2004-2005 Maude Hart Lovelace Book Award Master List 2004-2005 Charlie May Simon Children's Book Award Reading List 2004 Maryland Children's Book Award Master List 2003-2004 Sunshine State Young Reader's Award Master List 2004-2005 Volunteer State Book Award Master List 2004-2005 Iowa Children's Choice Award Master List 2005 Sequoyah Children's Book Award Master List 2005 Rebecca Caudill Young Readers' Book Award Master List 2003-2004 Great Stone Face Award Master List 2004-2005 Pennsylvania Young Reader's Choice Award Master List 2005 Sasquatch Reading Award Master List Twelve-year-old Mitchell got involved with the wrong kid this past summer, and the prank they played led to an elderly woman's injury. Now he finds himself at the police station—his "sentence" is to chat online with a nursing home resident twice a week for the next month. Mitch isn't thrilled; what could he and some "old" person possibly talk about? But Mitch’s new online friend has a personality all her own. Her name is Wootie Hayes, and she has plenty to talk about: how she got her name, how much she misses her own home, and how she detests bingo. But she also wants to know about Mitch’s situation. Without expecting it, they help each other face the truth and begin a new friendship in the process.

Bo Lozoff is the director of Human Kindness Foundation and its internationally acclaimed Prison-Ashram Project. His writings, workshops, and tapes have helped countless people transform their lives into sacred practice even in some of our worst prisons -- prisons of selfishness, fear, anger, and addiction as well as bars and steel.

A special collection of the best fiction, essays, poetry, and plays from annual PEN Prison Writing contest offers unique insights into the emotions and thoughts engendered by the prison experience, ranging from humor and empathy to rage, fear, and despair. 15,000 first printing.

"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"--

As banks crashed, belts tightened, and cupboards emptied across the country, American prisons grew fat. Doing Time in the Depression tells the story of the 1930s as seen from the cell blocks and cotton fields of Texas and California prisons, state institutions that held growing numbers of working people from around the country and the world—overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately non-white, and displaced by economic crisis. Ethan Blue paints a vivid portrait of everyday life inside Texas and California’s penal systems. Each element of prison life—from numbing boredom to hard labor, from meager pleasure in popular culture to crushing pain from illness or violence—demonstrated a contest between keepers and the kept. From the moment they arrived to the day they would leave, inmates struggled over the meanings of race and manhood, power and poverty, and of the state itself. In this richly layered account, Blue compellingly argues that punishment in California and Texas played a critical role in producing a distinctive set of class, race, and gender identities in the 1930s, some of which reinforced the social hierarchies and ideologies of New Deal America, and others of which undercut and troubled the established social order. He reveals the underside of the modern state in two very different prison systems, and the making of grim institutions whose power would only grow across the century.

By quadrupling the number of people behind bars in two decades, the United States has become the world leader in incarceration. Much has been written on the men who make up the vast majority of the nation’s two million inmates. But what of the women they leave behind? Doing Time Together vividly details the ways that prisons shape and infiltrate the lives of women with husbands, fiancés, and boyfriends on the inside. Megan Comfort spent years getting to know women visiting men at San Quentin State Prison, observing how their romantic relationships drew them into contact with the penitentiary. Tangling with the prison’s intrusive scrutiny and rigid rules turns these women into “quasi-inmates,” eroding the boundary between home and prison and altering their sense of intimacy, love, and justice. Yet Comfort also finds that with social welfare weakened, prisons are the most powerful public institutions available to women struggling to overcome untreated social ills and sustain relationships with marginalized men. As a result, they express great ambivalence about the prison and the control it exerts over their daily lives. An illuminating analysis of women caught in the shadow of America’s massive prison system, Comfort’s book will be essential for anyone concerned with the consequences of our punitive culture.

With as many as 1 billion people now using online communities such as newsgroups, blogs, forums, social networking sites, podcasting, videocasting, photosharing communities, and virtual worlds, the internet is now an important site for research. This exciting new text is the first to explore the discipline of 'Netnography' - the conduct of ethnography over the internet - a method specifically designed to study cultures and communities online. For the first time, full procedural guidelines for the accurate and ethical conduct of ethnographic research online are set out, with detailed, step-by-step guidance to thoroughly introduce, explain, and illustrate the method to students and researchers. The author also surveys the latest research on online cultures and communities, focusing on the methods used to study them, with examples focusing on the new elements and contingencies of the blogosphere (blogging), microblogging, videocasting, podcasting, social networking sites, virtual worlds and more. This book will be essential reading for researchers and students in social sciences such as anthropology, sociology, marketing and consumer research, organization and management studies and cultural and media studies.

"Doing Time" opens the prison doors to take you on a journey behind the razorwire through the genuine gritty reality of life "Inside". Follow a light-hearted and often hilarious guide as you learn to see and navigate the scenes of incarceration from angles you didn't even know were there. A must-read for those currently "Inside" or with a loved one serving time, true crime fans, and anyone interested in criminal justice.

Vera Toepoel’s practical, how-to guide to doing surveys online takes you through the entire process of using surveys, from systematically recruiting respondents, to designing the internet survey, to processing the survey data and writing it up. This book helps students and researchers in identifying possible strategies to make the best use of online surveys, providing pro’s and con’s, and do’s and don’ts for each strategy. It also explores the latest opportunities and developments that have arisen in the field of online surveys, including using social networks, and provides expert guidance and examples of best practice throughout. Suitable for those starting a research project or conducting a survey in a professional capacity, this book is the ideal go-to reference for anyone using internet surveys, be it a beginner or a more experienced survey researcher.

Celebrate Earth Day with Dr. Seuss and the Lorax in this classic picture book about protecting the environment! I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees. Dr. Seuss’s beloved story teaches kids to speak up and stand up for those who can’t. With a recycling-friendly “Go Green” message, The Lorax allows young readers to experience the beauty of the Truffula Trees and the danger of taking our earth for granted, all in a story that is timely, playful and hopeful. The book’s final pages teach us that just one small seed, or one small child, can make a difference. This book is the perfect gift for Earth Day and for any child—or child at heart—who is interested in recycling, advocacy and the environment, or just loves nature and playing outside. Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.