Book Review: Breaking and Entering: Burglars on Burglary

AuthorJennifer M. Overstreet
Published date01 May 2005
Date01 May 2005
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1177/0734016805275694
Subject MatterArticles
In Section 5, the first essay concludes that mentally ill inmates do not receive proper treat-
ment. The second essay shows that the treatment for women was deficient in prisons in the
state of Washington. The third essay demonstrates that Hepatitis C is an epidemic in prisons.
The fourth essay suggests that inmates are dying from neglect in private prisons. The fifth
essay says that prisoners with HIV are deprived proper medical care. The sixth essay argues
that prisons hire incompetent doctors in Florida. The last essay shows how a prison donor
blood clinic operated without proper safety measures.
The first essay in Section 6 shows that inmates are being tortured and killed via the
restraint chair. The second essay shows howguards brutalized inmates at the Supermax Fed-
eral Prison in Florence, Colorado. The third essay charges that state authorities showed total
deliberateindifference to prisoner-on-prisoner rape. The fourth essay argues that correctional
administrators and officers engaged in lies and cover-upsat Corcoran prison to hide killings
and torture. The fifth essay describes how the guards were acquitted of rape at Corcoran
prison, in spite of an abundance of evidence to convict. The sixth essay establishes that male
guards consistently sexually abuse women inmates at the Corrections Corporation of Amer-
ica prisons. The seventh essay shows how guards at the Washington Correction Center for
Women had sexual relationships with inmates and were not prosecuted. The eighth essay
examines the INS detainees’hunger strike to draw attention to illegal detention. The last two
essays describe how a County DAin Pennsylvania would not prosecute correctional guards.
The first essay in Section 7 shows howprison litigation changed from 1950 through 2000,
from the hands off, to the hands on, to a “gloves on” approach to judicial oversight; the
“gloves on” approach limits prisoners’ rights. The second essay examines how the federal
court system has made it difficult for inmates to address challenges to the conditions of their
confinement. The last essay argues that the law is a repressive tool used by elites to suppress
the poor.
This book gives an overall left-leaning approach to the American prison system, pointing
out the inhumanity that exists within it. It convincingly makes the point that the United States
is a prison nation that warehouses its poor and throwsaway citizens in the name of economic,
social, and political exploitation. The quest for justice is not achieved within the U.S. prison
system.
Bruce Wilson
Governors State University
Breaking and Entering: Burglars on Burglary (2nd ed.), by Paul F. Cromwell and James N.
Olson. Belmont, CA: Thompson/Wadsworth, 2004, 122 pp.
DOI: 10.1177/0734016805275694
Cromwell and Olson delve into the world of burglary with the assistanceof 30 burglarsin a
southwestern city of 250,000 in the United States. The authors’chief purpose was to examine
the thought processes of burglars to determine whether they perceivedthreats from the crimi-
nal justice system when calculating the risks and rewards of their crimes. In their seven-chap-
ter book, the authors observed the motives behind burglars’ lifestyle, what the burglars did
102 Criminal Justice Review

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