Academic literature on the topic 'Male prisoners Male prisoners Ex-convicts'

AbstractUser involvement in service development is seen as important to the credibility of these interventions but involving prisoners or ex-prisoners in this process can be problematic because of the vulnerability of this group as well as security issues. Questions arise as whether front line workers can instead reflect the perspectives of their clients accurately during service development events. Further, we query whether an alignment of perspectives is important for effective professional-prisoner relationships and offender self-efficacy when engaging in rehabilitation and reintegration programmes. To explore these questions, this chapter, in a case study third sector mentorship organisation, compares and contrasts the views of ex-prisoners and their mentors. Q methodology is employed to make this comparison. We find that mentors perspectives are most in tune with the most pessimistic perspectives of their clients: the most lonely, indigent and ill group of the exoffenders they work with. They do not share the optimistic views that characterise other groups of offenders in receipt of their service. The chapter explores the implications of these different views for exoffenders, their mentors and the participation of the offender in service innovation.

The needs to discipline and train prisoners for work, has become a convention that all nations including Ghana have come to accept with a view to churning out productive ex-prisoners. Thus, the aim prison education programs in Ghana is to turn inmates into useful citizens and the purpose of vocational training is to equip prisoners with skills which they can utilize to make a living. Additionally, the purpose for setting up the Junior and Senior High Schools is to give a second chance to inmates who dropped out of school before they were incarcerated. Similarly, the functional literacy program was introduced to teach illiterate prisoners how to read and write English, Akan, Ga, and Ewe languages. The chapter also discusses the duration, enrollment, teachers and the challenges of the programs. In addition, the general education program focuses on the curriculum, examination, and class attendance. The themes covered provide information on how prisoners are prepared toward reintegration in Ghana.

Wacquant has argued that a transnational political process, comprising harsh penal and social policies, is underway to exert social control over marginal populations created by economic liberalism and welfare state retrenchment. This chapter considers the relevance of Wacquant’s ideas to the UK by drawing upon new primary research which has explored offender experiences of both ‘prisonfare’ and ‘workfare’. It shows how the social atomisation associated with economic liberalism is intensified and institutionalised by prison with dire consequences for the ability of ex-prisoners to display the behaviour necessary to make and sustain a claim for out-of-work benefits. Moreover, the indications are that long-term imprisonment often leaves a legacy of alienation, dependency and conflict which leads to benefit sanctions and further criminal activity.

Friday the thirteenth is supposed to be the unlucky day, but for ex-King Eric XIV of Sweden it must have been a Thursday, because Thursdays are pea-soup days, at least in Sweden and Finland. It may only be a persistent myth that the arsenic trioxide (As2O3), which probably killed him, was put in his pea-soup on the order of his half-brother John III. That is, the pea-soup bit may be a myth, not that his brother John was the instigator. He had already held his schizophrenic older brother Eric prisoner for nine years, and a number of incriminating documents have been preserved. Eric died in 1577, and his fate mirrors that of Mary Stuart, who was sentenced to a more conventional execution by her cousin Elizabeth I ten years later. Oddly enough Eric had, with a certain hubris one must say, tried to negotiate marriages with both these distinguished ladies, and was only a few days from sailing off to meet Elizabeth in person when his father Gustav Wasa died in 1560 distracting him with other matters for a while. In 1577 there was no good way to analyse arsenic and establish murder by poison, but in 1829 the situation was different. When John Bodle was tried for having murdered his grandfather, octogenarian George Bodle, on his farm in Plumstead near Woolwich, the prosecution could provide an expert witness, James Marsh, inventor and (among other things) assistant to Michael Faraday. Marsh, through the foresight of the local police, who were already suspicious, and had preserved both the last coffee George Bodle had drunk and his stomach contents, analysed both for arsenic. This he did by adding hydrogen sulphide (H2S), a foul-smelling, flammable, and poisonous gas that used to haunt undergraduate chemistry labs when I was young. Dangerous as it may be, rather elementary precautions make it safe to handle H2S even for first-year students, and it was used in much the same way as by Marsh—for hunting down metal ions.

Recent questions surrounding the repatriation, rehabilitation, and reintegration of those who traveled to join the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the reintegration of violent extremists in conflict zones including Somalia, Nigeria, Libya, and Mali, and the impending release of scores of homegrown violent extremists from prisons in the United States and Europe have heightened policymaker and practitioner interest in violent extremist disengagement and reintegration (VEDR). Although a number of programs to reintegrate violent extremists have emerged both within and outside of conflict z