Short description:

This book brings together a group of leading authorities in this field, both academics and practitioners, to address the complex issues that the increasing number of prisoners in the UK, USA and elsewhere has raised. It assess the implications and results of research in this field, and suggests ways of mitigating the often devastating personal and psychological consequences of imprisonment.

Long description:

As the number of prisoners in the UK, USA and elsewhere continues to rise, so have concerns risen about the damaging short term and long term effects this has on prisoners. This book brings together a group of leading authorities in this field, both academics and practitioners, to address the complex issues this has raised, to assess the implications and results of research in this field, and to suggest ways of mitigating the often devastating personal and psychological consequences of imprisonment.

'An incredibly powerful and robust text on imprisonment. It is, without doubt, a tour de force.' ? Peter Hamerton in British Society of Criminology Newsletter

'This book deserves to become the standard text on the subject for some years to come.' ? Maurice Vanstone in Vista Vol. 10 no. 3

'Is most timely and well-crafted in its fresh handling of this critical and enduring issue.' ? Michael Weinrath, University of Winnipeg in The Canadian Journal of Criminology

'Extraordinarily important compendium because it looks at its subject in so many different contexts. By doing so, it provides clues and generates hypotheses about the nuances of the consequence of incarceration under varying circumstance.' ? Gilbert  Geis, University of California, Irvine, US

Table of Contents:

Foreword  1. Introduction: the effects of imprisonment revisited  Part 1: The Harms of Imprisonment - Thawing Out The 'Deep Freeze' Paradigm  2. Release and adjustment: perspectives from studies of wrongly convicted and politically motivated prisoners  3. The contextual revolution in psychology and the question of prison effects  4. Harm and the contemporary prison   5. The effects of supermax custody  6. The politics of confi nement: women's imprisonment in California and the UK  Part 2: Revisiting the Society of Captives  7. Codes and conventions: the terms and conditions of contemporary inmate values  8. Revisiting prison suicide: the role of fairness and distress  9. Crossing the boundary: the transition of young adults into prisons  10. Brave new prisons: the growing social isolation of modern penal institutions by Robert Johnson  1.1 'Soldiers', 'sausages' and 'deep sea diving': language, culture and coping in Israeli prisons  12. Forms of violence and regimes in prison: report of research in Belgian prisons  Part 3: Coping Among Ageing Prisoners  13. Older men in prison: survival, coping and identity  14. Loss, liminality and the life sentence: managing identity through a disrupted lifecourse  Part 4: Expanding the Prison Effects Debate Beyond the Prisoner  15. The effects of prison work  16. Imprisonment and the penal body politic: the cancer of disciplinary governance  17. The effects of imprisonment on families and children of prisoners  18. Reinventing prisons