Rethinking Prison Education in the Era of Mass Incarceration

By
Jeremy Travis
President, John Jay College of Criminal Justice
City University of New York
Following is the main text of the Keynote Address by President Travis, kicking off the 2/4/2011 University Faculty Senate Conference on “Higher Education in the Prisons.” The thrust of his speech is clearly that public higher education can play an indispensable role promoting successful [...]

Cutting Recidivism: What Works, What Doesn’t

By
Edward J. Latessa, Ph.D.
Professor & Director
School of Criminal Justice
University of Cincinnati
There’s a right way and many wrong ways to solve most problems, including the problem of how to reduce high offender recidivism rates. Scholarly researchers have identified the approaches that do work, and revealed those that don’t.-ED
“What works” is not a program or [...]

Addressing Drug Addiction among Offenders

by Diana DiNitto
Distinguished Teaching Professor,
University of Texas
On November 19, 2009, Professor DiNitto had the opportunity to testify before a hearing of the United States Sentencing Commission, marking the 25th anniversary of the passage of the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984. She highlights her major points from that appearance in the following commentary.- ED. [...]

Congress Set to Dump “Second Chance for Ex-Offenders Act”

By Thomas Kinney
The prisons are full, recidivism rate 65-70 percent, system is broken, can’t afford it any more, something must be done; we need judicial reform and a just released study confirms that the good old US of A has the highest prison population rate in the world, 756 per 100,000 of the national population. [...]

Some Actions Underway to Reduce Recidivism; Not Enough

There’s an old retort that’s sometimes used to quiet a noisy heckler: “Sir, you have a magnificent grasp of the obvious.” Unfortunately, it seems that only a few of our politicians or other governmental officials do “grasp the obvious” when it comes to initiating ways to reduce recidivism. Defined as “an ex-inmate’s return [...]

“Doing Time” by Jack (Murf the Surf) Murphy

Jack (Murf the Surf) Murphy reveals his personal straight-talk insight of incarceration issues.

Government Takes Aim at Prison Rape

photo by ecpark
From an NPREC press release dated June 23, 2009.
Calling sexual abuse of people in government custody “totally incompatible with American values,” the bipartisan federal National Prison Rape Elimination Commission issued a landmark report dated 6/23/09 on sexual abuse in U.S. correctional and detention facilities, and proposed the first comprehensive blueprint to prevent [...]

Budget Fiasco Means Higher Recidivism

Editors note: Just A Guy is an inmate in a California state prison. Following is an excerpt from his recent comments in the San Fransisco Bay Guardian Online “Politics” Blog .

By Just A Guy
The tides have turned and the language is changing as politicos try to salvage their political futures via a different spin [...]

Why Parole Does Not Work in California

From the California Progress Report
by Cathy Cockrell

Q. You’ve written extensively about the criminal justice system and in particular about parole, which California uses to monitor ex-offenders in the community after their release from prison. How did you originally get interested in parole?