Jason in the Guardian

Jason Warr (one of our PhD students) has made the news in a debate about whether prison education is working: Guardian 30 January.

No Place for Kids: The Case for Reducing Juvenile Incarceration

The Annie E. Casey Foundation, a private charitable organization, dedicated to helping build better futures for disadvantaged children in the United States, released their new report, No Place for Kids: The Case for Reducing Juvenile Incarceration. It presents evidence to demonstrate that incarcerating children does not work:
Youth prisons do not reduce future offending, they waste taxpayer dollars, and they frequently expose youth to dangerous and abusive conditions. The report also shows that many states have substantially reduced their juvenile correctional facility populations in recent years, and it finds that these states have seen no resulting increase in juvenile crime or violence. Finally, the report highlights successful reform efforts from several states and provides recommendations for how states can reduce juvenile incarceration rates and redesign their juvenile correction systems to better serve young people and the public.

Criminal rehabilitation: a spotlight on Europe

On the Cambridge University homepage, Johann Koehler talks about how a 'soft on crime' approach might be the way forward to break the cycle that 'career criminals' are in. Read the full article here.

Doing Time Together: LOVE AND FAMILY IN THE SHADOW OF THE PRISON

Office Hours - conversations with top social scientists about their research and the social world - have recorded an interview with Megan Comfort, who conducted etnographic research in a Californian prison on intimate relationships and wrote the book Doing Time Together about it. She talks about the women who visit their partners in prison. Interesting! Here's the podcast.

About the book:
"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."