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This research explores the subjective health experiences of women incarcerated in a provincial detention center in Ottawa, Canada.

Narrative interviews conducted with 16 previously incarcerated women were analyzed to explore how health issues shaped their experiences in detention.

Women identified a set of practices and conditions that negatively impacted health, including the denial of medication, medical treatment, and healthcare, limited prenatal healthcare, and damaged health caused by poor living conditions.

Findings suggest that structural health problems emerge in penal environments where healthcare is provided by the same agency responsible for incarceration. The incompatibility between the mandates of incarceration and healthcare suggests that responsibility for institutional healthcare should be transferred to provincial healthcare bodies.

This research responds to the lack of research on carceral health experiences within both penal scholarship and medical sociology, particularly in relation to women and those confined in jails.

The British East India Company (EIC) made connections between the Malay Archipelago and Bengal and established a penal settlement at Bencoolen, followed by the Straits Settlements for the Indian convicts. The convicts from different parts of South Asia today were generally described as “Indian”, such generalisation often hides the identity of specific convicts from South Asia. Among the Indian convicts, the Bengalis were transported to Bencoolen and the Straits Settlements. However, the generic term has made it difficult to reconstruct the history of Bengali convicts’ experiences and pathos. Therefore, this paper attempts to “rediscover” the afterlife of transportation of Bengali felons in the Malay Peninsula.

By examining a range of archival records and current scholarships, this article shows the inclusivity, diversity and accessibility of convict labourers with mainstream society. This study will open up a new avenue of convict histories and subaltern studies on Asia.

The Bengali convicts in the Straits Settlements, one of the oldest migrant sections, have largely been ignored in historical literature. Though the Bengalis, among other South Asian convicts, constituted a significant portion, they were categorised under the generic term “Indian” (Rai, 2014). Their manual labour was invaluable for the colonial economy and the development of the Straits Settlements.

Researcher faced difficulties to get the descendant of Bengali convicts.

This article is a research paper based on mostly archival records; therefore, it is an original contribution to the existing knowledge on the convict history.

Purpose – This chapter considers the consequences on liberty in relationship to the development of the international problem-solving court movement.

Design/methodology/approach – The research, which relies principally on ethnographic fieldwork in six different common law countries (England, Ireland, Scotland, Australia, Canada, and the United States), explores the development of local problem-solving courts in each jurisdiction. These include drug courts, community courts, domestic violence courts, and mental health courts. The ethnographic fieldwork was supplemented with data from various other sources, including government reports, parliamentary debates, evaluations of individual court programs, publications issued by various advocacy groups, media accounts, public statements and articles by problem-solving court judges, and analyses of specialty courts in law reviews and other academic journals.

Findings – The research reveal that the five countries outside of the United States demonstrate greater concern with protecting the dignity of the court, due process, and individual rights – or what the Australians refer to as open and natural justice.

Originality/value – It is the first large-scale comparative study of problem-solving courts in the common law countries where the movement is most advanced.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the feedback discourse by exploring how public managers and politicians use complaints from citizens to improve the overall and specific performance of public services. The main research questions are: Can citizen complaints analysis be a useful planning tool in the public sector? What can public managers learn from citizen feedback?

Applying an empirical approach (Yin, 2005), the multiple case studies treated in the paper aim to clarify a series of decisions (particularly, why feedback is not used to its maximum potential). The overall design includes a defined set of questions, and the research protocol includes data retrieval, collection and analysis. A new cataloging model is proposed to homogenize the spectrum of analysis. This model is intended to create a parallel between two local bodies different in size, mission, and complexity, but which have front office facilities and are in the same territory and have the same potential target population.

In total, 698 complaints and 183 corrective or preventive actions were analyzed. Public managers’ attention seems to focus on technical or normative issues rather than on aspects of public services. This may be explained by the lack of funds for training, the scarce use of relational and human capital development leverage, and the concomitant necessity to guarantee at least the same level of services as provided in previous years, confirming the “Blame the rich and credit the poor” mantra.

This paper offers a strategic approach to learning from citizen’s feedback that other scholars or practitioners have not yet provided. There are many academic studies on customer feedback as a continuous improvement tool for the private sector, but few for public administration.

Community policing has been around for at least two decades now and it is safe to say that it has become, in large part, more about managing disruptive subjects and virtuous citizens than preventing crime or disorder (Crank, 1994; DeLeon-Granados, 1999; Yngvesson, 1993). While the rhetoric of community may be succeeding where the policing policy is failing, the experience has certainly contributed to the growth of homologous efforts that include community prosecution and community correction. We see a criminal justice system pro-actively seeking to blur the boundaries between its institutions and the communities they work within and, all too often, without. In recent years, there has been a rapid growth in justice approaches that turn their attention toward the community. There are literally hundreds of examples of this trend, from offender-victim reconciliation projects in Vermont and Minneapolis to ‘beat probation’ in Madison, Wisconsin; from neighborhood-based prosecution centers in Portland, Oregon, and New York City, to community probation in Massachusetts. Of course, the most well-known version of community justice is community policing, but localized projects involving all components of the justice system have been widely promoted (Clear & Karp, 1998, p. 3).Like community policing and community prosecution, community correction programs generally focus on partnering with service providers and community groups in order to more finely calibrate their service delivery. For community corrections the recent focus has been on delivering re-entry programs and expanding the availability of intermediate sanctioning options. The sheriff (above) focuses on re-entry, to link jails and communities in two ways: extending the correctional continuum into power-poor communities and increasing political support for expanding the criminal justice system in more affluent communities. Even as fiscal stress translates into budget cuts in education, housing, drug treatment, and other services, the reach of the criminal justice system expands outside the fences as new community-based partnerships and inside the fences as an increasingly program-rich environment. These partnerships are, not surprisingly as we shall see, dominated by criminal justice professionals and dependent on coercive control techniques. Further, their budgets are growing with funds in previous eras earmarked for providing many of the same services in a social welfare, rather, than social control, service delivery context. While these budgetary trends map a macro political trend from an old democratic New Deal toward a new republican new deal network of patronage relationships (see Lyons, forthcoming 2004), this paper examines the micro politics of community corrections developing within an increasingly punitive American political-culture.

Past research indicates that increasing police arrests deters crime. However, little research exists on how restricting police arrests affects crime. The purpose of this paper is to test whether restrictions on police authority to arrest affects deterrence and crime rates.

The data consisted of crime statistics for 105 criminal suspects from a medium-sized police department in the western USA. A 2×4 mixed analysis of variance compared the suspects’ criminal activity for a four-month period before and after the arrest restrictions were imposed to ascertain how they affected deterrence and crime rates.

The restrictions on police arrests significantly increased the crime rate. Moreover, the crime rate increased the longer the restrictions on police arrest authority were in effect. In sum, the present study provides empirical support for the hypothesis that restrictions on police arrest authority decrease deterrence and increase the crime rate.

The present study suggests that restrictions on police arrest authority decreases deterrence and may significantly increase the crime rate. The restrictions may also have deleterious effects on police departments. Several states have recently imposed restrictions on police authority to arrest, and many other states are considering implementing such restrictions. Policy makers should carefully consider the results of the present study before implementing these policies.

The study fills a void in the crime literature by demonstrating that restrictions on police authority to arrest can decrease deterrence and increase the crime rate.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically verify whether “unfettered” judicial discretion in developing countries breeds corruption or not as judges could favour elites who have access to more money to steal or punish the poor who are petty‐thieves rather harshly.

The paper employs Suits index and regression analysis to investigate the relationship between the amount stolen and jail time. The index which is based on Lorenz curve is used to verify whether punishment for theft cases prosecuted in Ghana is anti‐petty theft, neutral, or anti‐serious theft. The regression analysis is used to explore the determinants of punishment per unit of the crime (i.e. amount stolen).

The results strongly support the claim that disproportionate penalty is assigned to petty thefts committed mostly by the poor and non‐elites. Moreover, the regression line which is almost a perfect fit indicates penalty per unit of the amount stolen decreases by 0.8 percent if the total amount stolen increases by 1 percent.

Due to poor records on criminals, there was very limited information on recidivism, hence this was not considered in the analysis. Second, there are much more theft convictions each year in Ghana than the sample represents. However, since the convicted cases used are random, the results are reliable enough.

Granting enormous discretionary powers to judges in developing countries may not guarantee retributive justice. Indeed the judiciary is likely to grant favours to elites who steal more and punish the poor who normally engage in petty theft disproportionately. Consequently, high discretionary powers to judges could potentially result in high blue and white collar crimes.

The paper makes a novel attempt at employing Suits index and regression analysis to verify the feasibility of retributive justice in the presence of unlimited discretionary powers.

Justification for, and implementation of, jail and prison library service is often based on philosophies that aim to ostensibly “correct” a person’s moral character and “improve” their potential as a productive member of society. These models tend to overlook people’s racial and cultural knowledges, ignore people’s existing humanity, and disregard or fail to acknowledge the racist systems of policing and institutionalization that are often responsible for someone landing in a carceral setting. Models that do not normalize policing, criminalization, and incarceration are needed in order for jail and prison library services to be meaningful to incarcerated patrons.

This chapter draws from the authors’ experience with local level jails to develop a patron-centered model of library services. Patron-centered services prioritize the humanity and interests of patrons who are incarcerated. By centering a recognition of patrons’ humanity and engaging in collection development as a shared process, patron-centered services resist white supremacy and the reiteration of carceral logics of rehabilitation or punishment. The chapter includes a description of on the ground services, a review of the overarching approaches to library services in carceral settings, the ways in which librarians dehumanize their patrons through narratives of exceptionalism, and a model for implementing and evaluating patron-centered services.

Discussion of the 2016 electorate has centered on two poles: results of public opinion and voter surveys that attempt to tease out whether racial, cultural, or economic grievances were the prime drivers behind the Trump vote and analyses that tie major shifts in the political economy to consequential shifts in the voting behavior of certain demographic and geographic groups. Both approaches render invisible a major development since the 1970s that has been transforming the political, social, and economic landscape of wide swaths of people who do not reside in major urban areas or their prosperous suburban rings: the emergence and consolidation of the carceral state. This chapter sketches out some key contours of the carceral state that have been transforming the polity and economy for poor and working-class people, with a particular focus on rural areas and the declining Rust Belt. It is meant as a correction to the stilted portrait of these groups that congealed in the aftermath of the 2016 election, thanks to their pivotal contribution to Trump's victory. This chapter is not an alternative causal explanation that identifies the carceral state as the key factor in the 2016 election. Rather, it is a call to aggressively widen the analytical lens of studies of the carceral state, which have tended to focus on communities of color in urban areas.