Rethinking America’s Correctional Policies

Anne S. Douds is lecturer of criminal justice in the School of Public Affairs at Penn State Harrisburg and former trial lawyer.Eileen M. Ahlin is assistant professor of criminal justice in the School of Public Affairs at Penn State Harrisburg.

• IntroductionSection I: Pre-IncarcerationChapter One: Plea Bargaining and Using Children to Coerce Cooperation Chapter Two: Children at Arrest Chapter Three: An Alford Plea Conundrum Section II: IncarcerationChapter Four: Time Fades to GreyChapter Five. The Yard Ball Paradox – Before Time Turns GreyChapter Six. Vernon Can’t Read: Prison EducationChapter Seven: Doing the Schizophrenic Shuffle: Mental Health and Psychopharmacology Chapter Eight: Abe’s AbscessChapter Nine: Deliberate Indifference or Indifferently Deliberate: How the Slow Pace of Prison Health Care Killed MatthewChapter Ten: End of Life CareSection III: Post-IncarcerationChapter Eleven: Walking Around Money and the Bus to NowhereChapter Twelve: Get a J-O-BChapter Thirteen: Burned Bridges Conclusion: RAP’ing Up

Readers who understand the criminal justice landscape of the US, based on their own careers and/or their academic scholarship, know that the country's correctional policies are perennially in need of rethinking. The outcomes hoped for are so distant from the actual outcomes that frustration is ubiquitous, for victims, offenders, attorneys, judges, correctional officers, wardens, and communities. The inventive approach adopted by criminal justice professors Douds and Ahlin (both, Penn State Harrisburg) to invite yet more reflection on the shortcomings of current policy and practice is to introduce the biographies of men whose experience of arrest, plea negotiation, incarceration, and reentry tell provoking stories. Salient elements of their stories serve as anchors to every chapter, so that readers are drawn into law and policy analysis through the power of personal anecdotes…. [This] volume…presents current and cogent arguments for why justice would be better served through a wide range of policy initiatives. Policies articulated here blend the authors’ recognition of what research suggests and what the application of professional practice norms could reasonably embrace. Summing Up: Recommended. All academic levels/libraries.