Rethinking America's correctional policies : commonsense choices from uncommon voices / Anne S. Douds and Eileen M. Ahlin.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Douds, Anne S., author.

Ahlin, Eileen, author.

Contributor:

Bloomsbury (Firm), publisher.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Corrections--Government policy--United States.

Corrections.

Corrections--Government policy.

United States.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (291 p.)

Distribution:

New York : Bloomsbury Publishing (US), 2025.

Place of Publication:

Lanham : Lexington Books, [2017]

Summary:

<span><span style="font-style:italic;">Commonsense Choices from Uncommon Voices:</span><span style="font-style:italic;">Rethinking America's Correctional Policies</span><span> brings together the experiences of men who served time in prison with contemporary research on correctional policy. This work combines a voyeuristic desire to observe "evil" and the consequences of the system of punishment, with detached consideration of what those stories can tell us about who we are as a nation and how we treat those who have betrayed the social trust. The authors simultaneously examine first-person accounts of inmate experiences with the correctional system and what actually, works, in operation, to promote the rehabilitative and restorative models of justice so many of our policymakers espouse. Each chapter opens with a vignette, a recollection of an event or series of events, about an inmate's experience during the various phases of correctional processing. These first-hand accounts have been collected from men who served time in prison. These men's stories are examined in their own right, then extrapolated to a broader analysis of the underlying social and policy issues to which that vignette speaks. All chapters follow the same structure: (a) opening vignette about a former inmate; (b) analysis, which includes (i) identification of the underlying issue; (ii) reflection; and (iii) extrapolation to a larger policy issue; and (c) recommendations from the field for enacting practice and crafting policy more responsive to the identified issue.</span></span>

Contents:

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Pre-incarceration

Plea bargaining and using children to coerce cooperation

Children at arrest

An alford plea conundrum

Incarceration

Time fades to grey

The yard ball paradox : before time turns grey

Vernon can't read : prison education

Doing the schizophrenic shuffle : mental health and psychopharmacology

Abe's abscess

Deliberate indifference or indifferently deliberate : how the slow pace of prison health care killed matthew

End of life care

Post-incarceration

Walking around money and the bus to nowhere

Get a J-O-B

Burned bridges

Conclusion: RAP'ing up

Bibliography

About the authors.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1-9787-3150-7

1-4985-3041-9

OCLC:

991595888