Access to the Press

This book brings together leading authorities from the fields of international human rights law, criminology, legal medicine, and political science with international human rights judges and UN experts to analyze the current situation of detainees in Europe, the Americas and Africa. This comprehensive volume offers a platform for reflecting on the complexity of the prison problem from a multidisciplinary perspective. The authors address detention-related issues with the aim of generating new ideas that contribute to both academic discussion and critical analysis. Academic dialogue across the globe provides insights into various national and international carceral systems and how they deal with human rights behind bars. At the same time, the critical comparison helps to identify basic needs and practices that can work in multiple settings. The contributors are respected experts and leading scholars in their fields, and each has pursued prison and human rights research over the last decades. However, this is the first time that they have come together in a multidisciplinary academic project. This book aims to stimulate diverse actors to imagine alternative ways of engaging with persons deprived of their liberty, in academia and in practice.

In 1974, women imprisoned at New York’s maximum-security prison at Bedford Hills staged what is known as the August Rebellion. Protesting the brutal beating of a fellow prisoner, the women fought off guards, holding seven of them hostage, and took over sections of the prison. While many have heard of the 1971 Attica prison uprising, the August Rebellion remains relatively unknown even in activist circles. Resistance Behind Bars is determined to challenge and change such oversights. As it examines daily struggles against appalling prison conditions and injustices, Resistance documents both collective organizing and individual resistance among women incarcerated in the U.S. Emphasizing women’s agency in resisting the conditions of their confinement through forming peer education groups, clandestinely arranging ways for children to visit mothers in distant prisons and raising public awareness about their lives, Resistance seeks to spark further discussion and research into the lives of incarcerated women and galvanize much-needed outside support for their struggles. This updated and revised edition of the 2009 PASS Award winning book includes a new chapter about transgender, transsexual, intersex, and gender-variant people in prison.

A piercing portrait of the injustices of the Indian prison system. For decades, the narratives around prisoners in India have perpetuated arbitrary notions of the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ citizen. Stories about Indian prisons rarely make it to public notice – from deplorable living conditions, lack of medical care and legal support to intense mistreatment, violence and all manner of horrific abuse. Despite the mounting evidence, any attempts to study the systemic frailties and chilling injustices that abound within a prison complex have been few and far between. In Hope Behind Bars, editors Sanjoy Hazarika and Madhurima Dhanuka draw upon extensive research, identifying prisoners and ex-prisoners, their families and associates and gathering first-person experiences about the Indian prison system. With ten essays contributed by subject specialists, including a former Supreme Court judge, lawyers, inmates, prison officials and activists, on a range of issues, such as the rights of prisoners, the journey to justice in the controversial Hashimpura killings case and life in a detention centre, this essential collection brings prisoners’ lives and liberties to the heart of public debate and policies, presenting accounts of how hope can flower in the most unlikely places. Searing and thought-provoking, it provides the reader with valuable insight into the vexed idea of incarceration and delivers a necessary human document of the true face of justice behind bars in our country

Life imprisonment has replaced capital punishment as the most common sentence imposed for heinous crimes worldwide. As a consequence, it has become the leading issue in international criminal justice reform. In the first global survey of prisoners serving life terms, Dirk van Zyl Smit and Catherine Appleton argue for a human rights–based reappraisal of this exceptionally harsh punishment. The authors estimate that nearly half a million people face life behind bars, and the number is growing as jurisdictions both abolish death sentences and impose life sentences more freely for crimes that would never have attracted capital punishment. Life Imprisonment explores this trend through systematic data collection and legal analysis, persuasively illustrated by detailed maps, charts, tables, and comprehensive statistical appendices. The central question—can life sentences be just?—is straightforward, but the answer is complicated by the vast range of penal practices that fall under the umbrella of life imprisonment. Van Zyl Smit and Appleton contend that life imprisonment without possibility of parole can never be just. While they have some sympathy for the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights, they conclude that life imprisonment, in many of the ways it is implemented worldwide, infringes on the requirements of justice. They also examine the outliers—states that have no life imprisonment—to highlight the possibility of abolishing life sentences entirely. Life Imprisonment is an incomparable resource for lawyers, lawmakers, criminologists, policy scholars, and penal-reform advocates concerned with balancing justice and public safety.

"[The report] finds that supervision -– probation and parole -– drives high numbers of people, disproportionately those who are Black and brown, right back to jail or prison, while in large part failing to help them get needed services and resources. In states examined in the report, people are often incarcerated for violating the rules of their supervision or for low-level crimes, and receive disproportionate punishment following proceedings that fail to adequately protect their fair trial rights."--Publisher website.

Male prisons can be dangerous places with a climate of distrust, but can long-term prisoners be given the space to reflect and grow ? This ground-breaking study found that engaging prisoners in philosophy education enabled them to think about some of the ‘big’ questions in life and as a result to see themselves and others differently.

From a federal inmate with two decades of continuous confinement comes a controversial expose of the shocking details of life in American prisons

Every day children exiled to prison are exposed to abusive and neglectful treatment, yet their plight is hidden. Based on wide-ranging research and first-person interviews, this passionately argued book presents the shocking truth about the lives and deaths of children in custody. Drawing on human rights legislation and progress in the care and treatment of vulnerable children elsewhere, it outlines the harsh realities of penal child custody including hunger, denial of fresh air, cramped and dirty cells, strip-searching, segregation, the authorised infliction of severe pain, uncivilised conditions for suicidal children and ever-present violence and intimidation. The issues are explored through the lens of protection, not punishment, and the author finds there can be only one conclusion: child prisons must close. Providing a compelling manifesto for urgent and radical change, this book should be read by everyone who cares about child protection and human rights.

In the past 30 years, the population of prisoners in the United States has expanded almost 5-fold, correctional facilities are increasingly overcrowded, and more of the country's disadvantaged populations—racial minorities, women, people with mental illness, and people with communicable diseases such as HIV/AIDS, hepatitis C, and tuberculosis—are under correctional supervision. Because prisoners face restrictions on liberty and autonomy, have limited privacy, and often receive inadequate health care, they require specific protections when involved in research, particularly in today's correctional settings. Given these issues, the Department of Health and Human Services' Office for Human Research Protections commissioned the Institute of Medicine to review the ethical considerations regarding research involving prisoners. The resulting analysis contained in this book, Ethical Considerations for Research Involving Prisoners, emphasizes five broad actions to provide prisoners involved in research with critically important protections: • expand the definition of "prisoner"; • ensure universally and consistently applied standards of protection; • shift from a category-based to a risk-benefit approach to research review; • update the ethical framework to include collaborative responsibility; and • enhance systematic oversight of research involving prisoners.