Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
In Punishment in America Michael Welch gathers together his seminal contributions to the most crucial and controversial issues in criminal justice. Topics range from the war on drugs, boot camps and institutional violence, to AIDS and HIV, capital punishment and the entire corrections industry. This coherent, but critical vision of punishment and corrections emphasizes social control but takes account of key social forces such as politics, religion and morality.
Synopsis
Michael Welch's book is an invitation to think. It is an invitation to grow intellectually and critically, as a consumer of crime policy and an observer of the American scene. Written by a scholar who has dedicated his work to uncovering the hidden ironies of formal crime policy, this is a collection of essays of depth and significance. Those who read it will be challenged, and those who engage with the challenges contained within these pages will have their views of the realities of penal policy changed: deepened, and made more honest, more complete. More true.
--from the Foreword by Todd R. Clear, Florida State University
Punishment in America offers readers a critical examination of the so-called back end of the criminal justice system, namely, incarceration. The book integrates various levels of analysis ranging from the macrosociological aspects of punishment to the meso (organizational) and micro (individual) dimensions of imprisonment. The overarching themes of Punishment in America are social control and the ironic effects of incarceration. In an effort to reduce crime, the criminal justice system ironically produces various self-defeating measures. Moreover, these pitfalls in current correctional policy and practice which neglect fundamental social inequality merely compound the problem of crime.
Table of Contents
Discovery of the penitentiary and emergence of social control -- Critical criminology, social justice, and an alternative view of incarceration -- The contours of race, social class, and punishment : exploring institutional biases in corrections -- The war on drugs and correctional warehousing : alternative strategies for the drug crisis -- Regulating the reproduction and morality of women : the social control of body and soul -- Jail overcrowding : social sanitation and the warehousing of the urban underclass -- A critical interpretation of correctional boot camps as normalizing institutions : discipline, punishment, and the military model -- The brutal truth : the reproduction of prison violence and the ironies of social control -- The machinery of death : capital punishment and the ironies of social control -- The poverty of interest in human rights violations in U.S. prisons -- Prisoners with HIV/AIDS : discrimination, fringe punishments, and the production of suffering -- The immigration crisis : detention as an emerging mechanism of social control -- The corrections industry : economic forces and the prison enterprise.