The second edition of the Handbook on Prisons provides a completely revised and updated collection of essays on a wide range of topics concerning prisons and imprisonment. Bringing together three of the leading prison scholars in the UK as editors, this new volume builds on the success of the first edition and reveals the range and depth of prison scholarship around the world. The Handbook contains chapters written not only by those who have established and developed prison research, but also features contributions from ex-prisoners, prison governors and ex-governors, prison inspectors and others who have worked with prisoners in a wide range of professional capacities. This second edition includes several completely new chapters on topics as diverse as prison design, technology in prisons, the high security estate, therapeutic communities, prisons and desistance, supermax and solitary confinement, plus a brand new section on international perspectives. The Handbook aims to convey the reality of imprisonment, and to reflect the main issues and debates surrounding prisons and prisoners, while also providing novel ways of thinking about familiar penal problems and enhancing our theoretical understanding of imprisonment. The Handbook on Prisons, Second edition is a key text for students taking courses in prisons, penology, criminal justice, criminology and related subjects, and is also an essential reference for academics and practitioners working in the prison service, or in related agencies, who need up-to-date knowledge of thinking on prisons and imprisonment.

This book interrogates Conservative government penal policy for adult and young adult offenders in England and Wales between 2015 and 2021. Government penal policy is shown to have been often ineffective and costly, and to have revived efforts to push the system towards a disastrous combination of austerity, outsourcing and punishment that has exacerbated the penal crisis. This investigation has meant touching on topical debates dealing with the impact of resource scarcity on offenders' experiences of the penal system, the impact of an increasing emphasis on punishment on offenders’ sense of justice and fairness, the balance struck between infection control and offender welfare during the government handling of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and why successive Conservative governments have intransigently pursued a penal policy that has proved crisis-exacerbating. The overall conclusion reached is that penal policy is too important to be left to governments alone and needs to be recalibrated by a one-off inquiry, complemented by an on-going advisory body capable of requiring governments to ‘explain or change’. The book is distinctive in that it provides a critical review of penal policy change, whist combining this with insights derived from the sociological analysis of penal trends.