Hard Time: A Fresh Look at Understanding and Reforming the Prison

Hard Time: A Fresh Look at Understanding and Reforming the Prison, 4th Edition, is a revised and updated version of the highly successful text addressing the origins, evolution, and promise of America’s penal system.

• Draws from both ethnographic and professional material, and situates the prison experience within both contemporary and historical contexts
• Features first person accounts from male and female inmates and staff, revealing what it’s actually like to live and work in prison
• Includes all-new chapters on prison reform and on supermax correctional facilities, including the latest research on confinement, long-term segregation, and death row
• Explores a wide range of topics, including the nature of prison as punishment; prisoner personality types and coping strategies; gang violence; prison officers’ custodial duties; and psychological, educational, and work programs 
• Develops policy recommendations for the future based on qualitative and quantitative research and evidence-based initiatives

Robert Johnson is a Professor of Justice, Law and Criminology at American University, Washington, D.C., and Editor and Publisher of BleakHouse Publishing. His publications include Death Work: A Study of the Modern Execution Process, which won the Outstanding Book Award of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.

Ann Marie Rocheleau is an Associate Professor at Stonehill College, Easton, Massachusetts. She collaborated on research studies on adult and juvenile corrections, community policing, and drug purchase for the National Institute of Justice and the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Alison B. Martin is a Policy Analyst with the Council of State Governments Justice Center. She is the co-author of Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship the World Over and Gay and Lesbian Communities the World Over. 

The book includes a Foreword by Francis T. Cullen, Professor of Criminal Justice and Sociology at the University of Cincinnati and an Afterword by Alison Libeling, University Lecturer and Director of the Prisons Research Centre at the Cambridge University Institute of Criminology.