Decarcerating Correctional Facilities during COVID-19

Decarcerating Correctional Facilities during COVID-19 PDF Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309683572
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
The conditions and characteristics of correctional facilities - overcrowded with rapid population turnover, often in old and poorly ventilated structures, a spatially concentrated pattern of releases and admissions in low-income communities of color, and a health care system that is siloed from community public health - accelerates transmission of the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) responsible for COVID-19. Such conditions increase the risk of coming into contact with the virus for incarcerated people, correctional staff, and their families and communities. Relative to the general public, moreover, incarcerated individuals have a higher prevalence of chronic health conditions such as asthma, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease, making them susceptible to complications should they become infected. Indeed, cumulative COVID-19 case rates among incarcerated people and correctional staff have grown steadily higher than case rates in the general population. Decarcerating Correctional Facilities during COVID-19 offers guidance on efforts to decarcerate, or reduce the incarcerated population, as a response to COIVD-19 pandemic. This report examines best practices for implementing decarceration as a response to the pandemic and the conditions that support safe and successful reentry of those decarcerated.

Decarcerating Correctional Facilities during COVID-19

Decarcerating Correctional Facilities during COVID-19 PDF Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309683572
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
The conditions and characteristics of correctional facilities - overcrowded with rapid population turnover, often in old and poorly ventilated structures, a spatially concentrated pattern of releases and admissions in low-income communities of color, and a health care system that is siloed from community public health - accelerates transmission of the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) responsible for COVID-19. Such conditions increase the risk of coming into contact with the virus for incarcerated people, correctional staff, and their families and communities. Relative to the general public, moreover, incarcerated individuals have a higher prevalence of chronic health conditions such as asthma, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease, making them susceptible to complications should they become infected. Indeed, cumulative COVID-19 case rates among incarcerated people and correctional staff have grown steadily higher than case rates in the general population. Decarcerating Correctional Facilities during COVID-19 offers guidance on efforts to decarcerate, or reduce the incarcerated population, as a response to COIVD-19 pandemic. This report examines best practices for implementing decarceration as a response to the pandemic and the conditions that support safe and successful reentry of those decarcerated.

The End of Prisons.

The End of Prisons. PDF Author: Mechthild E. Nagel
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9401209235
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
This book brings together a collection of social justice scholars and activists who take Foucault’s concept of discipline and punishment to explain how prisons are constructed in society from nursing homes to zoos. This book expands the concept of prison to include any institution that dominates, oppresses, and controls. Criminologists and others, who have been concerned with reforming or dismantling the criminal justice system, have mostly avoided to look at larger carceral structures in society. In this book, for example, scholars and activists question the way patriarchy has incapacitated women and imagine the deinstitutionalization of people with disabilities. In a time when popular sentiment critiques the dominant role of the elites (the “one percenters”), the state’s role in policing dissenting voices, school children, LGBTQ persons, people of color, and American Indian Nations, needs to be investigated. A prison, as defined in this book, is an institution or system that oppresses and does not allow freedom for a particular group. Within this definition, we include the imprisonment of nonhuman animals and plants, which are too often overlooked.

Smart Decarceration

Smart Decarceration PDF Author: Matthew Epperson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190653094
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Smart Decarceration is a forward-thinking, practical volume that provides innovative concepts and concrete strategies for ushering in an era of decarceration-a proactive and effective undoing of the era of mass incarceration. The text grapples with tough questions and takes up the challenge of transforming America's approach to criminal justice in the 21st century. The primary purpose of this book is to inform both academic and public understanding-to place the challenge of smart decarceration at the center of the current national discourse, taking into account the realities of the current sociopolitical context-and to propose beginning action steps. This is achieved by first outlining and addressing questions such as: What if incarceration were not an option for most?; Whose voices are essential in this era of decarceration?; What is the state of evidence for solutions?; How do we generate and adopt empirically driven reforms?; How do we redifine and rethink justice in the United States? Smart Decarceration offers a way forward in building a field of decarceration through provocative but reasoned challenges to existing approaches to criminal justice reforms, lively focus on potential solutions, and action steps for meaningful change. Book jacket.

Decarcerating Disability

Decarcerating Disability PDF Author: Liat Ben-Moshe
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452963509
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
This vital addition to carceral, prison, and disability studies draws important new links between deinstitutionalization and decarceration Prison abolition and decarceration are increasingly debated, but it is often without taking into account the largest exodus of people from carceral facilities in the twentieth century: the closure of disability institutions and psychiatric hospitals. Decarcerating Disability provides a much-needed corrective, combining a genealogy of deinstitutionalization with critiques of the current prison system. Liat Ben-Moshe provides groundbreaking case studies that show how abolition is not an unattainable goal but rather a reality, and how it plays out in different arenas of incarceration—antipsychiatry, the field of intellectual disabilities, and the fight against the prison-industrial complex. Ben-Moshe discusses a range of topics, including why deinstitutionalization is often wrongly blamed for the rise in incarceration; who resists decarceration and deinstitutionalization, and the coalitions opposing such resistance; and how understanding deinstitutionalization as a form of residential integration makes visible intersections with racial desegregation. By connecting deinstitutionalization with prison abolition, Decarcerating Disability also illuminates some of the limitations of disability rights and inclusion discourses, as well as tactics such as litigation, in securing freedom. Decarcerating Disability’s rich analysis of lived experience, history, and culture helps to chart a way out of a failing system of incarceration.

Criminal (in)Justice

Criminal (in)Justice PDF Author: Rafael A. Mangual
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781546001522
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In his impassioned-yet-measured book, Rafael A. Mangual offers an incisive critique of America's increasingly radical criminal justice reform movement, and makes a convincing case against the pursuit of "justice" through mass-decarceration and depolicing. After a summer of violent protests in 2020--sparked by the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Rayshard Brooks--a dangerously false narrative gained mainstream acceptance: Criminal justice in the United States is overly punitive and racially oppressive. But, the harshest and loudest condemnations of incarceration, policing, and prosecution are often shallow and at odds with the available data. And the significant harms caused by this false narrative are borne by those who can least afford them: black and brown people who are disproportionately the victims of serious crimes. In Criminal (In)Justice, Rafael A. Mangual offers a more balanced understanding of American criminal justice, and cautions against discarding traditional crime control measures. A powerful combination of research, data-driven policy journalism, and the author's lived experiences, this book explains what many reform advocates get wrong, and illustrates how the misguided commitment to leniency places America's most vulnerable communities at risk. The stakes of this moment are incredibly high. Ongoing debates over criminal justice reform have the potential to transform our society for a generation--for better or for worse. Grappling with the data--and the sometimes harsh realities they reflect--is the surest way to minimize the all-too-common injustices plaguing neighborhoods that can least afford them.

Decarceration

Decarceration PDF Author: Andrew T. Scull
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745697240
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
"Decarceration" is a word which has not yet entered the dictionary. But it is increasingly being used to designate a process with momentous implications for all of us. It is shorthand for a state-sponsored policy of closing down asylums, prisons, and reformatories. Mad people, criminals, and delinquents are being discharged or refused admission to the dumps in which they have been traditionally housed. Instead, they are to be left at large, to be coped with "in the community." We are told by those who run programs of this sort that keeping the criminal and the mentally disturbed in our midst is "humane." We are informed that it is a "more effective" means of curing or rehabilitating such people. And, miracle of miracles, we learn that this approach is also "cheaper"! With an alternative which embraces such an array of virtues, who can be surprised to learn that mental hospitals are emptying faster and faster, and that with each passing day the convicted felon's chances of going to prison grow more remote? On closer examination, it turns out that this whole enterprise is built on a foundation of sand. The claim that leaving deviants at large "cures" or "rehabilitates" them is just that - a claim. Little or no solid evidence can be offered in its support. Instead, it rests uneasily on a cloud of rhetoric and wishful thinking. Most people's conception of the "humane" does not embrace placing senile men and women in the hands of rapacious nursing home operators or turning loose the perpetrators of violent crimes, under conditions which guarantee that they will receive little or no supervision. Yet, as decarceration has been implemented, this is what has been happening. Much of the time, it appears as if the policy makers simply do not know what will happen when their schemes are put into effect. Nor do they seem very concerned to find out. Often, they do not even know where those they have dumped back on the rest of us are to be found.

Prisoners of Politics

Prisoners of Politics PDF Author: Rachel Elise Barkow
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674919238
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
America’s criminal justice system reflects irrational fears stoked by politicians seeking to win election. Pointing to specific policies that are morally problematic and have failed to end the cycle of recidivism, Rachel Barkow argues that reform guided by evidence, not politics and emotions, will reduce crime and reverse mass incarceration.

Decarcerating America

Decarcerating America PDF Author: Ernest Drucker
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1620972794
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
“A powerful call for reform.” —NPR An all-star team of criminal justice experts present timely, innovative, and humane ways to end mass incarceration Mass incarceration will end—there is an emerging consensus that we’ve been locking up too many people for too long. But with more than 2.2 million Americans behind bars right now, how do we go about bringing people home? Decarcerating America collects some of the leading thinkers in the criminal justice reform movement to strategize about how to cure America of its epidemic of mass punishment. With sections on front-end approaches, as well as improving prison conditions and re-entry, the book includes pieces by leaders across the criminal justice reform movement: Danielle Sered of Common Justice describes successful programs for youth with violent offenses; Robin Steinberg of the Bronx Defenders argues for more resources for defense attorneys to diminish plea bargains; Kathy Boudin suggests changes to the parole model; Jeannie Little offers an alternative for mental health and drug addiction issues; and Eric Lotke offers models of new industries to replace the prison economy. Editor Ernest Drucker applies the tools of epidemiology to help us cure what he calls "a plague of prisons." Decarcerating America will be an indispensable roadmap as the movement to challenge incarceration in America gains critical mass—it shows us how to get people out of prisons, and the more appropriate responses to crime. The ideas presented in this volume are what we are fighting for when we fight against the New Jim Crow.

Decarceration

Decarceration PDF Author: Andrew T. Scull
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN: 9780745600024
Category : Community-based corrections
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description


Building Abolition

Building Abolition PDF Author: Kelly Struthers Montford
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000398498
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
Building Abolition: Decarceration and Social Justice explores the intersections of the carceral in projects of oppression, while at the same time providing intellectual, pragmatic, and undetermined paths toward abolition. Prison abolition is at once about the institution of the prison, and a broad, intersectional political project calling for the end of the social structured by settler colonialism, anti-black racism, and related oppressions. Beyond this, prison abolition is a constructive project that imagines and strives for a transformed world in which justice is not equated with punishment, and accountability is not equated with caging. Composed of sixteen chapters by an international team of scholars and activists, with a Foreword by Perry Zurn and an Afterword by Justin Piché, the book is divided into four themes: • Prisons and Racism • Prisons and Settler Colonialism • Anti-Carceral Feminisms • Multispecies Carceralities. This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students, activists, and scholars working in the areas of Critical Prison Studies, Critical Criminology, Native Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Black Studies, Critical Race Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Critical Animal Studies, with particular chapters being of interest to scholars and students in other fields, such as, Feminist Legal Studies, Animal Law, Critical Disability Studies, Queer Theory, and Transnational Feminisms.