Myths and Realities of Prison Violence: A Review of the Evidence

In order to distinguish prison myth from reality, the authors examine both official and unofficial estimates of the violence and disorder in prison, as well the dual issues of whether drug abuse and gang activity in prison can be directly linked to the level of violence and disorder in correctional institutions. Based on this review, current responses to prison violence and disorder are examined; the authors argue that the key to reducing the current level of prison violence and disorder is to determine the appropriate tipping point between formal and informal social control mechanisms. The authors conclude by highlighting three distinct strategies for reducing violent incidents in prisons: (1) demand transparency, (2) require evidence-based practice, and (3) implement innovative measures of prison performance and quality.     

Political Responsibility for UK Prison Security – Ministers Escape Again

Two very serious prison escapes in 1994–5 prompted the Home Secretary, Michael Howard, to dismiss the Prison Service head, Derek Lewis (a contracted businessman) who successfully sued for full compensation and costs. This sacking and law suit were unprecedented events which highlighted familiar tensions about the 'policy' and 'administrative' ('operational') distinction and what passes for the theory of individual ministerial responsibility to Parliament. This article reviews four serious prison security failures in England and Northern Ireland since 1983 and the standard ministerial posture blaming operational error rather than their own policy framework. Drawing on interviews with relevant senior figures, the exceptionally politically sensitive case of executive agency status for the Prison Service of England and Wales is considered. The 'Lewis vs. Howard' affair is placed in its context of the increasingly managerial ambitions of both 'incomer' and career civil servants which conflict with traditionally comprehensive, but symbolic, ministerial responsibility.     

Measuring Quality of Life in Spanish Municipalities

Abstract

Measuring quality of life in municipalities entails two empirical challenges. First, collecting a set of relevant indicators that can be compared across the municipalities in the sample. Secondly, using an appropriate aggregating tool in order to construct a synthetic index. This paper measures quality of life for the largest 237 Spanish municipalities using Value Efficiency Analysis (VEA) to derive comparative scores by combining the information contained in 19 partial indicators. VEA is a refinement of DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) that imposes some consistency in the weights of the indicators used to construct the aggregate index. The indicators cover aspects related to consumption, social services, housing, transport, environment, labour market, health, culture and leisure, education and security. The results show that the Northern and Central regions in Spain attain the highest levels of quality of life, while the Southern regions report low living conditions. Education is the variable that requires the largest improvement in low performing municipalities, followed by health and culture facilities, pollution and crime. Population density, growth and ageing seem to relate positively to quality of life.     

A Structural Equation Model of Female Empowerment

This paper proposes a structural equation model to measure and explain female empowerment in Cambodia. Empowerment is defined as the decision-making ability of a woman regarding her strategic and non-strategic life choices. Grounded in the Capability Approach and in the gender economics literature this conceptualisation accounts for three key elements: resources, values/traditions, and decision-outcomes. These elements interact into a system of structural equations where a latent variable is specified to measure empowerment; decision-outcomes enter as partial metrics of empowerment; and resources, and values/traditions are modelled as exogenous factors. Stochastic dominance analysis is used to compare the empowerment status of women across life choices.     

Preventing suicide in prisons, part I. Recommendations from the International Association for Suicide Prevention Task Force on Suicide in Prisons

In 2000 the Department of Mental Health of the World Health Organization (WHO) published a guide named Preventing Suicide. A Resource for Prison Officers as part of the WHO worldwide initiative for the prevention of suicide. In 2007 there are new epidemiological data on prison suicide, a more detailed discussion of risk factors accounting for the generally higher rate of suicide in correctional settings in comparison to the general population, and several strategies for developing screening instruments. As a first step, this paper presents an update of the WHO guide by the Task Force on Suicide in Prisons, created by the International Association for Suicide Prevention. A second paper, by the same Task Force, will present some international comparisons of suicide prevention services in correctional facilities.     

Leisure Experience, Prison Culture, or Victimization? Sex Offenders Report on Prison Gambling

Opportunities for gambling in mainstream North American society have increased greatly over the past two decades. Despite the popularity of legalized gambling and attention it is receiving among social science researchers and economists, gambling within jails and prisons has been overlooked. This study utilized a semistructured interviewing procedure (Smith, 1995) to gain information about prison gambling from 11 sexual offenders on parole—all had spent significant time incarcerated. Qualitative analyses of responses suggest that offenders may gamble in various forms and for a variety of reasons, including a means of alleviating boredom, providing excitement and risk, and an opportunity to socialize. Prison gambling appears to be a complex phenomenon. A substantial amount of prison gambling seems to be associated with certain psychosocial benefits, while for a minority of cases there may be severe violence and victimization.     

Prison and Democracy: Lessons Learned and Not Learned, from 1989 to 2009

Dostoevsky, Mandela, and others have long noted that prisons expose social realities, often hidden, particularly inequality and gaps between policy and practice. Prisons symbolize, mirror, and shape the communities and countries in which they exist. Although prisons informed and were intertwined with many of the defining moments of 1989, in the 20 years since, societies often failed to recognize the important role prison and punishment play in relationship to democracy. By not recognizing that “prison matters” in relationship to democracy, polities (whether in transition to democracy or established democracies) failed to adequately learn “prison lessons.” Starting with a case study of South Africa, this paper considers prisons during apartheid and under democratic governance. This case is connected to other comparative and international examples (including Russia, Brazil, and the USA) to identify five lessons learned and not learned concerning prison and democracy. First, policies and practices of imprisonment reflect social orders, especially structures of inequality and understandings of legitimate power and opposition. Second, countries transitioning to democracy seldom anticipate rising crime and invariably neglect the relevance of prisons. Third, nations do not adequately grapple with the role of prison in the past, especially the nondemocratic past. Fourth, in established and recent democracies, penal populism resulted as politicians defined prison as a solution to a host of social ills, ignoring the consequences of expanded punishment. Fifth, prisons shaped key substantive realities beyond their walls, from leadership to recidivism, scandals, fiscal deficits, and crises of legitimacy.     

High rates of suicide and attempted suicide using pesticides in Nickerie, Suriname, South America

Suicide and attempted suicide are identified as a serious mental health problem in Suriname, especially in the district of Nickerie. An epidemiological study in the Nickerie catchment area revealed high rates of suicide (48 per 100,000) and attempted suicide (207 per 100,000) on average in the years 2000-2004. Particularly remarkable is the high number of attempted suicides among males (49%), and the use of pesticides in both fatal (55%) and nonfatal suicidal behavior (44%). Probably this high incidence of suicidal behavior reflects the very poor economic situation of the district, poverty of most of the population, high levels of alcohol misuse, domestic violence, the rigidity of Hindustani culture regarding family traditions, the accessibility of pesticides, and the lack of future perspectives. Health care alone will not be sufficient to tackle this problem. One of the most urgent measures to prevent suicides is to stow away pesticides in locked cabinets with the key held by the proprietor.     

CULTURE IN ACTION: THE ‘ROTTERDAM APPROACH’ AS MODERNIZATION THROUGH TRADITION

This article discusses the relation between administrative culture and the capacity to act. It analyses how the Dutch city of Rotterdam radically altered its safety and ‘livability’ approaches in the face of new challenges, and how the city used its cultural make‐up and traditions in doing so. This takes its importance from that fact that local governments are almost continuously confronted with the need to reform policies and methods in the face of challenges such as individualism, cultural diversity, and safety problems. The notion of culture or administrative culture is often invoked to explain why innovations have been unsuccessful. We will argue that this line of argumentation hinges on wrong assumptions about the influence of culture on action. Culture is conceptualized as too static and homogeneous, and too much focused on cognitive aspects. By proposing an alternative, action‐oriented concept of culture, we will argue that administrative culture can be a source of innovation.     

Dialogue, Culture, Critique: The Sociology of Culture and the New Sociological Imagination

In this paper, I show how the consideration of the role of the intellectual in democratic society informs an understanding of the critical project of the sociology of culture. This leads to a review of general sociological approaches to the problem of culture as they contribute to a critical project, suggesting the need for a distinctive conceptualization of the object of inquiry, “culture as the arts and sciences, broadly understood.” This approach requires making crucial distinctions, as well as studying key correlations. The distinctions are between: (1) Culture and Ideology, (2) High Culture and Autonomous Culture, and (3) Power and Knowledge. The correlations are between: (1) The Arts and Sciences, and Everyday Life, and (2) The Arts and Sciences, and Politics. At a time when the alternative to globalization is far from certain (this is what I get from the implicit debate between Calhoun and Beck), when the grounds for critique seem to be based on little more than nostalgic utopianism (this is how I understand Touraine’s prognosis of the end of society) or nostalgic pessimism (see Bauman) or hopeful pragmatism (Beck), I believe it is necessary to get closer to the pits of critical reflection and creative action in the cultural sphere. Casanova points to this in his consideration of religion in public life, even globalized religion (Casanova). Sassen (1998) suggests that we must understand globalization and its alternatives in their concrete local manifestations. Here, I would like to investigate secular alternatives, attempting to localize the critique of the global, showing how the traditions and projects of culture as the arts and sciences inform a collective intelligence with democratic deliberative dimensions (Pierre Levy). This is a call to keep alive critique in the postmodern circumstance, as part of an incomplete project of critical reflection and democratic action, a call for a sociology of culture as a key instrument for a renewed sociological imagination. The paper is centered on dialogue, (the relative autonomy of) culture, and critique.     

Rabindranath Tagore and the Aesthetics of Postmodernism

Skeptical postmodern claims about the viability of authorship and meaning in literature are contrasted in historical persepective with Rabindranath Tagore's views on the power of literary art to illuminate reality and enrich feeling. Consequences of postmodern methods and theories are explored with reference to his defense of art and life as a unity that entails unique knowledge and insight. Although influenced by Western culture, he distrusted theory applied to art. For him, durable meanings are an imperative of life for which literature is a vehicle. A post-Nobel Prize attempt to promote Eastern wisdom as a corrective to Western rationalism and materialism did not succeed.     

Economic Development Subsidies and the Funding of Private Prisons

For-profit prison corporations have sold prison privatization as a tool for economic development. The idea of prisons became more appealing once for-profit prison corporation demonstrated that they could finance, build, design, and construct prisons with private capital from private investment companies. Many private prisons throughout the United States are provided local, state, and federal economic development subsidies — which may include tax advantaged financing, property tax abatements, infrastructure improvements, and personnel training and development resources. Most research on prison privatization has examined costs and quality comparisons of private run prisons to government run correctional facilities. This article examines the factors that predict economic development subsidies to private prisons, which include: economic, social control, geographic, and political factors. Logistic regression results indicate the per capita gross state product, political ideology, black male disenfranchisement, and mandatory sentencing laws predict economic development subsidies to private prison corporations.     

HOW TRADITIONAL ARE THE AMERICAN,FRENCH AND GERMAN TRADITIONS OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION? A RESEARCH AGENDA

Consistent with the notion of tradition, public administration scholars usually interpret and compare administrative developments in the US, France, and Germany as inheritance, assuming continuity. However, administrative traditions have thus far not been an object of systematic research. The present research agenda aims to address this research gap by introducing the transfer‐of‐ideas approach as a means to examine the empirical substance of national traditions. We claim that for current research, the benefits of this approach are twofold. First, the transfer‐of‐ideas approach contributes to comparative public administration since it reveals in how far intellectual traditions are hybrid instead of distinctively American, French or German developments. Second, the approach may help to address the polysemous meanings of and terminological difficulties within administrative concepts that prevail in Public Administration on both sides of the Atlantic.     

Strategies for dealing with policy ambiguities

Ambiguities often weave through policies, leading to conflict and confusion over the intents and purpose of said policy and how it may manifest in any specific instance. Given that policy management is a core function for most public service agencies, the challenges here are almost universally experienced as public servants balance the political, legal, and technical requirements of policies against their functionality in practice. To this end, the authors use a grounded theory approach to identify themes in how practitioners cope with policy ambiguities. Relying on data from program evaluation reports and interviews with practitioners, the authors triangulate five themes: interpretation as a collaborative endeavor, teach people how to think, processes simplify and guide, consistency comes from horizontal communication, and policy interpretation evolve. Conclusions argue that ambiguity is a key theoretical and practical challenge that impacts the quality and character of democratic governance.     

The Quality of Life from a Child's Perspective

Abstract

During the last decade, both in politics and research methodology there has been an increased interest in listening to children's experiences and viewpoints, as separate and different from their adult carers. In the line with these interests, this article discusses how the quality of life, from a child's perspective, can be sociologically framed, and the relevance this has for people in the social work field. The article begins by clarifying the meaning of talking about quality of life from a child's perspective by reference to the concept of generational order. Next, some methodological experiences and empirical findings regarding quality of life from a child's perspective are briefly reported. This is partly because these experiences and findings by themselves are regarded as relevant for administrative practices and social work regarding children, and partly because they support and have been a source of shaping the sociological frame. Then, on the basis of these experiences and findings, and by adopting a relational social constructionist approach, the quality of life from a child's perspective is framed sociologically. Finally, based on the findings and framing of children's quality of life from a child's perspective some recommendations for social work regarding children are suggested.     

Spending the Golden Years Behind Bars: Predictors of Mental Health Issues Among Geriatric Prisoners

Mental illness in older inmates remains an underexplored topic of interest for prison research. The present study addresses gaps in extant literature, using a nationally representative sample of 1,907 male and female geriatric inmates in the United States (age range 50–84 years; M = 56) to analyze the association between mental health and predictors, such as gender, victimization, physical illnesses, and protective/ameliorative factors. The authors discuss their findings in relation to a theoretical framework that integrates the importation and deprivation models, as well as provide discourse on policy implications and future directions for research on older prison inmates.     

Cultural Capital and Sustainable Livelihoods in Sri Lanka's Rural Villages: Towards Culturally Aware Development

Increasing attention is being directed towards the role of culture in the development and well-being of rural communities. Systems of knowledge, beliefs, customs, norms and a wide range of culturally related activities, such as arts, crafts and music, can play a significant role in the everyday lives of people and contribute to the sustainability of human societies. The means through which culture can be effectively incorporated into development processes requires further research. This article develops the concept of ‘cultural capital’ to explore how cultural assets sustain an artisan class in three rural villages close to the city of Kandy in central Sri Lanka. The field research found that embodied cultural traditions and subsequent material outputs are vital ‘resources’ in achieving livelihood objectives and meeting family aspirations. We argue that the development industry needs to reconsider cultural assets and traditions and incorporate them into its work at conceptual and programmatic levels. Conceptually development needs to see itself as a cultural as much as economic or social process, and programmatically we see openings within sustainable livelihoods approaches for a greater explicit appreciation and awareness of locally-specific cultural traditions, strengths and perspectives.     

International Trends in Prison Upsizing and Downsizing: In Search of Evidence of a Global Rehabilitation Revolution

Abstract

Our review of global trends in the use of incarceration reveals that both the number of people incarcerated worldwide and the global rate of incarceration continue to increase in every global region. In addition, there have been sizable global increases in the use of pretrial detention, the proportion of female prisoners, the proportion of foreign prisoners, prison privatization, and prison crowding. After reviewing these global trends, we examine the available data on correctional performance, focusing on global crime trends in the subgroup of countries (n = 20) where three-quarters of the world’s prison population is currently located. While most (17/20) of these countries continued to increase their prison population despite decreases in most crime categories, three countries—the Russian Federation, South Africa, and Pakistan—have reduced their reliance on incarceration (number and rate) while also reducing their crime rates. Compared to other countries with large prison populations, the United States’ overall increase in both the prison population (+14.4% since 2000) and incarceration rate (+2.2) can be described as modest. Our review of global trends in corrections and sentencing policy reforms revealed an emerging focus on offender rehabilitation in both prison and community corrections settings and a growing recognition of the link between community development and crime. Focusing on the potential impact of rehabilitation-rich policy reforms in the United States, we highlight the results of a recent simulation modeling study (Taxman & Pattavina, 2013 Pattavina, A., & Taxman, F. S. (2013). Using discrete-event simulation modeling to estimate the impact of RNR program implementation on recidivism levels. In F. S. Taxman & A. Pattavina (Eds.), Simulation strategies to reduce recidivism (pp. 267–281). New York, NY: Springer.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) designed to estimate the impact of expanding our institutional corrections treatment infrastructure. This study reported significant, but relatively small, long-term reductions in prison populations when treatment capacity and treatment quality are increased. These findings suggest that even major improvement in the quantity and quality of prison programming—by itself—will not fundamentally change the life course of prisoners, resulting in continued high return-to-prison rates for these offenders. We conclude that for the United States to significantly reduce its reliance on incarceration, we will need to rethink our approach to crime and punishment. Our global review of corrections and sentencing strategies identified a number of possibilities. Using the global incarceration rate and the global crime rate as benchmark performance “tipping points,” we call for the development of corrections and sentencing policies—and the hiring of corrections personnel—based on the new goal of corrections: individual and community rehabilitation.     

Stepping Out: Rhetorical Devices and Culture Change Management in the UK Civil Service

Organizational culture is the pattern of values and beliefs held by members of an organization and the management of culture is now one of the most frequently discussed of all organizational concepts. The excitement associated with culture is attributable to two factors. First, it is argued that culture is the key to organizational performance; simply stated, a strong organizational culture can be a source of competitive advantage. Second, culture is perceived as an alternative method of control to traditional and technocratic forms of management and can be manipulated to ensure that employees are enthusiastic and committed to organizational objectives.
Despite the extensive interest in this topic, culture remains an elusive concept. This paper investigates the nature of culture and considers strategies for introducing cultural change. Specifically, the aims of the paper are threefold. First, to locate and explain the interests and significance of culture change for the public sector. Second, using a case study of a newly created agency, to investigate the problems and issues affecting cultural change in the civil service. Third, to reassess and critically evaluate the claims for culture management made in the literature. Finally, this paper questions some of the assumptions in the literature, which with few exceptions are biased toward top management and the unitary conception of organization, an ideological frame of reference which is particularly problematic in the public sector.