The US Department of Justice is under fire for failing to prosecute banks that caused the 2008 economic meltdown because they are too big to jail. Prosecutors have long neglected to hold corporate executives accountable for chronic mistakes that kill and injure workers and customers. This book, the first of its kind, analyzes five industrial catastrophes that have killed or sickened consumers and workers or caused irrevocable harm to the environment. From the Texas City refinery explosion to the Upper Big Branch mine collapse, the root causes of these preventable disasters include crimes of commission and omission. Although federal prosecutors have made a start on holding low-level managers liable, far more aggressive prosecution is appropriate as a matter of law, policy, and justice. Written in accessible and jargon-free language, this book recommends innovative interpretations of existing laws to elevate the prosecution of white-collar crime at the federal and state levels.

This important volume examines how and why increasing numbers of students, disproportionately youth of color, are being taken from our schools and put into our prisons. Williamson and Appleman, along with a collection of scholars, teacher educators, K–12 teachers, administrators, and incarcerated students, offer their perspectives on how schooling can be restructured to disrupt this flow and dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline. They present clearly articulated strategies on curriculum, pedagogy, and disciplinary practices that can help redirect our collective efforts away from carceral practices. By considering chapters from prison educators and currently incarcerated students (the end of the pipeline), readers will plainly see the disciplinary and curricular issues that need to be addressed in our schools. The text includes examples of meaningful ways to engage students that could be incorporated into a variety of classrooms, from social studies to science to English language arts. Book Features: Instructive cautionary tales with specific pedagogical and policy suggestions. Alternatives to discipline in schools, such as restorative justice and positive behavioral support.Insights to help educators consider the trajectory of their students, as well as suggestions for making the curriculum both relevant and sustaining. Directly addresses the ways in which an understanding of the mechanisms of the school-to-prison pipeline can be woven into teacher preparation.

The American criminal justice system is becoming ever more centralized and punitive, owing to rampant federalization and mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines. Go Directly to Jail examines these alarming trends and proposes reforms that could rein in a criminal justice apparatus at war with fairness and common sense.

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.

In It's Jail Not Yale, former prisoner Corey Henderson talks straight about how police, prosecutors, judges and sometimes your own defense attorney collude to entrap and incarcerate. He then gives strategies you can use to avoid self-incrimination, detect and defend against unscrupulous defense attorneys, avoid or minimize your sentence and more. The second half of the book is devoted to emphasizing the rules you must follow to survive prison. Corey Henderson was an industrious middle-class well-educated young man. He owned a profitable business, had a good paying job and had just been accepted to a prestigious doctorate program. Then someone accused him of a crime. He would eventually spend four and a half years in a high security prison. Here he shares on-the-street insights about the legal system and the and the incarceration machine (once you're accused, you lose).

An enlightening and sometimes humorous manual for disenchanted employees explores such issues as power-hungry coworkers, the difference between liking work and enjoying a job, and the best and worst reasons for leaving one job to take another.

"Indefinite is the first major ethnographic study of American jails since the advent of racialized mass incarceration. The author was confined in a southern California county jail system during which time, he conducted what he calls an organic ethnography of jail life. The resulting study is an investigation of the vagaries of jail living, the relationship between custodial deputies and penal residents, the endurance strategies residents employed to protect their emotional selves from being overwhelmed by the nature of jail punishment, and consequences of extremes of vulnerability, uncertainty, and penal time. Indefinite toggles between what is peculiar to jail time and what is familiar in broader social life to develop general concepts, sensitizing schemes, and theories about social life that expand beyond the specifics of jail without reducing jail to a mere case study"--

Lawyer Saul Goodman of Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad offers his own particular brand of funny, down-to-earth legal advice. Got the long arm of the law around your neck? Does Lady Justice have her eye on you? Were you set up at a lineup? Saul Goodman can help! There are some crazy laws out there. Did you know that in New Mexico there’s a law that says “idiots” can’t vote? Or that Massachusetts still has a ban on Quakers and witches? Or that in Georgia it’s illegal to put a donkey in a bathtub? Even if you’re not bathing a donkey (and hey, if you are, no judgment from me!), you could be breaking the law right now and not even know it. That’s why you need Don't Go to Jail! You can carry the advice of a seasoned legal practitioner with you anywhere you go, helping you to stay out of the courts and in the good graces of the criminal justice system. Want to be your own attorney? Want to avoid getting hauled in on a warrant? Want to keep the cops from discovering the baggie of “your friend’s” marijuana stashed under the passenger seat of your car? This is your chance to get those tips and many more savory bits of indispensable legal advice--all for much less than my usual hourly fee.

Prison studies has experienced a period of great creativity in recent years, and this collection draws together some of the field's most exciting and innovative contemporary critical writers in order to engage directly with one of the most profound questions in penology - why prison? In addressing this question, the authors connect contemporary penological thought with an enquiry that has received the attention of some of the greatest thinkers on punishment in the past. Through critical exploration of the theories, policies and practices of imprisonment, the authors analyse why prison persists and why prisoner populations are rapidly rising in many countries. Collectively, the chapters provide not only a sophisticated diagnosis and critique of global hyper-incarceration but also suggest principles and strategies that could be adopted to radically reduce our reliance upon imprisonment.