John Irwin – författare

John Irwin writes about prisons from an unusual academic perspective. Before receiving a Ph.D. in sociology, he served five years in a California state penitentiary for armed robbery. This is his sixth book on imprisonment – an ethnography of prisoners who have served more than twenty years in a California correctional institution. The purpose of the book is to take issue with the conventional wisdom on homicide, society’s purposes of imprisonment, and offenders’ reformability. Through the lifers’ stories, he reveals what happens to prisoners serving very long sentences in correctional facilities and what this should tell us about effective sentencing policy.

John Irwin writes about prisons from an unusual academic perspective. Before receiving a Ph.D. in sociology, he served five years in a California state penitentiary for armed robbery. This is his sixth book on imprisonment – an ethnography of prisoners who have served more than twenty years in a California correctional institution. The purpose of the book is to take issue with the conventional wisdom on homicide, society’s purposes of imprisonment, and offenders’ reformability. Through the lifers’ stories, he reveals what happens to prisoners serving very long sentences in correctional facilities and what this should tell us about effective sentencing policy.

Based on in-depth interviews and two years of participant observation of felons, this book traces the career paths of such criminal types as the thief, the hustler, and the junkie, as well as the non-criminal 'square john'. The career of the felon, from early environment to crime to prison to parole, is explored from the point of view of the felon himself, a viewpoint seldom considered by the 'straight' society in which the felon must learn to function. Since its first publication, "The Felon" has quickly become a classic of criminal sociology. For this new edition the author has prepared a preface assessing the changes that have occurred since the book first appeared. Engaging and readable, Irwin's description of the life of felons and his conclusions about the role of prisons in our society remain convincing and topical today.

The path away from America's prison crisis may lead through the jail. While there may be many positive aspects of jails as sites of confinement, especially when compared with the prisons of mass incarceration, Irwin's analysis pointed to features that could make the new jail-based version of mass incarceration even worse. The local nature and relative obscurity of jails means that the level of legal review and due process obtainable in prisons through the persistent efforts of civil rights lawyers may be even harder to maintain in jails. The historic focus of jails on what Irwin called "rabble management" threatens to undermine the opportunity presented by the present prison crisis to rethink America's overreliance on confinement of all kinds (whether prisons, jails, or immigration detention centers). If so, it is vital that those of us committed to reversing the destructive effects of mass incarceration on American democracy and social equality expand our concern and our research from prisons to the jails that may replace them. The re-publication of John Irwin's The Jail: Managing the Underclass in American Society is a most timely aid to that mission.--From the foreword by Jonathan Simon

Wyatt Prunty's poems have been described as "quiet, reflective, and of unexpected depth" (Howard Nemerov), "both artful and truthful" (Donald Justice), "a triumph of controlled and understated but powerful emotion" (Anthony Hecht), and "illuminated by a language both skewed and precise" (Walker Percy). As a poet, Prunty-who is also the founder and director of the Sewanee Writers' Conference-has been praised for "his powerful imagination in the specifics of ordinary details, suggesting persuasively that the near at hand is as unexplored and full of wonder as the far ends of the universe" ( Publishers Weekly) and called "one of the most gifted and technically accomplished American poets of the post-World War II generation" ( Southern Review).An elegant overview of his career until now, Unarmed and DANGEROUS: New and Selected Poems features selections from Wyatt Prunty's five previous books- The Times Between (1982); What Women Know, What Men Believe (1986); Balance as Belief (1989); Run of the House (1993); and Since the Noon Mail Stopped (1997), all published by the Johns Hopkins University Press-as well as new poems that demonstrate the poet's wide-ranging and sympathetic imagination. Prunty's new work includes moving evocations of childhood ("A Child's Christmas in Georgia, 1953"), richly detailed poems about ordinary people and situations ("The Downtown Bus"), and even a probing meditation on the fairy tale "Jack and the Beanstalk" ("Annals of Jack"). Together, the poems gathered in this volume afford a clear portrait of a major American poet whose distinctive voice and vision have earned him the admiration and respect of such contemporaries as Richard Wilbur, X. J. Kennedy, and Mark Strand and marked him as "a writer who has mastered his craft, [a] poet [who] can look at the life most of us take for granted and show us what is most real, most precious in it" ( The Commercial Appeal).