The commercial exploitation of children is a global crisis (Rahman, 2011; Svensson, 2006). However, media outlets and sociological researchers have successfully situated the problem as a primarily Asian, South American, or Eastern European concern. In the process, the exploitation of children in the United States has largely been ignored. The continued trafficking of international youth into this country, coupled with the growing rate at which American born children are targeted by interst...

Is prison a humane form of punishment and an effective means of rehabilitation? Are current prison policies, such as shifting resources away from rehabilitation toward housing more offenders, improving the safety and lives of incarcerated populations?Considering that many Canadians have served time, are currently incarcerated, or may one day be incarcerated–and will be released back into society–it is essential for the functioning and betterment of communities that we understand th...

More and more women—mothers, grandmothers, wives, daughters, and sisters—are doing hard prison time all across the United States. Many of them are facing the prospect of years, decades, even lifetimes behind bars.Oddly, there's been little public discussion about the dramatic increase of women in the prison system. What exactly is happening here, and why? The answers are in Women Behind Bars, in which investigative journalist Silja Talvi sheds light on why American girls a...

They discuss how young men are drawn to gang life, how young girls become attracted and attached to the gang members who eventually sell them into prostitution, and why it is so hard to infiltrate and dismantle the distinct but interrelated worlds of the procurer, victim, and client. Rooted firmly in first person testimony, this research deepens our understanding of juvenile prostitution by identifying and exploring the types of motivations and circumstances that lead teenagers into prosti...

Cost-effective methods for improving crime control in AmericaSince the crime explosion of the 1960s, the prison population in the United States has multiplied fivefold, to one prisoner for every hundred adults—a rate unprecedented in American history and unmatched anywhere in the world. Even as the prisoner head count continues to rise, crime has stopped falling, and poor people and minorities still bear the brunt of both crime and punishment. When Brute Force ...

A call to replace Canada’s incarceration model, which has proven destructive, discriminatory, expensive, counterproductive, and — most of all — unnecessary.Imprisonment developed in the Western world as the punishment to suit all offences, from violent assault to victimless drug use. Centuries ago, incarcerating convicts represented progress on society’s part, since it came as a replacement for capital punishment, maiming, and torture.Our current model — ta...

Every year, hundreds of thousands of jailed Americans leave prison and return to society. Largely uneducated, unskilled, often without family support, and with the stigma of a prison record hanging over them, many if not most will experience serious social and psychological problems after release. Fewer than one in three prisoners receive substance abuse or mental health treatment while incarcerated, and each year fewer and fewer participate in the dwindling number of vocational or educati...

The public health expert and prison reform activist offers "meticulous analysis" on our criminal justice system and the plague of American incarceration ( The Washington Post).An internationally recognized public health scholar, Ernest Drucker uses the tools of epidemiology to demonstrate that incarceration in the United States has become an epidemic—a plague upon our body politic. He argues that imprisonment, originally conceived as a response to the crim...

This book is part of a two volume set that examines prostitution and sex trafficking on a global scale, with each chapter devoted to a particular country in one of seven "geo-cultural" areas of the world. The 18 chapters in this volume (Volume I) are devoted to examination of the commercial sex industry (CSI) in countries within Africa, Asia, Middle East, and Oceania, while the 16 chapters that comprise Volume II focus exclusively on Europe, Latin America, and North America. Volume II also...

"If you do the crime you gotta do the time." This adage reflects the overall attitude most Americans have about crime and the criminal justice system. Implicit in this adage is the notion that once "the time" is done, the individual is free to re-enter society and resume a normal life. In Prisoner Re-entry and Social Capital, authors Earl Smith and Angela J. Hattery challenge this myth. Prisoner Re-entry and Social Capital takes as its starting point interviews with twent...

As crime rates inexorably rose during the tumultuous years of the 1970s, disputes over how to handle the violence sweeping the nation quickly escalated. James Q. Wilson redefined the public debate by offering a brilliant and provocative new argument-that criminal activity is largely rational and shaped by the rewards and penalties it offers-and forever changed the way Americans think about crime. Now with a new foreword by the prominent scholar and best-selling author Charles Murray, this ...

**"Jeanne Stinchcomb’s book makes an excellent contribution to the field of corrections serving as a substantial resource for those teaching corrections and as a practical inspiration for those students who will ultimately lead the profession. Stinchomb carefully crafts a balanced perspective that presents a powerful argument for why corrections is an important and necessary part of our criminal justice system while at the same time cautioning that justice can only be served when correctio...