In 1993, teenagers Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley, Jr. - who have come to be known as the West Memphis Three - were arrested for the murders of three eight-year-old boys in Arkansas. The ensuing trial was marked by tampered evidence, false testimony, and public hysteria. Baldwin and Misskelley were sentenced to life in prison, while eighteen-year-old Echols, deemed the 'ringleader,' was sentenced to death. Over the next two decades, the three men became known worldwide as a...
A brilliant, high concept, intensely gripping thriller perfect for fans of GIRL A, THE CAPTIVE will keep you guessing till the very end . . .'Part thriller, part dark, unpredictable love story. A GRIPPING page-turner' ADELE PARKS, Platinum Magazine'INGENIOUS. A smart, pacy and highly entertaining thriller' T.M. LOGAN______________________Hannah knows the cage intimately. Small, the size of a shopping centre parking space. A bed, a basin, a table and chair. A hatch and metal drawer through which...
With passion and precision, Exile and Embrace examines the key elements of the religious debates over capital punishment and shows how they reflect the values and self-understandings of contemporary Americans. Santoro demonstrates that capital punishment has relatively little to do with the perpetrators and much more to do with those who would impose the punishment. Because of this, he convincingly argues, we should focus our attention not on the perpetrators and victims, as is typically the cas...
No Winners Here Tonight (Series on Law, Society, and Politics in the Midwest)
by Andrew Welsh-Huggins
Few subjects are as intensely debated in the United States as the death penalty. Some form of capital punishment has existed in America for hundreds of years, yet the justification for carrying out the ultimate sentence is a continuing source of controversy. No Winners Here Tonight explores the history of the death penalty and the question of its fairness through the experience of a single state, Ohio, which, despite its moderate midwestern values, has long had one of the country's most active d...
Treatment for Crime (Engaging Philosophy)
Preventing recidivism is one of the aims of criminal justice, yet existing means of pursuing this aim are often poorly effective, highly restrictive of basic freedoms, and significantly harmful. Incarceration, for example, tends to be disruptive of personal relationships and careers, detrimental to physical and mental health, restrictive of freedom of movement, and rarely more than modestly effective at preventing recidivism. Crime-preventing neurointerventions (CPNs) are increasingly being advo...
*THE GRIPPING NEW DRAMA AS SEEN ON NETFLIX*South Africa, 1987. Apartheid. When Leon, a white 19-year-old prison guard working on death row commits an inexplicable act of violence, killing seven black men in a hail of bullets, the outcome of the trial - and the court’s sentence - seems a foregone conclusion.Hotshot lawyer John Weber (played by Steve Coogan) reluctantly takes on the seemingly unwinnable case. A passionate opponent of the death penalty, John discovers that young Leon worked on deat...
Argues that mass incarceration is slavery’s legacy and exposes today’s penal system where structural racism and state sanctioned violence keep Black women contained. For centuries, Black women have experienced extreme rates of arrest, conviction, and incarceration in the nation’s jails and prisons. Thousands of enslaved and free African American women were held captive in private slave jails, public jails, and antebellum prisons. Today, Black women continue to overpopulate the criminal (in)just...
Short-listed for the 2000 Arthur Ellis Award for Best Non-Fiction Norman "Red" Ryan was a notorious bank robber, safecracker, and killer. He escaped from Kingston Penitentiary twice - first by force, and then years later by gulling the credulous into believing that he was "reformed." The dupes of Ryan's second emancipation included the prison's Roman Catholic chaplain, several nationally prominent citizens, the country's largest newspaper, and, ultimately, R.B. Bennett, the prime minister of C...
With her characteristic brilliance, grace and radical audacity, Angela Y. Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of the prison. As she quite correctly notes, American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. For generations of Americans, the abolition of slavery was sheerest illusion. Similarly,the entrenched system of racial segregation seemed to...
Prisons and Health in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Studies Crime AMD Public Policy)
by Jason Schnittker, Professor of Sociology Michael Massoglia, and Christopher Uggen
A comprehensive examination of the connection between mass incarceration and health In an age when over two million people are incarcerated in the United States alone, the wide-reaching impact of prisons in our society is impossible to deny, and the paradoxical relationship between prisons and health has never been more controversial. Prisons are charged at the same time with being punitive and therapeutic, with denying freedom and administering treatment, with confining and rehabilitating. And...
The Ride tells the shocking true story of the 1997 abduction and gruesome murder of ten-year-old Massachusetts resident Jeffrey Curley, and how his father, Bob, healed the deep wounds of rage and emerged to become an outspoken critic of the death penalty.
Documents the author's discovery that his new family home in Florence had been the scene of a double murder, his relationship with the investigative journalist co-author, and how they both became targets of the police investigation into the murders.
Prisons and Punishment in America (Contemporary Debates)
by Michael O'Hear
Synthesizing the latest scholarship in law and the social sciences on criminal sentencing and corrections, this book provides a thorough, balanced, and accessible survey of the major policy issues in these fields of persistent public interest and political debate. After three decades of explosive growth, the American incarceration rate is impracticably high. Drawing on leading research in law and the social sciences, this book covers a range of topics in sentencing and corrections in America in...
We call it justice - the assassination of Osama bin Laden, the incarceration of corrupt politicians or financiers like Rod Blagojevich and Bernard Madoff, and the climactic slaying of cinema-screen villains by superheroes. But could we not also call it revenge? We are told that revenge is uncivilized and immoral, an impulse that individuals and societies should actively repress and replace with the order and codes of courtroom justice. What, if anything, distinguishes punishment at the hands of...
Among the Lowest of the Dead (Law, Meaning, and Violence)
by Von Drehle David
Utilising individual interviews and focus group discussions, primarily from two Chinese cities, The Chinese Mafia: Organized Crime, Corruption, and Extra-Legal Protection contributes to the understanding of organized crime and corruption in the Chinese context, filling a significant gap in criminological literature, by investigating how extra-legal protectors-corrupt public officials and street gangsters-emerge, evolve and operate in a rapidly changing society. China's economic reforms have bee...
Side-by-side, time-lapse photos and interviews, separated by twenty-five years, of people serving life sentences in prison, by the bestselling author of The Little Book of Restorative Justice"Shows the remarkable resilience of people sentenced to die in prison and raises profound questions about a system of punishment that has no means of recognizing the potential of people to change." -Marc Mauer, senior adviser, The Sentencing Project, and co-author (with Ashley Nellis) of The Meaning of Life...