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Private prison staff are a valuable resource, and they can be affected by various workplace variables. The effects of organizational justice on counterproductive staff behaviors in a sample of correctional staff at a private prison were examined using organizational-justice theory. Specifically, the association of distributive and procedural justice with turnover intent, sick-leave views, and absenteeism were tested while controlling for demographic characteristics (position, gender, age, tenure, and race/ethnicity). OLS regression models show that procedural justice was the strongest predictor and was negatively associated with all three measures of counterproductive behaviors; distributive justice was only predictive of turnover intent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects on the process of undertaking qualitative research with incarcerated individuals and prison staff in selected Ghana prisons. The challenges encountered during the planning, approval, and fieldwork stages, as well as measures adopted to address these challenges, have been discussed. The paper aims to serve as a guide to novel prison researchers in the sub-Saharan African context, given that the majority of studies on challenges and approaches to conducting prison research have come from jurisdictions outside the region. To this end, given the unique nature of the prison governance system in Ghana and other sub-Saharan African countries, this paper contributes to filling a knowledge gap in qualitative prison research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Africa has two fully privatised prisons, each housing some 3,000 prisoners. Their history has been mired in controversy from the start, and this has not improved over a period of nearly 25 years. Recent events affecting the security and integrity of the two facilities provide a useful opportunity to reflect on these private prisons as well as wider issues regarding private sector involvement in the prison system. The intersection of politics, organised labour, private sector interests, and corruption have in all likelihood rung the death knell for private prisons in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The efforts of the Mexican authorities to defeat insecurity, violence, and crime have not been successful. It seems that the prison system plays a major role in this. Delinquent violence forces us to look for different options and conditions. Proposals that emanated from the humanist psychoanalysis promoted by Erich Fromm, who lived in Mexico for over 20 years from the late 1950s to the mid 1970s, are therapeutic resources and paths of analysis. These allow us to identify both the productive and the creative aspects of the individual personality propelling the person to their social integration. The aim is to guide individuals toward a biophilic character and to the construction of a fair society provided with hope and liberty. The mission of the Instituto Mexicano de Psicoanálisis (IMPAC; Mexican Institute of Psychoanalysis), founded in Mexico City in 1963 by Erich Fromm, is to: spread Fromm's intellectual legacy through psychoanalytic training; pay specialized attention to persons in need of psychotherapies and analytic psychotherapies; disseminate Fromm's thoughts by publishing them; undertake professional research; plus, recently, collaborate with federal agencies for justice procurement and human rights defense. This has made it possible to convince us of the appropriateness, validity, and efficacy of humanist psychoanalysis to approach and become involved in benefiting Mexican society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractLittle is known with regard to due process and forensic assessment capacities in Africa, where over one million are deprived of their liberty on any given day. A rapid situation assessment explored multi-stakeholder perspectives regarding the situation of people with a mental illness in the Malawi prison system. In-depth interviews were conducted with 10 regional professional stakeholders, 18 former prisoners, and five prison staff from two maximum-security prisons. Reflexive thematic analysis yielded five themes; occurrence of mental illness among people living in prison; prison environment exacerbating harm and levels of mental illness; security responses to the presence of psychiatric disorders; availability and coverage of specialist psychiatric and psychological care; and diversion, other non-custodial measures and continuity of care on release. Narratives highlight the substantial causal impact of the prison environment in amplifying existing and new mental illness, vulnerability and exploitation of people with a mental disorder. Malawi prisons are hampered by lack of specialist forensic capacity nationally; centralized mental health surveillance system; and insufficient skilled staff to conduct evidence-based screening and care. Security operations implement the use of pharmacological and physical restraint measures at times. Faith-based organizations play an important role in providing psychological and spiritual support. Release and reintegration require family involvement. A cross departmental intersectoral partnership response spanning government ministries, key civil society organizations, the Malawi Prison Inspectorate and Malawi Human Rights Commission is warranted. Recommendations include alleviation of prison congestion, prison staff capacity building and investment in forensic mental health services with adequate geographic coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there is a growing literature investigating the causes and consequences of the US prison boom—the tripling of prison facilities between 1970 and 2000—much less is known about current patterns of prison closures. We use novel data capturing the universe of prison closures (N = 188) from 2000 to 2022 to identify and characterize what we term "the prison bust"—the period since 2000 when prison closures began to climb and eventually eclipse new prison building. We show that the prison bust is, in part, a consequence of development-oriented prison-building policies that aggressively used prisons to stimulate struggling local economies. The bust is primarily concentrated in the counties that pursued prison building most aggressively, reflecting a highly cyclical and reactionary pattern of prison placement and closure. We also show that, relative to counties with at least one prison but no closures, closures are concentrated in metro counties with stronger local economies and multiple prisons. Overall, we highlight the prison bust as an important new era in the history of US punishment and provide a new dataset for investigating its causes and consequences. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and policy implications of these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, university archives have initiated efforts to document mass incarceration in the United States. As they engage in this work, it is important to examine how archivists are responding to the ethical challenges presented by collecting and stewarding records related to incarceration. This article addresses that need by reporting on the findings of qualitative interviews with archivists working at academic repositories with major collections focused on incarceration. This study's focus on university archives reflects their prominence in undertaking such work, which is likely to continue given these insti tutions' comparative autonomy and access to resources. Evaluating this work is urgent because of the vulnerable position of those most impacted by the prison system. Three major themes emerged from the interview data collected in this research: (1) financial and intellectual resources available at universities to support incarceration-related archiving; (2) the university context can provoke ethical anxiety for archivists working with incarceration-related collections; and (3) obtaining meaningful consent is a particularly difficult challenge for archives that steward incarceration materials. Placing these findings within the context of the academy's carceral entanglements and in dialogue with critical prison studies and critical archival studies scholarship, I argue that ethical incarceration archiving demands a liberatory approach. This approach begins by asking if and how incarceration archiving can help get people free. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-uniform staff help create prison social climate by providing services that include educational and vocational classes, mental health counseling, employment and reentry preparedness, and family-strengthening activities. The present study examines how non-uniform correctional staff perceive their association with successful delivery of rehabilitative services in correctional settings. After accompanying hundreds of non-uniform prison staff throughout their daily professional routines and conducting interviews with them in institutions supervised by eight different U.S. state prison systems, a threefold typology of approaches to successfully delivering rehabilitative services in prison was identified: holistic, pragmatic, and community-oriented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, a growing number of scholars have explored the effect of prison visitation on individuals' post-release behavior. Findings from this work generally indicate a link between in-prison visits and reductions in recidivism. Yet whether the effect of visitation on recidivism operates similarly across race and ethnicity remains largely unexplored. In the current investigation, we draw on data from the Florida prison system, to examine associations between visitation and recidivism, including whether the effect of visitation is similar across race and ethnic groups. Our findings contribute to research and theorizing on prison visitation by further unpacking the visitation-recidivism link. We conclude by discussing the broader policy implications of our findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rate at which women experience incarceration has increased substantially over the last four decades. Justice-involved women are often the primary caretakers of children and suffer more often from mental health, substance use, and other issues at higher rates than justice-involved males. Previous research has noted the need for gender-responsive programming, but less research has explored women inmate perceptions of the programming within women correctional facilities. This qualitative study examined 545 incarcerated women across multiple institutions in a large Southern prison system. We asked incarcerated women about their perceptions of accessibility, needs, benefits, and problems in correctional programming. Findings indicate that women's programming may still not adequately address gender-based needs. Additionally, women among the sample identified several programming-related issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay discusses about the Brazilian prison system model and its nuances of annulment, silencing and destruction of the subjects' identity. The authors present the prison system, providing a critical history, since its emergence and how the prison has not fulfilled its objective of resocializing citizens. On the contrary, prison has served to brutalize and strengthen itself as a "prodution" for criminals and delinquents, more marginalized than when they were sent to prison. Problems presented here are the processes of mutilation of the personality and identity of the subjects, the construction of a new prison identity that only serves the prison environment, the hierarchical relationship within the prison, with its codes of honor and conduct, the ways of life, its tensions and ambivalences, subjection to routine and welcoming rituals that demonstrate what life will be like in the new social environment. Survival strategies, which will be more important than the search for freedom, establish relationships between incarcerated subjects, which produces a way of life and subjectivity analyzed in the text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior work on extended restrictive housing (ERH) has focused primarily on incarcerated persons rather than on potential impacts of this housing on personnel. Drawing on scholarship on the get-tough era, prison personnel, and ERH, we seek to shed light on contemporary correctional management practices and how doing so can illuminate the broad-ranging impacts of the get-tough era. We hypothesize that operational and organizational stressors differ for ERH personnel and may contribute to greater stress and adversely affect their mental and physical health. After presenting analyses from a mixed-methods study of Florida prisons, we discuss implications of the results for research and policy. We conclude that the get-tough era has led to harms, such as negative effects for personnel, that extend beyond those who are punished to those who play a role in systems of punishment and that have implications for understanding and addressing prison system safety and order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Francoism's repression of its civilian population was based on a massified prison system and parallel system of punitive parole. At their core were religious personnel who fulfilled key disciplinary functions for the new state. By the latter stages of the civil war (1936–1939), church and lay Catholic personnel had already produced the legal justifications to underpin the repression. They blended older quasi-theocratic and anti-egalitarian philosophy to meet the disciplinary needs of the new moment where a politically mobilized society was challenging older forms of traditional order and hierarchy (before and during the war). This church–state symbiosis in Spain was already explicit by the early-twentieth century. After World War Two, as before it, Franco's 'National-Catholic' dictatorship deployed religious personnel speaking an antiquated language of 're-Christianization' and 'religious conversion' to impose a modern, state disciplinary project – i.e., the sculpting and close surveillance of its population. Given the Church's full participation in this 'divine totalitarianism', it was paradoxical that by the time of Cold War ascendancy in the mid-1950s, it would be the same Church providing an alibi for Franco's state – in which judicial and penal systems remained militarized, and the everyday lives of its population closely controlled – to reassure Western interlocutors, who were themselves mostly socially conservative and/or Christian-Democratic, of Francoism's 'non-totalitarian' nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes Francoism through its prison system – from the mass incarcerations of the 1940s (deployed as an instrument of overt political repression) to the gaols of the 1960s developmentalist dictatorship, by which time the majority of prisoners were not activists but the 'ballast'/'excess' of high-speed industrialization/urbanization undertaken without any welfare safety net. The article discusses how the dictatorship conceived of the different groups it incarcerated, how it tried to manage them by 'divide and rule' and to what purpose. It explores prisoners' counterstrategies and the paradox of 'the political' in a Francoist prison system which never used the term, yet saw each and every inmate as posing a threat to the dictatorship's ideology of 'social peace' (i.e., societal stasis). The article charts a prison transition by the early 1970s, from totalitarian to emerging neoliberal model, the latter still designed to 'contain' but no longer to 'sculpt' its inmates. Notwithstanding this key change, the article highlights core continuities in the prison system across forty years of Francoism: militarized discipline, rule by secret decree, 'divide and rule' strategies, and institutionalized abuse that was endemic and structural. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the chronology of change in the Spanish prison system, especially during the transition from the Francoist dictatorship (1975–1982). It indicates how the incarcerated population had come to reflect Francoism's management of social change (including via an increasing use of preventive detention). By the early 1970s, political activists represented a minority of those incarcerated, although a minority that had grown steadily again from the late 1960s. The article discusses relations between the different groups of inmate, the rapidly-deteriorating conditions inside the gaols, and the emergence in the early transition period (1976) of prison protests (COPEL) led by common prisoners whose main objective was inclusion in the gaol amnesty then being proposed as part of the exit strategy from dictatorship. The article analyzes the reactive rather than proactive response to COPEL of Spain's transitional governments, composed of reformist Francoists, and the eventual outcome in a prison reform law in 1979. The article assesses the law's limited practical effect inside the gaols, because of severe budgetary restrictions combined with Spain's rising prison population – the latter mirroring developments across Western democracies generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 16 April 2013, the Assad regime's Military Intelligence Branch 227 committed a massacre of over 300 civilians (including women and children) in Damascus, by driving them to a secluded part of Tadamon neighborhood, taking them to a pre-dug pit, and executing them one by one. The perpetrators videotaped the entire massacre, footage that was never intended to be circulated, but a source close to the perpetrators leaked the video to us. Having analyzed the video content, managed to find the main shooter on Facebook and then interview him, and having found contextual information and evidence for this massacre, one of the questions that still need to be addressed was: How can we unravel, examine, and systemize these types of violent video produced by the Assad regime? Much like the Caesar photos, the prison CCTV system, and the Mukhabarat archives, the phenomenon of perpetrators producing and archiving very violent images like the Tadamon massacre demonstrates how and why the Assad regime has become the chief archivist of its own violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary American corrections, extended solitary confinement (ESM) as a management tool has emerged as a strategy for avowedly controlling the most violent individuals and, in so doing, creating a safer prison system. We theorize that the emergence of this unique form of housing may also be viewed as a signal of prison system failure. To advance this argument, we identify how different theoretical perspectives can be used to anticipate the effects of ESM on prison system violence and order and then investigate the plausibility of this account by grounding it in analysis of qualitative data from a study of one state's prison system. The analysis suggests theoretical and empirical warrant for both views of ESM—as an effective tool and as a symptom of system failure. Implications of the study research and policy are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sentinel event review systems were created to prevent catastrophes from occurring in complex human organizations, though they have yet to be fully realized in corrections. Sentinel event reviews may be particularly salient for incarcerated people who engage in dual harming behaviors (i.e., self-harm and violence) given their overrepresentation in disciplinary incidents. To explore this potential, incident reports spanning a three-year period for an entire state prison system were examined. Our specific objectives were to assess the prevalence of institutional incidents committed by people who dual harm, and to identify their unique characteristics. Quantitative estimations indicated how dual harmers, in comparison to other incarcerated population members, were responsible for a higher proportion of disciplinary incidents. Further analyses indicated how people who dual harm were disproportionately more at-risk for mental health issues, and more likely to be housed in maximum-security facilities. Policy implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study is an investigation into two experiences related to deprivation of liberty, developed at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, that consists of an extension program and a research project on sentence remission through reading. In this investigation, we aim to understand how research and extension complement each other in the training of undergraduate students. To achieve this, we draw from our experiences as research or extension students through an autobiographical approach and develop our narratives on the educational dimension, in which we are immersed as students of Pedagogy and Social Sciences. Initial results indicate the importance of the dialogue between extension and research, as we perceive in our experiences that both are in a dialogical relationship. Research contributes to mapping data, laws, theoretical frameworks to be used, and the practices that are developed. Extension, from the perspective of popular education, can promote dialogues of different knowledge, exchanges of proposals for action, and social intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1769 and 1789, the warden of the prison workhouse at Christianshavn wrote around 300 statements to accompany petitions made for inmates' release. Drawing on the theories of Arlie Russell Hochschild, this article argues that the statements detail the feeling rules of the prison workhouse and provide evidence that the inmates 'worked the system' by performing emotional labour in accordance with said feeling rules. Thus, the article uncovers and connects practices and tactics of coercion and autonomy in the prison workhouse, examining how inmates navigated the authorities' expectations as a tactic of escape from imprisonment and labour coercion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I adopt the following hypothesis: the prison system in Poland of 1944–1956 was the effect of an imposed legal framework and administrative regulations that demoralized and destroyed the personal value system of the prison staff. I study the behavior of wardens in a situation of constant pressure and ideological control. I ask who were the people who created the prison system in Poland and how the penal system absorbed and shaped them. I use documents from the collection of the Prison Management Department of the Ministry of Public Security and the Central Prison Administration of the Ministry of Interior. I confront the emerging picture of attitudes and behaviors of prison officers with behavioral models developed by Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo based on their experiments conducted in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. In the first section, I present the legal and organizational issues of the prison system and the recruitment process for its employees. Next, I present the scope of professional and ideological formation of new staff and analyze the consequences of such preparation for the functions of a prison officer. In the following paragraphs, I reflect on what strategies of discomfort repression did the officers in Stalinist penal institutions assume. Moreover, I consider the scope and sources of their violence toward prisoners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2011, the Department of Corrections/Ara Poutama Aotearoa (Corrections) began a series of initiatives aimed at reducing reoffending, including introducing case management. In 2016 Corrections stated that case management had led to improvements in four areas: the assessment of prisoner needs; prisoner motivation to complete activities; scheduling of programmes; and levels of reintegration support. Using in-depth qualitative interviews of seven men formerly in prison in Aotearoa New Zealand, this study explores the perceptions that the formerly imprisoned have of case management, and examines the four improvements identified by Corrections. While based on a small and unique sample group, the study provides interesting indicative insights into case management in the prisons of Aotearoa New Zealand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reflects on the role of education and artistic workshops in the Mexican prison system. From two experiences of collaborative experimentation with people deprived of liberty in two prisons in Mexico City. Starting from the performance of the "workshop worker without a workshop" it was proposed to experiment with the form of the artistic workshop, emptying it of its disciplinary and pedagogical framework, trying to bring it to a situation where the workshop could be not a workshop. We will give an account of the methodological design of the neverland workshop based on performance, as well as its ethical implications based on the exhibition of two specific experiences: Life Does Not Decide Alone (2014) and Rethinking the Penal State (2018). We conclude with a reflection on the characteristics of the situational "okupation" of the cultural workshop, concluding that it is due to the intervention of temporality and not so much with the intervention of the penitentiary space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The expansion of immigration detention in the United States has been attributed to policy, privatization, and anti-immigrant racialization. This research extends understandings of immigration detention's growth by focusing on how Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) maintains the necessary space to detain migrants during this expansion. In this article, I introduce the concept of "malleable detention:" the flexible strategies and methods used to restructure space within immigration detention. I base this concept on findings from an analysis of the T. Don Hutto Detention Center - a detention site that has remained open despite various abuses, protests, and closures. Using statements from ICE officials, intergovernmental service agreements (IGSAs) between ICE and local governments, government reports, nongovernmental reports, and newspaper accounts, I find that the Hutto site displayed three forms of malleable detention. Detention was made malleable through repurposing non-detention space into detention space, maintaining flexibility in the detained populations, and reconfiguring contracts that helped keep detention open. Beyond the Hutto case, the malleable detention concept extends to detention sites throughout the U.S. This provides evidence into how ICE is able to sustain enough detention space that makes the U.S. the largest detainer of immigrants in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reveals the functionality of the entrepreneurial ideology present in the political formulation of access to work in prison. It is understood that this type of work also suffers the impacts of the new morphology of work. It is argued that mass incarceration is a result of the penal state. It also considers that access to penal labor policies in prison is constituted by contradictions and expropriations of a neoliberal nature. The study concludes that access minimizes the life of the individual deprived of liberty and hides the expropriations that interest capital, thus evidencing the neoliberal logic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The opioid crisis is a significant public health issue in North America that began in the 1990s with opioid-related deaths increasing each year. Although studies have been published regarding the incidence of opioid-related deaths in the general population, there is limited information regarding deaths in the prison population. To investigate the impact of the opioid epidemic in this vulnerable population, a retrospective study of all drug-related deaths that occurred in correctional facilities and penitentiaries in Ontario, Canada, between January 2009 and December 2019 was conducted. A total of 90 deaths were attributed to acute drug toxicity and the decedents ranged in age from 18 to 63 years and comprised 81 men and 9 women. The results of this study indicate the number of drug-related fatalities have increased by 375% (from 4 to 19) over the last 11 years. The detection of opioids in drug-related deaths has increased with fentanyl being the most frequently detected drug. Data also indicates the recent emergence of fentanyl-related analogues in this population. The results from this study provide valuable information about drug-related deaths in the Ontario prison system and provide insight into how the opioid crisis and the increased use of fentanyl and its analogues have affected this vulnerable population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects on and acknowledges current issues within the U.S. prison system and discusses the feasibility of solutions that can be implemented to reduce the rate at which individuals reoffend, often referred to as the recidivism rate. While other countries are working to increase normalcy in prisons and decrease sentence lengths, the U.S. builds maximum security facilities and sentences individuals to an extraordinary amount of time. Although the U.S.' approach is outdated, many people have been working to improve the system and reduce the recidivism rate. The U.S. will be compared to other countries to show key differences that correlate to the U.S.' increased incarcerated population and recidivism. Multiple implementation ideas, such as post-secondary education, will be offered to show ways that the U.S. can reduce the recidivism rate and the number of individuals behind prison walls. In no way should this paper be taken as slander towards current policy makers, police officers, or correctional officers. The purpose of this paper is to look at some major issues and discuss solutions in the big picture. It is not being used to point out flaws of individuals. At the end of this paper, ideas of implementation will be discussed to show how change in the U.S. is possible. Change does not have to be big or take place inside of prison walls to be effective. Implementation of a new approach is necessary in the U.S. to reduce recidivism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review article is dedicated, in the introduction, to describe the problems identified by the author regarding the prison system, as well as to determine its objectives. Then, it is exposed that the penal system, and not only its prison environment, has been wasting, for many years, the possibility that the custodial sentence fulfills its resocializing purpose. Subsequently, it explains what privatizing prison administration implies and what are the advantages and disadvantages of doing so. The Peruvian experience of productive prisons promoted since 2017 is described below. Finally, the main conclusions that have been reached as a result of the investigation are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identity-driven theories of desistance provide a useful model for understanding change in a carceral context. However, these theories often are not grounded in specific programmes or practices that might catalyze identity shift, and tend to focus narrowly on recidivism as the sole outcome of interest. In this study, we examine the role of prison higher education in identity-driven change through the process of transformative learning. Using administrative information on college-level course completion and an original longitudinal survey of prison college students, we show evidence of both between- and within-subjects shifts in individuals' sense of self-efficacy, as well as their broader civic orientation. We further explore the role of identity using a survey experiment that randomly assigns individuals to a "student" versus "prisoner" identity label. We find that identity labelling has significant effects on both confidence in accomplishing one's goals and perceived likelihood of recidivism. We supplement these quantitative findings with qualitative interviews of prison college alumni. Our study suggests that access to higher education can be consequential for those in prison, and provides a broader framework through which to analyze the effects of prison programming that extends beyond recidivism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The principle of normalisation has gained more prominence in international prison law, with both the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules (UN SMR) and the European Prison Rules (EPR) promoting normalisation to the guiding principles. In general terms, normalisation refers to shaping life in prison in resemblance to life outside prison. However, it largely remains unclear what this principle entails for prison policy. The general formulation in the UN SMR and EPR leave much discretionary room to national prison authorities. By conducting a (comparative) policy analysis, this article aims to uncover the normative standards derived from the UN SMR and EPR and how the principle translates into national laws and policies of Norway and the Netherlands. The analysis shows that although the main provision is generally formulated, some detailed norms are provided in other provisions on how elements of life in prison should be shaped, including limits and restrictions. In Norway and the Netherlands, normalisation is not explicitly mentioned in law, but is (to a varied extent) incorporated in policy. It is shown that, in practice, normalisation is closely tied to reintegration, which has important implications for the principle itself and the norms that are taken as point of reference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last two decades, a body of critical scholarship has emerged accentuating the social and cultural importance of food in prison. This article employs a tripartite conceptual framework for contemplating and demarcating food's different valuations in prison. We draw from our interviews with over 500 incarcerated individuals to demonstrate how acquiring, trading, and preparing food is inscribed with use, exchange, and sign values. In doing so, we provide illustrative examples of how food informs processes of stratification, distinction, and violence in prison. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most incarceration settings around the world are governed by strong cisnormative policies, architectures, and social expectations that segregate according to a person's legal gender (i.e. male or female). This paper draws on the lived experiences of 24 formerly incarcerated trans women in Australia and the U.S. to elucidate the way in which the prison functions according to Lucas Crawford's theory of trans architecture, alongside Jacques Derrida's notion of archive fever. The paper displays how the cisnormative archive of the justice system and its architectural constructs impact trans women in men's incarceration settings, including how trans women entering the incarceration setting are able to embody gender in a way that is not reified by the insistences of those normative structures. In light of this, this paper advances a theoretical understanding of the prison as an archive and as an architectural construct, providing a new means of understanding how incarcerated trans persons may use and perform gender to survive carceral violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Penal order is closely linked to the broader social order in China and the disciplinary side of its maintenance. This article seeks to demonstrate, through the case of performance making, what order means to the Chinese prison authority, and how prisoners comply with and sometimes defy the system based upon various motivations. Using data from an ethnographic study on performance making in a men's prison during 2015–2018, this study aims to understand how an 'exemplary order' is maintained, and what kinds of compliance and resistance can be found. The findings suggest that "theatre in prisons" is not a Western invention to be borrowed, but a long-established institutional mechanism of order mainetence in China, as participation in prison's activities represents compliance with the regime order. However, compliance is also utilized by the prisoners not only for hedonistic gains but also for gaining social capital, which can have a strong positive influence on their quality of life inside and earlier release. This study will also demonstrate how the Chinese penal order maintenance shares similirities with modes of soft power found in British prisons, as well prisoner-officer collaboration found in other Global South countries, with a twist [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The identification and treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in carceral settings remain a fundamental concern for practitioners, policy-makers, and incarcerated persons (IPs) alike. In recent years, PTSD assessment tools designed for the general population have been adopted for use in prisons upon intake, sometimes side-by-side with other assessment tools. This study attempts to provide insight into how these tools are used for a majority of IPs within the United States. Based on results from six U.S. states and the federal prison system, we find that PTSD assessment would benefit from newer tools designed for the specific challenges in the prison environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Punishment as a social institution has failed to live up to the quixotic ideals of theory and has descended into the practice of mass incarceration, which is one of the defining failures of modern times. Scholars have traditionally studied punishment and incarceration as parts of a social transaction between the criminal offender, whose crime imposes a cost to society, and the state that ensures the offender repays this debt by correcting past harms and preventing future offenses. But if crime has a cost that must be repaid by the offender, punishment also has a cost that must be repaid by the state. These social costs of punishment start by impacting the offender but inevitably ripple out into the community. While the costs of crime remain a predominant theme in criminal justice, scholars have also recorded the economic, political, and social costs of punishment. This Article contributes to this literature by proposing a paradigm shift in punishment theory that reconceptualizes punishment as an industry that produces negative externalities. The externality framework recognizes punishment and its practice of mass incarceration as an institution that purports to provide certain benefits, but also must be balanced with the overwhelming social costs it produces in the community. Viewing punishment and the carceral state as an externality problem that accounts for community costs creates a unique synergy between law and economics and communitarianism that deepens punishment theory while carrying the practical value of exploring externality-based solutions. This Article argues for a Pigouvian prison tax, among other externality solutions, that will gradually lower the prison population while reinvesting revenue in the most impacted communities to mitigate punishment’s social costs in future generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on ethnographic research and document analysis, the article analyzes the implementation of electronic monitoring of offenders in Maranhão during the years following the massacres at the Pedrinhas Penitentiary Complex. Statistical data on the growth of the Maranhão prison population and the development of monitoring programs between 2014 and 2018 are also mobilized. The text recovers Chico de Oliveira's concept of "platypus" to describe the coupling between the old and the new, the archaic and the modern, the filthy and the aseptic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to outline preliminary considerations regarding reports produced by social workers to the Technical Classification Commissions (CTC) in Rio de Janeiro. From a sample of 25 processes in the criminal execution phase, we scrutinized their narratives conceiving such documents as part of an invisible path of the disciplinary process of prisons and as a labyrinth that conditions the intramural technical movements to paths preconceived by the system itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prison officers' behavior is one of the most consequential features of the modern prison. In this article, we introduce an organizational culture conceptual framework and build on previous prison scholarship to develop a model of prison officer workplace culture. We then apply the proposed model to original research in a US prison to investigate the relational aspects of prison officer culture during early 21st-century penal reforms. We find a set of collective norms and beliefs among officers consistent with the "traditional" prison officer culture historically documented by penologists, including high levels of distrust of prisoners, avoidance of relationships, and distancing from rehabilitation goals. We name this culture the "security mindset" because officers use multiple conceptions of "security" to rationalize their behavior. Our findings suggest that prison officer culture in late mass incarceration may work against the positive and supportive relationships necessary for rehabilitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the role of college-in-prison programs within the larger U.S. prison system. It discusses the challenges and ethical considerations of teaching college coursework in prison settings, with an emphasis on the potential conflict of "helping the State" by providing education within the carceral system.

In January 2021, President Biden announced Executive Order 14006 to eliminate all federal prison contracts with private prison companies. The new Executive Order raised questions regarding the future for government contractors in the private prison business and criminal policy reform. This Note explores potential consequences of Executive Order 14006 and implications for existing contract employees in the private prison management industry. Further topics include the historical development of the U.S. prison system towards privatization, the issues within contract prisons that generated action from the Biden administration, and the challenges associated with transitioning government resources and federal inmates to exclusively federally run facilities. This Note advocates for the Department of Justice to change its hiring processes in light of the strict scrutiny anticipated to be held against former contract prison employees, who did not receive the qualified immunity protection in their roles. This Note further encourages the Biden administration to enforce Executive Order 14006 through varying methods to ensure the durability and effectiveness of the Order to serve its associated policy goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The application of remission of penalty by reading: discourses and practices seek to present the policy of remission of penalty by reading in the state of Santa Catarina, through interviews with coordinators responsible for these initiatives in two prison units. They decide on the procedures taken, the operational dynamic, and select the books and evaluation criteria. In addition to bringing together and comparing the two projects of reference through reading, the work proposes to investigate the moral intentions and the ends envisaged and achieved in the coordinators' speeches. As a result, it was identified that there are still no systematized data on the recidivism of participants in penalty remission projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the scarcity of research on the impact of the privatization of the prison system in Latin America, we take the Mexican case with the aim of problematizing the implementation of prison outsourcing and the accreditation of new prisons by the American Correctional Association (ACA). In historical context, we will see how the privatization of prisons and the expansion of precariousness and incarceration as a form of government began with the signing of the Merida Plan, amidst the crossfire of the war declared against drug trafficking, which brought the neoliberalizing impulse with which the prison outsourcing model would begin. Based on the methodology of situated narratives, we problematized, together with a prison worker, the subjectivizing conditions that would mobilize prison outsourcing among new employees in this type of prisons. We also analyzed the details of the labor activity regime that the ACA standards require of them. We conclude that prison outsourcing poses a labor horizon of precariousness in which those who integrate it are required to progressively develop a multipurpose technical toolbox; this kind of polytechnical worker must also be subject to the activity regime of the ACA and to the punitive sensitivity of the actuarial model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extreme forms of custody represent the boundary points of state power. The configuration of the most restrictive corners of prison systems, and what goes on within them, is highly instructive in exposing the objectives, limits, and implications of state coercion at its most severe. Based on data collected in England & Wales and Norway, this article has two main aims. The first is to explore the degree to which "deep‐end" confinement differs between jurisdictions with different penal philosophies. The second is to understand how the most extreme form of confinement in each jurisdiction differs from the more typical carceral experiences within each system and its overall penal ethos. Empirically, then, the article seeks to shine light into the deepest dominions of both prison systems, illuminating the experiential texture of extreme forms of imprisonment. It concludes by asking what can be inferred about Nordic exceptionalism, and about deep‐end confinement more generally, by analyzing these domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present work proposes a new perspective regarding the prison system x EJA. Despite all the obstacles that stand in the way of a good evolution, there is always a choice. Choosing the path one wants to follow is a unique action for man, regardless of the influences he received in his childhood and adolescence. It is up to the person, the choice of being good or bad. The point to be raised is the reason why the prisoner finds it difficult to start or finish his studies. In order to seek answers, the group carried out fieldwork, interviewing 40 (forty) prisoners from a semi-open prison unit in the region of Campinas. Open questions were asked seeking answers from respondents. The vast majority attach no importance to studies; the only importance lies in the fact that every 12 hours of school attendance is one day redeemed from his sentence. What is the mirror of the child who lives precariously in a community that is dominated by drug trafficking? It can only be the criminal agent. And what is the way out for this child, since all his paths have been cut off? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past decades, Europe has been shocked repeatedly by terrorist crimes. This has led to an influx of suspects and convicts of terrorism in the prison system. The aim of this study is to provide insight into socio-demographic, psychopathological and criminal background characteristics of convicted violent extremists. Retrospective analyses were conducted on primary source data from 82 convicts in Dutch prison terrorism wings. Results showed that violent extremists are a heterogeneous group regarding socio-demographic characteristics. About 60% of the population had previously been convicted of ordinary crimes and a third suffered from a mental disorder. To gain more insight into violent extremists, additional research is needed into motivational and other risk factors. The latter is a necessary step to improve the identification, risk assessment, and effective treatment of violent extremists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In January 2021, President Biden announced Executive Order 14006 to eliminate all federal prison contracts with private prison companies. The new Executive Order raised questions regarding the future for government contractors in the private prison business and criminal policy reform. This Note explores potential consequences of Executive Order 14006 and implications for existing contract employees in the private prison management industry. Further topics include the historical development of the U.S. prison system towards privatization, the issues within contract prisons that generated action from the Biden administration, and the challenges associated with transitioning government resources and federal inmates to exclusively federally run facilities. This Note advocates for the Department of Justice to change its hiring processes in light of the strict scrutiny anticipated to be held against former contract prison employees, who did not receive the qualified immunity protection in their roles. This Note further encourages the Biden administration to enforce Executive Order 14006 through varying methods to ensure the durability and effectiveness of the Order to serve its associated policy goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Older prisoners are the fasted growing sub group in prisons across developed countries. They have high levels of health and social care needs in relation to their younger counterpart and those of the same age living in the community. There are a lack of interventions to ensure their needs are met. The older prisoner health and social care assessment and plan (OHSCAP) provided a structured process for addressing need and it's effectiveness was evaluated in a randomised controlled trial (RCT). This paper presents findings from the nested qualitative study relating to this RCT. The aim of this study was to explore the facilitators and barriers to delivering the OHSCAP. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with twelve staff members delivering the OHSCAP and 14 service users who had received the intervention. The framework method was used to analyse the data produced. Participants described a 'broken' prison system. They discussed a staffing crisis resulting in individuals' human rights being violated, which led to dangerous conditions in the prison. These conditions further impeding the staffing crisis, as recruitment was difficult and staff sickness was high. This 'broken' prison cycle significantly contributed to a lack of adequate attention being paid to OHSCAP processes. The delivery of health and social care interventions in prison is challenging when basic systems relating to staffing and safety are not adequate. Future research needs to consider how these circumstances can be mitigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]