Innovation of the Current Book

• Jurisdiction: United States

Innovation of the Current Book

Most existing books about prisoners' rights and correctional law are fairly narrow in scope and do not situate the discussion of prisoner rights into a broader penological context of corrections or criminal justice. Other texts are appropriate for law students but too sophisticated for an introductory level college course. Furthermore, those texts that do integrate prisoner rights and correctional law into a broader discussion of corrections tend to do so in a cursory manner, thus leaving out many important legal issues, relevant federal statutes, and significant cases. Furthermore, a theoretical framework that will enable readers to better understand the rationale behind the laws that pertain to correctional practice is absent.

With over two million individuals currently incarcerated and another 5.1 million under community supervision (both probation and parole), the nation's correctional population reaches an astonishing number of over 7.3 million people under some form of correctional supervision/treatment. This is about 1 in every 31 adults. As a consequence of this reality, there are tens of thousands of lawsuits, both civil rights and torts based, filed every year by convicted criminals. Aside from the impact on the prisoners, the holdings of those cases with merit (as well as the sheer number of lawsuits) affects the lives of correction officers, correction administrators, judges, attorneys, and the general public. In this regard, a comprehensive discussion of prisoner rights is necessary to any textbook on corrections. Correctional Management and the Law: A Penological Approach integrates a broad and detailed discussion of prisoner rights in a manner not previously offered, while proposing a theoretical framework that will enable readers to better understand the social, penological and administrative rationale behind relevant laws and judicial decisions, as well as their impact on current and future correctional practices.

In terms of prisoner rights, Correctional Management and the Law: A Penological Approach begins with a short discussion on the goals of...