Corrections Today

The new MindTap for the text offers customizable content, course analytics, an eBook and an applied learning experience -- all within your current learning management system. MindTap prepares students to make the kind of reasoned, real-world decisions they will need to make as future professionals. With an array of assets, including concepts clearly linked to learning objectives and Bloom's Taxonomy levels, MindTap is perfectly suited for today's criminal justice students -- engaging them, guiding them toward mastery of basic concepts and advancing their critical thinking abilities.

Gripping, current high-profile cases are the subject of the text's real-life chapter opening vignettes, which capture student interest and encourage reading. Chapter six, for example, depicts a recent high-profile prison escape in which a man serving life for killing someone with a bomb explosion uses battery acid to deteriorate the window-frame of his cell.

"TechnoCorrections" boxes provide comprehensive information about the latest technologies in corrections. Topics include using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to mimic the capabilities of human beings and the use of electronic monitoring to reduce the recidivism of individuals involved in gang-related crime, sex offenses or intimate partner violence.

"Evidence-Based Corrections" boxes highlight evidence-based policies and practices in the field of corrections. For example, chapter one highlights Project BUILD, a violence prevention curriculum designed to help youth in detention overcome problems they may face in their communities, such as gangs, crime and drugs.

Careers in corrections are highlighted in every chapter with such features as "Voices Across the Professions," which includes interviews of working professionals, and "Thinking Like a Corrections Professional" activities that challenge students to think critically and solve problems about dilemmas a corrections professional is likely to face on the job.

"Correctional Life" inserts give students a firsthand glimpse of what it is like "inside" prisons of the past or the present. Provocative "Myth/Fact" boxes present popular myths (i.e., prison rehabilitation efforts are a failure) followed by a fact that has been supported by research in the field. These features are designed to generate lively discussion and debate in the classroom.

New and expanded coverage of hot topics includes discussions of the following: the increase in the use of private prisons and new policies to reduce privatization in the field of corrections, restorative justice programs, re-entry programs, alternatives to incarceration, the effect of correctional technologies on recidivism, prison overcrowding, special offender populations, mental health issues, COVID-19, changes in sentencing guidelines, policies to protect incarcerated transgender individuals and more.

Consolidation of the previously separate chapters on male and female prisons to encompass gender in prisons makes the 5th Edition more inclusive and more focused. The text features 13 chapters organized into four logical parts.

The "Voices Across the Professions" feature showcases experiences and profiles of current working corrections professionals who discuss what it's like to work in the field of corrections. This feature, which presents interviews with the professionals, is now more thoroughly integrated throughout the text, and most are completely new to this edition. Profiles include a juvenile probation/parole specialist, a correctional officer at a large jail, a housing unit correctional officer at an all-female prison and a parole officer/former hostage negotiator.