplinary and regulatory institutions that have come to structure modern societies and which have now acquired intensified coercive force under widespread global neocapitalist conditions of further marketization and securitization. In a sense, this book begins where Foucault’s (1977) Discipline and Punish ends: Meiners unpacks the forces at play that produce what used to be called juvenile delinquency and give rise to the criminalization of children and youth, as well as their families and communities. Biometrics now play an increasing role in tracking and surveying stigmatized groups, while anxieties around security are increasingly migrating from individual bodies to families, neighborhoods, communities, and even states. The key recurring trope that Meiners critically interrogates (especially across the first section of the book) is the so-called “school-to-prison pipeline,” mobilized by various campaigning groups whose strategies to exceptionalize or otherwise account for young people’s problematic trajectories inadvertently re-inscribe normalizations and pathologizations of various characteristics of children and childhood. Drawing on both a comprehensive critical historical review of U.S. policies and practices as well as an impressively wide range of examples, including her own involvements in various community education programs with children and youth in marginal situations, adult education initiatives in prisons, post-prison educational programs and more, Meiners systematically highlights how gendered heteronormativities intersect with classed racializations to render especially AfricanAmerican children, youth and families under greater threat of intervention and incarceration. The book is structured into three substantive sections—Childhoods, School and Prison, and Adulthoods—with a final, more utopian chapter entitled “After and Now.” While children and youth figure explicitly throughout most of the book, once the trope of innocence has been queried (and indeed queered), racialized, gendered and heterosexed normativities are then available to be explored: “New sites of resistance and mobilization are created by unpacking what counts as a child in this political moment and how heterogendered and racialized forms of innocence are reproduced through the use of the child in campaigns” (p. 26). Various other key myths (as in Barthes’ (1972) sense of tropes anchoring assumed constellations of social norms) are shown to be secured by “the artefact of the child” (p. 27) that Book Review: For the Children? Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State 171 have consequences for adults, communities, professional and institutional practices and state policies. Substantive examples are discussed at all levels—history, current policy and provision, and personal practice in specific projects and settings—and include campaigns for public safety, prison reform, and campaigns for and against prison closure, educational provision for prison inmates (both juvenile and adult), and post-prison educational initiatives. On the way, restorative justice programs come in for very critical treatment as merely re-personalizing and thus foreclosing analysis of the structural and institutional conditions that gave rise to these situations. I found the discussion of the school-to-prison pipeline very helpful in unpacking how educational initiatives collude in the perpetuation of social inequalities by limiting the domain of explanation and thus of intervention. Perhaps a particularly graphic but indicative chapter is the penultimate one, concerned with the construction and consequences of acquiring the label of being a sex offender (which, shockingly for this British reader, can arise for young people who engage in consensual sex but who are considered under-age or where certain sexual practices—oral sex, for example—are considered criminal within state legislation). The asymmetries of treatment and trajectory through the criminal justice system according to fateful intersections of age, gender, sexuality and racialization are shown through recent cases...

High rates of language impairment in vulnerable populations: the case for improving cross-sector awareness of Developmental Language Disorder.

High rates of language impairment in vulnerable populations: the case for improving cross-sector awareness of Developmental Language Disorder.

Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years by Nicholas Frankel

Reviewed by: Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years by Nicholas Frankel Nikolai Endres (bio) Nicholas Frankel, Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2017), 384 pages, ISBN 9780674737945, $29.95 Nicholas Frankel’s Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years focuses on Wilde’s prison years (1895–97) and his exile (1897–1900), tracing “Wilde’s euphoric enjoyment of his new freedom in the days immediately after his release, as well as the disappointment and dejection that followed as Wilde came to realize that exile as Britain’s most notorious sex offender meant public insults, long bouts of isolation, loss of livelihood, and eventually a withering of his health and creative faculties” (9). Frankel describes Wilde’s solitary confinement (which devastated Wilde, since no one needed an audience more than the witty entertainer) and aggravated hard labor. Wilde would have had to ascend about 8,640 feet on the treadmill every day—like climbing Chicago’s Sears Tower six times or stepping up the Eiffel Tower ten times. As a result, he quickly broke down. Not until he was granted an allowance of books (by Saint Augustine, Dante, Blaise Pascal, Cardinal Newman, or the Roman historian Theodor Mommsen) and paper did his situation improve. After his release, most people commented on how Wilde looked better, healthier, younger (he had lost weight). Wilde initially developed a routine of bathing in the sea, attending mass, and agitating for prison reform, which helped pass the 1898 Prisons Act, an occasion during which “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” was quoted twice in the Houses of Parliament. More incredibly, Wilde enthusiastically celebrated the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria (in whose name he had been condemned), treating local youths (all male) to strawberries and cream and “God Save the Queen.” Immediately afterwards, people started to gossip why the female sex had not been invited, and the parties ended. Concerning Wilde’s relationship with Bosie, Frankel attempts to redeem the maligned aristocrat. First of all, in prosecuting the Marquess of Queensberry, Wilde knew what he [End Page 206] was doing, and he also knew the stakes of reconnecting with his lover after Reading Gaol. In this context, Frankel explodes the myth that the authorities had been dragging their feet after Wilde lost his first trial, giving him valuable hours to escape to the Continent. Next, although De Profundis damaged Bosie’s reputation to posterity, Wilde never mailed that vituperative letter, which might have been useful as therapy but was dismissed after Wilde’s sentence. Frankel quotes a very different letter from Holloway Prison: “If one day, at Corfu, or in some enchanted isle, there were a little house where we could live together, oh! life would be sweeter it has ever been” (131). This idyll materialized in Villa Giudice at Posillipo, Greek for “a place where unhappiness comes to an end,” in the Bay of Naples, where Wilde reunited with the love of his life. Frankel adds that the two lived there in style, employing a cook, a maid, and two boy servants, and it was there, in Douglas’ company, that Wilde completed “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” Bosie, flush with the inheritance from his loathed father, also continued to support Wilde until the very end, spending today’s equivalent of about $50,000 in 1900 alone. Instead, Frankel, following other biographers, faults Wilde’s estranged wife Constance for listening to her lawyers rather than her heart in refusing to let Wilde see his sons. Both Cyril and Vyvyan became orphans when their mother and father passed away within a couple of years, and both were kept in the dark about the whereabouts and death of their father. And since in married life three is company and two is none, Frankel turns to Robbie Ross, Wilde’s faithful friend and Bosie’s implacable rival. Ross controlled Wilde’s purse strings, hoped to normalize—that is, heterosexualize—Wilde’s social standing, and successfully promoted the “nakedly self-obsessed” Bosie perpetuated in so many books, plays, and films about Wilde (15). Frankel then moves on to the Paris of Wilde’s last years, which boasted over 100 commercial venues for people of Wilde’s sexual orientation, including cafes, bars, hotels...

Reform, Resistance and Managerial Clawback: The Evolution of ‘Reform Prisons’ in England

AbstractAbstract: In late modernity, prison policy and practice have been characterised as being structured by punitiveness and managerialism. Recent research on prison reform has focused on the pervasiveness of punitiveness, but the resilience of managerialism is equally important in understanding contemporary penality. The creation of ‘reform prisons’ in England, offered an attempt to reimagine managerialism, where prison managers would act with greater autonomy, freed up from centralised policy prescription and monitoring of compliance. The article explores how this reform developed in practice. Particular attention is paid to the retreat from the original intentions and the emergence of a counter‐reformation, reasserting the centralised, managerial hegemony. It is concluded that while attention has been paid to punitiveness, the existence of a carceral habitus, and the process of carceral clawback, managerialism also plays a central role in shaping contemporary penality, and it is important to draw attention to a managerial habitus and managerial clawback.

Unpacking Prison Reform in the Former Soviet Union

Introduction This special issue is dedicated to the issue of the evolution of punishment in the former Soviet Union (fSU). This is a particularly timely topic. Carceral institutions, whether investigation isolators, remand prisons, prison colonies or resettlement centres, play a hugely important role in the political and social dynamics of former Soviet countries. In Tajikistan in the last year, prison breaks, riots and suspicious deaths in custody have threatened to completely destabilise ...

Prison Reform: The Cost of Prison for Inmates, Families, and Society

Prison Reform is front-and-center in America today. The cost of prison is higher than ever - but not just in economic terms. More and more Americans are being incarcerated every day when there are so many other options that could take its place. The cost of prison is taking its toll on the quality of the family unit, the quality of society, and on the quality of the perceived self-worth of the individual incarcerated. Most incarcerated Americans are forgotten and unloved. They are treated, many times, worse than animals. Extensive sentencing and unnecessary incarceration for first-time, non-violent offenders must stop. Please join me in the fight to change policy in America’s prison system by sharing this with your Senators, Congressman, or any others who may appreciate it, may benefit from it, or who can otherwise help instigate change.

Newsworthiness of reform: prison news stories in an era of change

ABSTRACTMedia representations of prison have been cited as a source of information for those who do not have personal experience with these institutions. While found in various facets of the media, the news media can offer immediate information about prison-related issues. Traditionally, news coverage of prison has featured negative stories about escaped inmates, riots, and abusive guards, and their messages have served to justify get tough policies. Combined these types of news stories have contributed to penal populism. In recent years, efforts aimed at fixing the damage done by the imprisonment binge have become prevalent. What is not known is how the news media are covering these reform efforts. This study examines prison news articles published in The New York Times during 2015 to determine if and how prison reform efforts are being covered. While traditional prison news stories are still being published, prison reform was newsworthy. Readers were exposed to bipartisan arguments supporting prison reform, while simultaneously receiving messages that these changes would not apply to violent offenders.