Tackling prison overcrowding: Build more prisons? Sentence fewer offenders?

✍ Scribed by Mike Hough (editor); Rob Allen (editor); Enver Solomon (editor)

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2008
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 153
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Tackling prison overcrowding is a response to controversial proposals for prisons and sentencing set out in by Lord Patrick Carter's Review of Prisons, published in 2007. The Carter review proposed the construction of vast 'Titan' prisons to deal with the immediate problem of prison overcrowding, the establishment of a Sentencing Commission as a mechanism for keeping judicial demand for prison places in line with supply, along with further use of the private sector, including private sector management methods. Tackling prison overcrowding comprises nine chapters by leading academic experts, who expose these proposals to critical scrutiny. They take the Carter Report to task for construing the problems too narrowly, in terms of efficiency and economy, and for failing to understand the wider issues of justice that need addressing. They argue that the crisis of prison overcrowding is first and foremost a political problem - arising from penal populism - for which political solutions need to be found. This accessible report will be of interest to policy makers, probation practitioners, academics and other commentators on criminal policy.

✦ Table of Contents

Tackling prison overcrowding
Tackling prison overcrowding
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Notes on contributors
Introduction
The prisoners’ dilemma in England and Wales
Building on sand: why expanding the prison estate is not the way to ‘secure the future’
Towards more consistent and predictable sentencing in England and Wales
‘Titan’ prisons: do size, efficiency and legitimacy matter?
Private punishment? An examination of the expansion, development and employment relations of private prisons
Reducing the use of custody as a sanction: a review of recent international experiences
Where now?
Endnote: latest developments in penal policy