Hard Time: A Fresh Look At Understanding And Reforming The Prison

This new edition of a longstanding, successful textbook explores the complex issues necessary to understand and reform the prison system.

• Draws from both ethnographic and professional material, and situates the prison experience within both contemporary and historical contexts
• Features first person accounts from prisoners and staff – both men and women – explaining what it’s like to live and work in prison, and in doing so brings the issues alive for students
• Includes brand new extensive chapters on prison reform, and on supermax correctional facilities – including research on confinement, long-term segregation, and death row
• Explores topics including the nature of prison as punishment; prisoner personality types and their coping strategies; gang violence; prison officers’ public and private custodial duties; and psychological, educational, and work programs offered
• Develops policy recommendations for the future based on qualitative and quantitative research and evidence-based initiatives

Robert Johnson is a Professor of Justice, Law and Criminology at American University, Washington, D.C., and Editor and Publisher of BleakHouse Publishing. His publications include Death Work: A Study of the Modern Execution Process, which won the Outstanding Book Award of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.

Ann Marie Rocheleau is an Associate Professor at Stonehill College, Easton, Massachusetts. She collaborated on research studies on adult and juvenile corrections, community policing, and drug purchase for the National Institute of Justice and the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Alison B. Martin is a Policy Analyst with the Council of State Governments Justice Center. She is the co-author of Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship the World Over and Gay and Lesbian Communities the World Over.?

The book includes a Foreword by?Francis T. Cullen, Professor of Criminal Justice and Sociology at the University of Cincinnati and an Afterword by?Alison Libeling,?University Lecturer and Director of the Prisons Research Centre at the Cambridge University Institute of Criminology.?