The author used qualitative data collected in 2005 and 2006 in California to explore how former inmates (men and women) understand and explain prison violence and inmate culture.--Chapter 1.

The US prison industrial complex is in desperate need of repair. Corrections has become big business in America and a young, misguided generation is fueling a system built to fail. More and more kids are hitting the streets and lining up to go behind the razor wire. What is the solution? What if reformed felons could change the future of the next generation? Kit Cummings' bold vision-borne out of twelve years working with more than ten thousand offenders-flips the script on prison reform and disrupts the pipeline from schools to prisons. He replaces the current gang-inspired convict code with one that integrates respect, integrity, and dignity, giving prisoners the freedom to dream big dreams and become positive role models to a young generation at risk. Brothers who have been behind the wire share powerful lessons with our youth, redirecting their path and ending the violence in the streets and in their hearts. The proven success of Kit's Power of Peace Project lays the groundwork for a future with less violence, declining prison populations, and a more sound and just prison system.In 2010, Kit Cummings founded the Power of Peace Project. Using the experience he gained resolving conflict in some of the most dangerous areas in the world, he applies his principles to bring about change in prisons, schools, corporations, and the faith-based community. Kit has worked with the incarcerated in over a hundred prisons, jails, detention centers, and rehab facilities and served over ten thousand prisoners. The New Convict Code brings solutions to the growing epidemic of crime and violence we are witnessing among today's youth.

When most people think of prison gangs, they think of chaotic bands of violent, racist thugs. Few people think of gangs as sophisticated organizations (often with elaborate written constitutions) that regulate the prison black market, adjudicate conflicts, and strategically balance the competing demands of inmates, gang members, and correctional officers. Yet as David Skarbek argues, gangs form to create order among outlaws, producing alternative governance institutions to facilitate illegal activity. He uses economics to explore the secret world of the convict culture, inmate hierarchy, and prison gang politics, and to explain why prison gangs form, how formal institutions affect them, and why they have a powerful influence over crime even beyond prison walls. The ramifications of his findings extend far beyond the seemingly irrational and often tragic society of captives. They also illuminate how social and political order can emerge in conditions where the traditional institutions of governance do not exist.

Incarcerated Interactions: A Theory-Driven Analysis of Applied Prison Communication is an innovative, applied edited book that uses core interdisciplinary social science theories to analyze and describe the social psychology and sociology of communicative interactions amongst incarcerated individuals. Beginning with the fundamentals of human interactions, this edited volume allows scholars across a variety of disciplines (such as criminology, sociology, communication studies, social psychology, anthropology, and economics) to become familiar with and apply the core principles and the requisite terminology of human communication within a criminological context. Each of the four sections of the text not only build upon the knowledge structures of previous chapters, but also function as stand-alone analyses and/or applications of extant scholarship within essential contexts. From a general discussion of core social science theory to the specific application of that theory in a range of scholarly contexts, this book addresses relevant issues such as mental illness and wellness, the gendered experience of inmates, recidivism rates, violence, the criminogenic effect of incarceration and the large-scale implications of prison gangs and their associated cultural influence, to name a few.

Unsparing and important. . . . An informative, clearheaded and sobering book.—Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post (1999 Critic's Choice) Inner-city black America is often stereotyped as a place of random violence, but in fact, violence in the inner city is regulated through an informal but well-known code of the street. This unwritten set of rules—based largely on an individual's ability to command respect—is a powerful and pervasive form of etiquette, governing the way in which people learn to negotiate public spaces. Elijah Anderson's incisive book delineates the code and examines it as a response to the lack of jobs that pay a living wage, to the stigma of race, to rampant drug use, to alienation and lack of hope.

A brilliant work from the most influential philosopher since Sartre. In this indispensable work, a brilliant thinker suggests that such vaunted reforms as the abolition of torture and the emergence of the modern penitentiary have merely shifted the focus of punishment from the prisoner's body to his soul.