NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A renowned journalist and legal commentator exposes the unchecked power of the prosecutor as a driving force in America’s mass incarceration crisis—and charts a way out. “An important, thoughtful, and thorough examination of criminal justice in America that speaks directly to how we reduce mass incarceration.”—Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy “This harrowing, often enraging book is a hopeful one, as well, profiling innovative new approaches and the frontline ad...
An Analytic Assessment of U.S. Drug Policy
by David Boyum and Peter Reuter
In its efforts to control the use of cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and other illegal drugs, the United States spends about $35 billion per year in public funds. Almost half a million dealers and users are under incarceration. In this book, David Boyum and Peter Reuter provide an assessment of how well this massive investment of tax dollars and government authority is working. Boyum and Reuter show that America's drug problem is mainly a legacy of the epidemics of heroin, cocaine, and crack use du...
LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE FINALIST • NAACP IMAGE AWARD NOMINEE • A “powerful and devastating” (The Washington Post) call to free those buried alive by America’s legal system, and an inspiring true story about unwavering belief in humanity—from a gifted young lawyer and important new voice in the movement to transform the system. “An essential book for our time . . . Brittany K. Barnett is a star.”—Van Jones, CEO of REFORM Alliance, CNN Host, and New York Times bestselling author Brittany K...
In a public square in Beijing in 1904, multiple murderer Wang Weiqin was executed before a crowd of onlookers. He was among the last to suffer the extreme punishment known as lingchi. Called by Western observers "death by a thousand cuts" or "death by slicing," this penalty was reserved for the very worst crimes in imperial China.A unique interdisciplinary history, Death by a Thousand Cuts is the first book to explore the history, iconography, and legal contexts of Chinese tortures and execution...
Lashings, branding irons, and harsh treatment in labor camps all come to mind when one thinks of Russian methods of punishment. Analyzing the "languages of the lash"—the official definitions and discussions of corporal punishment—Schrader explores the relationship between the punishment of social deviants and the stability of the imperial Russian state. Interpreting penal law and practice in a broad social and political context, she illuminates the process by which Russia developed and reformula...
In this revised edition of his seminal book on race, class, and the criminal justice system, Marc Mauer, executive director of one of the United States' leading criminal justice reform organizations, offers the most up-to-date look available at three decades of prison expansion in America. Including newly written material on recent developments under the Bush administration and updated statistics, graphs, and charts throughout, the book tells the tragic story of runaway growth in the number of p...
True-life reporting on vicious criminals and the haphazard system that punishes them In 1969, the Supreme Court justices cast votes in secret that could have signaled the end of the death penalty. Later, the justices' resolve began to unravel. Why? What were the consequences for the rule of law and for the life at stake in the case? These are some of the fascinating questions answered in Murder at the Supreme Court. Veteran journalists Martin Clancy and Tim O'Brien not only pull back the curt...
The iconic New York Times bestseller that 'struck the spark that would eventually light the fire of Black Lives Matter' (Ibram X. Kendi)Named one of the most important nonfiction books of the 21st century by Entertainment Weekly' Slate' Chronicle of Higher Education' Literary Hub and Book RiotOnce in a great while a book comes along that radically changes our understanding of a crucial political issue and helps to fuel a social movement. The New Jim Crow is such a book. Lawyer and activist Miche...
The Little Book of Dialogue for Difficult Subjects
by Lisa Schirch and David Campt
The word "dialogue" suffers from over-use, yet its practice is as transforming and as freshly hopeful as ever. Authors Schirch and Campt demonstrate dialogue's life and possibilities in this clear and absorbing manual: "Dialogue allows people in conflict to listen to each other, affirm their common ground, and explore their differences in a safe environment." Schirch has worked throughout the Southern hemisphere in peacebuilding projects. Campt has focused on racial and class reconciliation in...
Roberts & Zuckerman's Criminal Evidence
by Paul Roberts and Adrian Zuckerman
Roberts and Zuckerman's Criminal Evidence is the eagerly-anticipated third of edition of the market-leading text on criminal evidence, fully revised to take account of developments in legislation, case-law, policy debates, and academic commentary during the decade since the previous edition was published. With an explicit focus on the rules and principles of criminal trial procedure, Roberts and Zuckerman's Criminal Evidence develops a coherent account of evidence law which is doctrinally deta...
The conventional wisdom is that the founders were avid death penalty supporters. In this fascinating and insightful examination of America's Eighth Amendment, law professor John D. Bessler explodes this myth and shows the founders' conflicting and ambivalent views on capital punishment. Cruel and Unusual takes the reader back in time to show how the indiscriminate use of executions gave way to a more enlightened approach-one that has been evolving ever since. While shedding important new light o...
An inside look at the struggles former prisoners face in reentering society Every year, roughly 650,000 people prepare to reenter society after being released from state and federal prisons. In Halfway House, Liam Martin shines a light on their difficult journeys, taking us behind the scenes at Bridge House, a residential reentry program in Boston, Massachusetts. Drawing on three years of research, Martin explores the obstacles these former prisoners face in the real world. From drug addiction...
Discussions of punishment typically assume that punishment is criminal punishment carried out by the State. Punishment is, however, a richer phenomenon and it occurs in many contexts. This book contains a general account of punishment which overcomes the difficulties of competing accounts. Recognizing punishment's manifoldness is valuable not merely in contributing to conceptual clarity, but in that this recognition sheds light on the complicated problem of punishment's justification. Insofar as...
An Atlantic Book of the Year and finalist for the Orwell Prize: a riveting true crime tale from the defense attorney who inspired John Grisham's The Chamber Legendary criminal defense attorney Clive Stafford Smith has devoted his career to helping save penniless defendants from a justice system whose goal is not so much to find the right man as to get a conviction. Miami, 1986. Kris Maharaj is arrested, tried, and sentenced to death for the brutal murder of his ex-business partner, Derrick Moo...
Long Term Offenders, or LTOs, is the state's term for those it condemns to effective death by imprisonment. Often serving sentences of sixty to eighty years, LTOs bear the brunt of the bipartisan embrace of mass incarceration heralded by the "tough on crime" agenda of the 1990s and 2000s. Like the rest of the United States' prison population-the world's highest per capita-they are disproportionately poor and non-white. The Long Term brings these often silenced voices to light, offering a powerfu...
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Barry Siegel tells the gripping legal drama of a man who has spent almost forty years in prison for murders he denies committing and the tenacious lawyers who believe in his innocence. The journey begins in 1962 when the murder of two young people on an isolated lovers' lane in the desert bewildered the inexperienced sheriff's department of Maricopa County, Arizona. Despite a few promising leads - including several chilling confessions from a violent repeat offe...
The Politics of the Death Penalty in Countries in Transition
The increase in the number of countries that have abolished the death penalty since the end of the Second World War shows a steady trend towards worldwide abolition of capital punishment. This book focuses on the political and legal issues raised by the death penalty in "countries in transition", understood as countries that have transitioned or are transitioning from conflict to peace, or from authoritarianism to democracy. In such countries, the politics that surround retaining or abolishing t...
In this crucial study, named one of the Washington Post's Notable Nonfiction Books of 2016 and now in paperback, Baz Dreisinger goes behind bars in nine countries to investigate the current conditions in prisons worldwide. Beginning in Africa and ending in Europe, Incarceration Nations is a first-person odyssey through the prison systems of the world. Professor, journalist, and founder of the Prison-to-College-Pipeline program, Dreisinger looks into the human stories of incarcerated men and wom...
A former federal judge tells the stories of the people she sentenced over 17 years on the bench and the lessons learned about our deeply flawed justice system Over the course of 17 years as a federal judge, Nancy Gertner sentenced hundreds of defendants in accordance with the rule of law. But more often than not, she felt the punishments she was required to name were disproportionate, and based on racially discriminatory laws and practices. In this book, she tells the stories young men and boys...