(ISSN 1530 – 3012)
- From the editor
- Prison Stories II: Poems from a Worker in the Prison-Industrial Complex
- The New Penology Revisited: The Criminalization of Immigration as a Pacification Strategy
- Determinants of Migrant Perceptions of the Police: The attributes of race, trust and legitimacy
- A Tribal-State Approach to the Reduction of Criminal Disparity among American Indian Youth in Maine
- A model prison for the next 50 years: The high-tech, public-private Shimane Asahi Rehabilitation Center
- Of Course We Are Crazy: Discrimination of Native American Indians Through Criminal Justice
Welcome to the Spring 2014 issue of the Justice Policy Journal. Here in the editorial offices we have been swamped with submissions — a great position to be able to bring you the latest research in justice policy. This issue begins with a series of poems from a previous contributor, two articles each on the topics of immigration/migrants and Native Americans and justice systems, and a final article on a novel new prison built in Japan.
First up, Dahn Shaulis in Prison Stories II: Poems from a Worker in the Prison Industrial Complex provides readers with several original poem based on his experiences moving from the field of sociology to working as a prison guard to eventually assuming the role of case worker in the criminal justice system. His poems cover a range of topics from the effects of the brutalization of the prison system, to mental health treatment in the system to worker burnout. For anyone interested in understanding the criminal justice system from the perspective of someone who worked on the inside, Shaulis’ poems provide insightful analysis of some of the most pressing issues facing the U.S. prison system.
Alissa Ackerman, Meghan Sacks, and Rich Furman author our second article titled The New Penology Revisited: The Criminalization of Immigration as a Pacification Strategy that traces how the new penology has shaped immigration policy in the U.S. By tracing the impact of the new penology on immigration, Ackerman and her colleagues show that immigrants face criminalization largely as a pacification strategy. This pacification in turn provides the basis for the popularity of new penology strategies in immigration enforcement.
Stephen Egharevba provides our third article titled Determinants of Migrant Perceptions of the Police: The attributes of race, trust and legitimacy. In it, he outlines the factors that determine police civility amongst migrants in Finland. Based on an analysis of interviews with African migrants, he reveals that encounters between police and immigrants are the main determinants of migrants’ perceptions. Further, he shows that immigration status affects trust in police, demonstrating how socio-cultural structures of immigrants contributes to perceptions.
Fourth, Eileen Luna-Firebaugh and Mary Jo Tipppeconnic Fox explain how alienation from education impacts the criminal justice experiences of Native American youth in Education: A Tribal-State Approach to the Reduction of Criminal Disparity among American Indian Youth in Maine. The authors researched two different types of education programs meant to retain Native American youth. They found that only the program that included traditional Native values and cultural in systems of mainstream education resulted in retention of Native American youth. Their evidence demonstrates that novel approaches foregrounding traditional and cultural approaches to education are necessary to reduce the criminal justice system involvement and enhance educational outcomes for tribal youth.
Fifth up is an article by Paul Leighton titled ‘A model prison for the next 50 years’: The high-tech, public-private Shimane Asahi Rehabilitation Center. Leighton uses the declining incarceration rate in the U.S. to rethink the mode of the prison and traces how the Shimane Asahi Rehabilitation Center operates in Japan. This prison provides a new type of prison based on the privatization of “social infrastructure.” Using a public-private partnership, the prison uses technology and a hose of education, therapeutic and educational programs to accomplish its goals. Further, instead of separating itself from the community, it provides a center for community engagement and utilizes local resources.
Finally, Scott Tighe is the author of our fifth article titled ‘Of Course We Are Crazy’: Discrimination of Native American Indians Through Criminal Justice. In it, he traces how the broader forces of discrimination impact Native Americans. Showing the challenges that Native Americans face, he complicates this picture by showing the way that a criminal conviction further complicates educational, housing, and job prospects. He argues that restoring cultural competence is necessary in order to solve the role that racial discrimination plays in the foundation of Native American social challenges.
Happy reading!
Elizabeth Brown and Randall Shelden
Prison Stories II: Poems from a Worker in the Prison Industrial ComplexBy Dahn Shaulis
In 2008, Justice Policy Journal published a compilation of Shaulis’ short ethnographic stories about prison work. Those vignettes were based on thousands of notes he wrote while working for the Nevada Department of Corrections from 2000 to 2007. These poems are also based on the same notes, and crystallize many of the issues still found in the US prison system today, including brutalization effects, bureaucracy, prisoners’ families, mental health treatment, objectification of prisoners, gangs, hepatitis, sexual assault and other forms of violence, warehousing, and worker burnout.
The New Penology Revisited: The Criminalization of Immigration as a Pacification StrategyBy Alissa R. Ackerman, Meghan Sacks, and Rich Furman
The New Penology is a set of criminal justice policies that focuses on risk management and control of certain groups of people. Scholars have noted the existence of these strategies since the early 1990s. One population for whom these strategies is most apparent is undocumented immigrants in the United States. First, this article outlines the new penology as it related to undocumented immigrants. Next, it offers an explanation of pacification strategies as they relate to policy and finally, the article provides a new theoretical explanation for current immigration policy. The authors argue that pacification strategies lead to the existence and popularity of new penological strategies.
Determinants of Migrant Perceptions of the Police: The attributes of race, trust and legitimacyBy Stephen Egharevba
This article examines those factors that determine migrants’ perception of police civility in Turku. The data on which this analysis is based consists of sixty-five immigrants; however, the analysis is based on thirty-five interviews, out of the total participants especially among those who have resided in the country for a certain number of years with resident, permanent permits and nationality status. The findings indicated that Police and immigrants’ encounters are the main determinant of the general attitude toward the police. Furthermore, naturalised respondents had the highest trust towards the police while the refugees and students have the lowest trust in the police.
Education: A Tribal-State Approach to the Reduction of Criminal Disparity among American Indian Youth in MaineBy Eileen Luna-Firebaugh and Mary Jo Tippeconnic Fox
This paper focuses on tribes in the state of Maine. It references extensive research published by Education World in 2000 to provide an important perspective into the history of the development of an educational approach and programs to divert youth from criminal conduct. Research presented in this article was conducted, with the assistance of Maine State tribal members, in June of 2012. This research determined that the mainstream approach recommended by Education World had little effect on the education or retention of Native American youth in public secondary schools. However, the inclusion of traditional values and culture which includes Native approaches within systems of mainstream education does appear to increase the retention of American Indian youth in high school and affects their subsequent educational progress.
“A model prison for the next 50 years”: The high-tech, public-private Shimane Asahi Rehabilitation CenterBy Paul Leighton
The declining incarceration rate in America provides an opportunity to rethink the quality of prisons and ask: If you were told that your neighbors were newly released prisoners, what kind of institution would you want them to have served time in? One positive model of prison is a high-tech, public-private partnership prison that embraces rehabilitation, reentry and restorative justice – and that also strives to have the local community as a partner. The article reports on a visit to Shimane Asahi rehabilitation center in Japan. It provides background on the prison and Japan’s experiment with privatizing “social infrastructure.” The article then describes the involvement of the private sector and the infusion of technology, including tracking, scanners, and automated food delivery. Next, it provides an overview of numerous educational, therapeutic, and vocational programs. Finally, it discusses how the prison has a center for community engagement and makes many efforts to utilize the resources of the local region.
‘Of Course We Are Crazy’: Discrimination of Native American Indians Through Criminal JusticeBy Scott Tighe
Native Americans are the most economically impoverished ethnic group in the United States. Fewer educational opportunities, high unemployment, permanent residency issues, homelessness, mental illness, substance abuse, and geographic isolation are realities and challenges that contribute to the proliferation of social problems experienced by Native Americans. Application of discrimination theory provides an understanding of how racial discrimination is the foundation of the social challenges Native Americans face. One solution to lessen the challenges that Native Americans experience is the restoration of their core cultural competencies.