Ecuador prison riots will increase spending pressures

Headline ECUADOR: Prison riots will increase spending pressures

Containing the Surplus Rebellion: Prison Strike/Prison Riot

The 2016 and 2018 wave of prison strikes in the United States presents itself as an extraordinary flashpoint of the prisoner resistance movement. But how might these events be understood in relation to what has been broadly characterized as an “age of riots”? Following Joshua Clover’s characterization of the contemporary riot in Riot. Strike. Riot. as a “surplus rebellion” of racialized “surplus populations” and given the characterization of the contemporary carceral state as a warehouse to contain such racialized populations, this essay characterizes the contemporary wave of prison riots accordingly as a “surplus rebellion.” More specifically, it focuses on the Kinross prison strike-riot that broke out in September 2016 in Michigan’s Kinross prison in order to derive some general parallels between the surplus rebellion and the singularity of recent prison strikes.

Enforcement of Custodial Sentence in the Light of Who Guidelines During the Covid-19 Pandemic in Poland on the Example of the Correctional Facility in Chełm

During the Covid-19 pandemic, most of the rights of prisoners were clearly limited. These restrictions temporarily affected, among others, visits, out-of-prison employment, prison furloughs and access to religious services. The introduced restrictions significantly increased dissatisfaction among prisoners, which manifested in prison riots in Poland (e.g. in Chełm) and abroad. It should be noted, however, that the full exercise of all the rights and freedoms of prisoners in the conditions of pandemic is not possible, even if compliance with the WHO guidelines set out in the document of 15 March 2020 is ensured. These guidance has been followed rightfully in practice by most Polish prisons and pre-trial detention centres and there have been no reports of serious coronavirus disease outbreaks.

Prison Riots in Nicaragua: Negotiating Co-Governance Amid Creative Violence and Public Secrecy

In this article, I explore how prison riots, large critical incidents of a collective order, emerge, take place, and alter governance relations in place in the Nicaraguan prison system. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted with prisoners and former prisoners of two Nicaraguan prison facilities, I provide a prisoners’ point of view on the political use of violence in prison, particularly during two large prison riots. While authorities often held that prison conditions combined with the “violent attitudes” of prisoners turned prisons into “powder kegs,” such an interpretation does not allow for an understanding of riots as embedded in prison governance structures and conveniently draws the attention away from underlying issues pertaining to the de facto sharing of power in prison in Nicaragua. I argue that by using what has been termed “creative violence,” prisoners attempt to break through the authorities’ imposed regime of public secrecy and draw attention to these issues, forcing authorities to negotiate. Yet, even if riots then function as a catalyst for changes in co-governance arrangements, they do not appear to be geared at permanently damaging or annihilating the existing arrangements but rather at pressuring the authorities hard enough to make compromises and concessions as to the distribution of power in prison.

Death toll mounts in gang-led Brazil prison riots

Headline BRAZIL: Death toll mounts in gang-led prison riots

The Crime Wave and the War against Discretionary Justice in the 1920s

The welcoming environment that New York had provided for Progressive penology turned hostile in the 1920s, when fear of a crime wave led to an all-out attack on discretionary justice. Scathing accounts of the governor’s pardon power and the Parole Board’s release of prisoners serving indeterminate sentences appeared in the press, and in 1926 draconian mandatory sentencing statutes, known as the Baumes laws, clipped the board’s capacity to parole repeat offenders, yet nothing short of constitutional change could remove the chief executive’s powers. This chapter traces how a spate of prison riots in 1929 helped prompt a compromise between the Republican legislature and Democratic governor Franklin D. Roosevelt. This resulted in a revamped board geared to operate with business efficiency. Thus, a measure of sentencing discretion was restored, while the governor retained sole authority to reprieve and commute death sentences.

Prison Riots

This essay provides an overview of prison riots, the possible stages of a riot, and a historical account of the incidence of riots in the United States as well as cross-nationally since the early twentieth century (including finer discussions of the most serious riots and their implications). Theories of prison riots are presented and critiqued in terms of their applicability to the most serious riots in the past half-century. Within this discussion, attention is paid to how prison conditions might influence the chance of a prison riot. Actual riots develop in a dynamic relationship between rioting inmates and prison authorities and, as a result, pre-riot factors, such as inmate ideologies, can help explain the course of a riot but not completely. The essay concludes with a brief discussion of riot preparedness and effective guidelines for preventing the escalation of riots to the hostage stage.