Scandals at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo signal alarming changes in America’s attitudes toward criminals, punishment, and democratic ideals The statistics are startling. Since 1973, America’s imprisonment rate has multiplied over five times to become the highest in the world. More than two million inmates reside in state and federal prisons. What does this say about our attitudes toward criminals and punishment? What does it say about us? This book explores the cultural evolution of punishment pra...
For nearly 40 years the United States has been gripped by policies that have placed more than 2.5 million Americans in jails and prisons designed to hold a fraction of that number of inmates. Our prisons are not only vast and overcrowded, they are degrading. Mass Incarceration on Trial examines a series of landmark decisions about prison conditions that has opened an unexpected escape route from this trap of tough on crime' politics. This set of rulings points toward values that could restore le...
Mental Disability, Violence, and Future Dangerousness
by John Weston Parry
Law, Drugs and the Politics of Childhood (New Advances in Crime and Social Harm)
by Simon Flacks
Debates about the regulation of drugs are inseparable from talk of children and the young. Yet how has this association come to be so strong, and why does it have so much explanatory, rhetorical and political force? The premise for this book is that the relationship between drugs and childhood merits more exploration beyond simply pointing out that children and drugs are both ‘things we tend to get worried about’. It asks what is at stake when legislators, lobbyists and decision-makers revert to...
The controversial New York City police commissioner and New York Times bestselling author of The Lost Son shares the story of his fall from grace and the effects of his incarceration on his views of the American justice system. Bernard Kerik was New York City's police commissioner during the 9/11 attacks, and became an American hero as he led the NYPD through rescue and recovery efforts of the World Trade Center. His resume as a public servant is long and storied, and includes receiving a Medal...
For twelve years, criminal law professor and leading retributivist Robert Blecker wandered freely inside Lorton Central Prison, armed only with cigarettes, a tape recorder, and the prisoners' trust, probing the lives and crimes of street criminals. After decades of visiting death rows and prisons around the country, speaking with both guards and convicted killers, he began to better understand who did and did not deserve to die. While liberal activists decry the death penalty as unnecessarily ex...
London had many places of execution: Tyburn, of course, but also Smithfield, Wapping, Kennington, Tower Hill and Charing Cross among others. All of these venues allowed the public to participate - whether in approval or opposition - and, in the opinion of the authorities, provided deterrence at a time when even trivial offences carried the death penalty. Author Robert Bard surveys the capital's places of execution and seeks to explain the prevailing appetite of the authorities and the public for...
In the 1980s, a series of child sex abuse cases rocked the United States. The most famous case was the 1984 McMartin preschool case, but there were a number of others as well. By the latter part of the decade, the assumption was widespread that child sex abuse had become a serious problem in America. Yet within a few years, the concern about it died down considerably. The failure to convict anyone in the McMartin case and a widely publicized appellate decision in New Jersey that freed an accus...
A critical examination of how contemporary criminal justice reforms expand rather than shrink structurally violent systems of policing, surveillance, and carceral control in the United States. Public opposition to the structural racist, gendered, and economic violence that fuels the criminal legal system is reaching a critical mass. Ignited by popular uprisings, protests, and campaigns against state violence, demands for transformational change have escalated. In response, a now deeply entre...
Little Book of Restorative Justice (Justice and Peacebuilding)
by Howard Zehr
Howard Zehr is the father of Restorative Justice and is known worldwide for his pioneering work in transforming understandings of justice. Here he proposes workable principles and practices for making Restorative Justice possible in this revised and updated edition of his bestselling, seminal book on the movement. (The original edition has sold more than 110,000 copies.) Restorative Justice, with its emphasis on identifying the justice needs of everyone involved in a crime, is a worldwide movem...
Abolition Democracy - Open Media Series (Open Media)
by Angela Y. Davis
Revelations about U.S policies and practices of torture and abuse have captured headlines ever since the breaking of the Abu Ghraib prison story in April 2004. Since then, a debate has raged regarding what is and what is not acceptable behavior for the world’s leading democracy. It is within this context that Angela Davis, one of America’s most remarkable political figures, gave a series of interviews to discuss resistance and law, institutional sexual coercion, politics and prison. Davis talks...
In Their Names busts open the public safety myth that uses victims' rights to perpetuate mass incarceration, and offers a formula for what would actually make us safe, from the widely respected head of Alliance for Safety and Justice When twenty-six-year-old recent college graduate Aswad Thomas was days away from starting a professional basketball career in 2009, he was shot twice while buying juice at a convenience store. The trauma left him in excruciating pain, with mounting medical debt,...
A comparative study of correctional management that illustrates how the introduction of internal governing systems in prisons can encourage civilized behavior, provide order, and enforce punishment. Challenging the accepted notions about prisons, Governing Prisons argues for the necessity of ensuring these facilities are made safely humane. John J. Dilulio argues that the key to better prisons is a highly disciplined constitutional government that involves employing prison managers that are...
Sentencing Fragments (Studies in Crime and Public Policy)
by Michael Tonry
Sentencing matters. Life, liberty, and property are at stake. Convicted offenders and victims care about it for obvious reasons, while judges and prosecutors also have a moral stake in the process. Never-the-less, the current system of sentencing criminal offenders is in a shambles, with a crazy quilt of incompatible and conflicting laws, policies, and practices in each state, not to mention an entirely different process at the federal level. In Sentencing Fragments, Michael Tonry traces four d...
In November 1973, William J. Wright, a former patient and trustee of the Farview State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, brutally murdered two teenage boys, Edmund Keen and Paul Freach, in Lackawanna County, a region that took great pride in not only its history, but its reputation as a friendly, family-oriented, safe place to live. It was a place where families could leave their doors unlocked, and be confident about allowing their children to play and explore outdoors. Yet all that would cha...
Danielle Sered's brilliant and groundbreaking Until We Reckon steers directly and unapologetically into the question of violence, offering approaches that will help end mass incarceration and increase safety. Widely recognized as one of the leading proponents of a restorative approach to violent crime, Sered asks us to reconsider the purposes of incarceration and argues persuasively that the needs of victims of violent crime are better met by asking people who commit violence to accept responsib...
The Death of the American Death Penalty
by John F. Galliher, Larry W Koch, and Colin Wark
The death penalty has largely disappeared as a national legislative issue and the Supreme Court has mainly bowed out, leaving the states at the cutting edge of abolition politics. This essential guide presents and explains the changing political and cultural challenges to capital punishment at the state level. As with their previous volume, America Without the Death Penalty (Northeastern, 2002), the authors of this completely new volume concentrate on the local and regional relationships betwee...