The New Jim Crow was initially published with a modest first printing and reasonable expectations for a hard-hitting book on a tough topic. Now, ten-plus printings later, the long-awaited paperback version of the book Lani Guinier calls “brave and bold,” and Pulitzer Prize–winner David Levering Lewis calls “stunning,” will at last be available.

In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. Yet, as legal star Michelle Alexander reveals, today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against convicted criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal.

Featured on The Tavis Smiley Show, Bill Moyers Journal, Democracy Now, and C-Span’s Washington Journal, The New Jim Crow has become an overnight phenomenon, sparking a much-needed conversation—including a recent mention by Cornel West on Real Time with Bill Maher&mdas;about ways in which our system of mass incarceration has come to resemble systems of racial control from a different era.

#1 New York Times Bestseller | Named one of the Best Books of the Year by The New York Times • The Washington Post • The Boston Globe • The Seattle Times • Esquire • Time
 
Winner of the Carnegie Medal for Nonfiction | Winner of the NAACP Image Award for Nonfiction | Winner of a Books for a Better Life Award | Finalist for the Los Angeles Book Prize | Finalist for the Kirkus Reviews Prize | An American Library Association Notable Book

A powerful true story about the potential for mercy to redeem us, and a clarion call to fix our broken system of justice—from one of the most brilliant and influential lawyers of our time
 
Bryan Stevenson was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending those most desperate and in need: the poor, the wrongly condemned, and women and children trapped in the farthest reaches of our criminal justice system. One of his first cases was that of Walter McMillian, a young man who was sentenced to die for a notorious murder he insisted he didn’t commit. The case drew Bryan into a tangle of conspiracy, political machination, and legal brinksmanship—and transformed his understanding of mercy and justice forever.
 
Just Mercy is at once an unforgettable account of an idealistic, gifted young lawyer’s coming of age, a moving window into the lives of those he has defended, and an inspiring argument for compassion in the pursuit of true justice.
 
Praise for Just Mercy
 
“Every bit as moving as To Kill a Mockingbird, and in some ways more so . . . a searing indictment of American criminal justice and a stirring testament to the salvation that fighting for the vulnerable sometimes yields.”—David Cole, The New York Review of Books
 
“Searing, moving . . . Bryan Stevenson may, indeed, be America’s Mandela.”—Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times
 
“You don’t have to read too long to start cheering for this man. . . . The message of this book . . . is that evil can be overcome, a difference can be made. Just Mercy will make you upset and it will make you hopeful.”—Ted Conover, The New York Times Book Review
 
“Inspiring . . . a work of style, substance and clarity . . . Stevenson is not only a great lawyer, he’s also a gifted writer and storyteller.”—The Washington Post
 
“As deeply moving, poignant and powerful a book as has been, and maybe ever can be, written about the death penalty.”—The Financial Times
 
“Brilliant.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer
 
“Not since Atticus Finch has a fearless and committed lawyer made such a difference in the American South. Though larger than life, Atticus exists only in fiction. Bryan Stevenson, however, is very much alive and doing God’s work fighting for the poor, the oppressed, the voiceless, the vulnerable, the outcast, and those with no hope. Just Mercy is his inspiring and powerful story.”—John Grisham
 
“Bryan Stevenson is one of my personal heroes, perhaps the most inspiring and influential crusader for justice alive today, and Just Mercy is extraordinary. The stories told within these pages hold the potential to transform what we think we mean when we talk about justice.”—Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow

The criminal justice system is complicated—Understand it and your rights

Criminal law is full of complex rules and procedures, but this book demystifies them. It explains how the system works, why police, lawyers, and judges do what they do, and—most important—the options for suspects, defendants, and victims. It also provides critical information on working with a lawyer.

In plain English, The Criminal Law Handbook covers:
search and seizure
arrest, booking, and bail
Miranda
arraignment
plea bargains
trials
sentencing
working with defense attorneys
common defenses
constitutional rights
juvenile court
preliminary hearings
appeals
public defenders

This edition is completely updated, covering the latest in criminal law, including U.S. Supreme Court cases.

Since the crime explosion of the 1960s, the prison population in the United States has multiplied fivefold, to one prisoner for every hundred adults--a rate unprecedented in American history and unmatched anywhere in the world. Even as the prisoner head count continues to rise, crime has stopped falling, and poor people and minorities still bear the brunt of both crime and punishment. When Brute Force Fails explains how we got into the current trap and how we can get out of it: to cut both crime and the prison population in half within a decade.

Mark Kleiman demonstrates that simply locking up more people for lengthier terms is no longer a workable crime-control strategy. But, says Kleiman, there has been a revolution--largely unnoticed by the press--in controlling crime by means other than brute-force incarceration: substituting swiftness and certainty of punishment for randomized severity, concentrating enforcement resources rather than dispersing them, communicating specific threats of punishment to specific offenders, and enforcing probation and parole conditions to make community corrections a genuine alternative to incarceration. As Kleiman shows, "zero tolerance" is nonsense: there are always more offenses than there is punishment capacity. But, it is possible--and essential--to create focused zero tolerance, by clearly specifying the rules and then delivering the promised sanctions every time the rules are broken.

Brute-force crime control has been a costly mistake, both socially and financially. Now that we know how to do better, it would be immoral not to put that knowledge to work.

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 résumé as a public servant is long and storied, and includes receiving a Medal of Honor. In 2004, Kerik was nominated by George W. Bush to head the Department of Homeland Security.

Now, he is a former Federal Prison Inmate known as #84888-054.

Convicted of tax fraud and false statements in 2007, Kerik was sentenced to four years in federal prison. Now, for the first time, he talks candidly about what it was like on the inside: the torture of solitary confinement, the abuse of power, the mental and physical torment of being locked up in a cage, the powerlessness. With newfound perspective, Kerik makes a plea for change and illuminates why our punishment system doesn’t always fit the crime.

In this extraordinary memoir, Kerik reveals his unprecedented view of the American penal system from both sides: as the jailer and the jailed. With astonishing candor, bravery, and insider’s intelligence, Bernard Kerik shares his fall from grace to incarceration, and turns it into a genuine and uniquely insightful argument for criminal justice reform.

The criminal justice system becomes increasingly complex each year with new laws affecting legal processes. The Criminal Law Handbook explains every part of a criminal case including:

arrests
booking
preliminary hearings
charges
bail
arraignment
search and seizure
plea bargains
sentencing
juveniles

This revised edition covers the latest changes in criminal and U.S Supreme Court cases. Written by the authors of Represent Yourself in Court, Paul Bergman, J.D. and Sara Berman, J.D.

Maximum Security tells the stories of the world's harshest prisons, and the people on either side of the locked door.
From Alcatraz and Devil's Island to La Santé, France and Boscobel, USA 'supermax', this book is about the eternal cat and mouse game played out between convicts and the warders who try to keep them behind the four tall walls of 'the Big House'.
These pages are packed with accounts of repressive prison regimes and the people who fight against them, the vicious
hierarchies that operate within the prison population, what it's like to be on Death Row, riots and hostage-taking, violent abuse by both guards and inmates, plus daring escapes against the odds.
From institutional corruption and sadistic punishments to drug smuggling and prisoner murder, Maximum Security lets you peer between the cell bars into a hidden world of crime and punishment.

For twelve years Robert Blecker, a criminal law professor, wandered freely inside Lorton Central Prison, armed only with cigarettes and a tape recorder. The Death of Punishment tests legal philosophy against the reality and wisdom of street criminals and their guards. Some killers' poignant circumstances should lead us to mercy; others show clearly why they should die. After thousands of hours over twenty-five years inside maximum security prisons and on death rows in seven states, the history and philosophy professor exposes the perversity of justice: Inside prison, ironically, it's nobody's job to punish. Thus the worst criminals often live the best lives.

The Death of Punishment challenges the reader to refine deeply held beliefs on life and death as punishment that flare up with every news story of a heinous crime. It argues that society must redesign life and death in prison to make the punishment more nearly fit the crime. It closes with the final irony: If we make prison the punishment it should be, we may well abolish the very death penalty justice now requires.

Since 1996, death sentences in America have declined by more than 60 percent, reversing a generation-long trend toward greater acceptance of capital punishment. In theory, most Americans continue to support the death penalty. But it is no longer seen as a theoretical matter. Prosecutors, judges, and juries across the country have moved in large numbers to give much greater credence to the possibility of mistakes - mistakes that in this arena are potentially fatal. The discovery of innocence, documented in this book through painstaking analyses of media coverage and with newly developed methods, has led to historic shifts in public opinion and to a sharp decline in use of the death penalty by juries across the country. A social cascade, starting with legal clinics and innocence projects, has snowballed into a national phenomenon that may spell the end of the death penalty in America.

Over 7,000 people have been legally executed in the United States this century, and over 3,000 men and women now sit on death rows across the country awaiting the same fate. Since the Supreme Court temporarily halted capital punishment in 1972, the death penalty has returned with a vengeance. Today there appears to be a widespread public consensus in favor of capital punishment and considerable political momentum to ensure that those sentenced to death are actually executed. Yet the death penalty remains troubling and controversial for many people. The Killing State: Capital Punishment in Law, Politics, and Culture explores what it means when the state kills and what it means for citizens to live in a killing state, helping us understand why America clings tenaciously to a punishment that has been abandoned by every other industrialized democracy. Edited by a leading figure in socio-legal studies, this book brings together the work of ten scholars, including recognized experts on the death penalty and noted scholars writing about it for the first time. Focused more on theory than on advocacy, these bracing essays open up new questions for scholars and citizens: What is the relationship of the death penalty to the maintenance of political sovereignty? In what ways does the death penalty resemble and enable other forms of law's violence? How is capital punishment portrayed in popular culture? How does capital punishment express the new politics of crime, organize positions in the "culture war," and affect the structure of American values? This book is a timely examination of a vitally important topic: the impact of state killing on our law, our politics, and our cultural life.

The Last Lawyer is the true, inside story of how an idealistic legal genius and his diverse band of investigators and fellow attorneys fought to overturn a client’s final sentence.

Ken Rose has handled more capital appeals cases than almost any other attorney in the United States. The Last Lawyer chronicles Rose’s decade-long defense of Bo Jones, a North Carolina farmhand convicted of a 1987 murder. Rose called this his most frustrating case in twenty-five years, and it was one that received scant attention from judges or journalists. The Jones case bares the thorniest issues surrounding capital punishment. Inadequate legal counsel, mental retardation, mental illness, and sketchy witness testimony stymied Jones’s original defense. Yet for many years, Rose’s advocacy gained no traction, and Bo Jones came within three days of his execution.

The book follows Rose through a decade of setbacks and small triumphs as he gradually unearthed the evidence he hoped would save his client’s life. At the same time, Rose also single-handedly built a nonprofit law firm that became a major force in the death penalty debate raging across the South.

The Last Lawyer offers unprecedented access to the inner workings of a capital defense team. Based on four-and-a half years of behind-the-scenes reporting by a journalism professor and nonfiction author, The Last Lawyer tells the unforgettable story of a lawyer’s fight for justice.

Bill Kurtis, anchor of the wildly popular true-crime TV series Cold Case Files and American Justice, used to support the death penalty. But after observing the machinations of the justice system for thirty years, he came to a stunning realization that changed his life: Capital punishment is wrong. There can be no real justice in America until it is abolished.

In The Death Penalty on Trial, Kurtis takes readers on his most remarkable investigative journey yet. Together, we revisit murder scenes, study the evidence, and explore the tactical decisions made before and during trials that send innocent people to death row. We examine the eight main reasons why the wrong people are condemned to death, including overzealous and dishonest prosecutors, corrupt policemen, unreliable witnesses and expert witnesses, incompetent defense attorneys, bias judges, and jailhouse informants. We see why the new jewel of forensic science, DNA, is revealing more than innocence and guilt, opening a window into the criminal justice system that could touch off a revolution of reform. Ultimately we come to a remarkable conclusion: The possibility for error in our justice system is simply too great to allow the death penalty to stand as our ultimate punishment.

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.

In this remarkable legal page-turner, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Barry Siegel recounts the dramatic, decades-long saga of Bill Macumber, imprisoned for thirty-eight years for a double homicide he denies committing. In the spring of 1962, a school bus full of students stumbled across a mysterious crime scene on an isolated stretch of Arizona desert: an abandoned car and two bodies. This brutal murder of a young couple bewildered the sheriff 's department of Maricopa County for years. Despite a few promising leads—including several chilling confessions from Ernest Valenzuela, a violent repeat offender—the case went cold. More than a decade later, a clerk in the sheriff 's department, Carol Macumber, came forward to tell police that her estranged husband had confessed to the murders. Though the evidence linking Bill Macumber to the incident was questionable, he was arrested and charged with the crime. During his trial, the judge refused to allow the confession of now-deceased Ernest Valenzuela to be admitted as evidence in part because of the attorney-client privilege. Bill Macumber was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.
The case, rife with extraordinary irregularities, attracted the sustained involvement of the Arizona Justice Project, one of the first and most respected of the non-profit groups that represent victims of manifest injustice across the country. With more twists and turns than a Hollywood movie, Macumber's story illuminates startling, upsetting truths about our justice system, which kept a possibly innocent man locked up for almost forty years, and introduces readers to the generations of dedicated lawyers who never stopped working on his behalf, lawyers who ultimately achieved stunning results. With precise journalistic detail, intimate access and masterly storytelling, Barry Siegel will change your understanding of American jurisprudence, police procedure, and what constitutes justice in our country today.

The first case study of its kind, this book addresses a broad range of questions about the rationale for and application of judicial execution in Connecticut since the seventeenth century. In addition to identifying the 158 people who have been put to death for crimes during the state's history, Lawrence Goodheart analyzes their social status in terms of sex, race, class, religion, and ethnicity. He looks at the circumstances of the crimes, the weapons that were used, and the victims. He reconstructs the history of Connecticut's capital laws, its changing rituals of execution, and the growing debate over the legitimacy of the death penalty itself. Although the focus is on the criminal justice system, the ethical values of New England culture form the larger context. Goodheart shows how a steady diminution in types of capital crimes, including witchcraft and sexual crimes, culminated in an emphasis on proportionate punishment during the Enlightenment and eventually led to a preference for imprisonment for all capital crimes except first-degree murder. Goodheart concludes by considering why Connecticut, despite its many statutory restrictions on capital punishment and lengthy appeals process, has been the only state in New England to have executed anyone since 1960.

The brutal murders of young Devon and Damon Routier in the early morning hours of June 6, 1996, put their mother—Darlie Routier—at the heart of one of the most notorious murder cases in modern Texas history—despite her own throat having been slashed to within two millimeters of her carotid artery.

The actions of a small-town police department and those within Dallas County's ruthless justice system created a perfect storm that swept up the young mother and landed her on death row. There she has remained, in a nine-feet-by-six-feet cell, despite claims of her innocence by those who know her, findings about the alarming fallibility of bloodstain analysis, and her husband's admission that at the time of the murders he was soliciting help to stage a home burglary to commit insurance fraud.

In Dateline Purgatory, award-winning journalist Kathy Cruz enlists current-day legal experts to weigh in on the shocking transgressions that resulted in one of the country's most controversial death penalty convictions.
With the help of the infamous death row inmate and a former FBI Special Agent known as “Crimefighter,” Cruz would find that her journey through Purgatory was as much about herself as it was about the woman dubbed “Dallas’s Susan Smith.”

Visit the author's website at http://datelinepurgatory.com/

This book provides far more than an effective overview of the history, current status, and future of capital punishment in America; it supplies excerpts of the words of the justices themselves to make these judicial opinions readily accessible and understandable to general audiences. As a result, readers can see what the justices had to say for themselves regarding more than 30 important cases involving the death penalty—without relying on any intermediary interpretations of their statements. After a brief historical summary of the debate over capital punishment and the arguments favoring and opposing capital punishment, the book "decodes" how the justices have interpreted and applied constitutional provisions to historical and contemporary controversies. Each case includes brief narrative commentaries inserted by the authors to provide context for the justices' words. Additionally, the excerpted judicial opinions are presented as primary source documents for the reader's inspection and reflection.

In the mid-1990s, as public trust in big government was near an all-time low, 80% of Americans told Gallup that they supported the death penalty. Why did people who didn’t trust government to regulate the economy or provide daily services nonetheless believe that it should have the power to put its citizens to death?

That question is at the heart of Executing Freedom, a powerful, wide-ranging examination of the place of the death penalty in American culture and how it has changed over the years. Drawing on an array of sources, including congressional hearings and campaign speeches, true crime classics like In Cold Blood, and films like Dead Man Walking, Daniel LaChance shows how attitudes toward the death penalty have reflected broader shifts in Americans’ thinking about the relationship between the individual and the state. Emerging from the height of 1970s disillusion, the simplicity and moral power of the death penalty became a potent symbol for many Americans of what government could do—and LaChance argues, fascinatingly, that it’s the very failure of capital punishment to live up to that mythology that could prove its eventual undoing in the United States.

If the goal of our justice system is to reduce crime and create a safer society, then we must do better.

According to conventional wisdom, severely punishing offenders reduces the likelihood that they’ll offend again. Why, then, do so many who go to prison continue to commit crimes after their release? What do we actually know about offenders and the reasons they break the law?

In Crime & Punishment, Russell Marks argues that the lives of most criminal offenders – and indeed of many victims of crime – are marked by often staggering disadvantage. For many offenders, prison only increases their chances of committing further crimes. And despite what some media outlets and politicians want us to believe, harsher sentences do not help most victims to heal.

Drawing on his experience as a lawyer, Marks eloquently makes the case for restorative justice and community correction, whereby offenders are obliged to engage with victims and make amends. Crime & Punishment is a provocative call for change to a justice system in desperate need of renewal.

A classic study in law and society is now readily available to scholars, researchers, and others in the field of criminal justice, due process, policing, and administrative procedure. It adds a new Preface by the author and a new Foreword by Berkeley law professor Malcolm M. Feeley. As the author reflects:

"I think it was my first day in the field that the police liaison to the district attorney's probation revocation program exclaimed, 'Forget rights! Forget right to jury! Forget right to bail! There are no rights!' As Malcolm Feeley says in his Foreword, what I 'discovered' over the course of researching and writing this study was in plain view from the beginning. The criminal process has largely been subsumed as an administrative process and the procedural rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights have long since faded away. What I hope my work explains is how this happened doctrinally -- how the expansion of criminal due process was halted and redirected by the very administrative due process revolution it gave birth to. And how it happened in practice -- how police, prosecutors, and corrections came to realize that they had the tools to bypass the criminal process in enforcing the criminal sanction."

In his new Foreword, Feeley describes the book as "a brilliant analysis of the criminal process" and explains why its relevance and theoretical power have increased over time. In a nation where legal rights and process became enhanced in criminal courts and formal processes of adjudication, Greenspan showed the bypassing of much of this framework by the substitution of parole revocation, probation, and the like -- by what Feeley summarizes as "the triumph of the administrative model. Her thesis shows how this occurred. The backlash to the Warren Court’s criminal due process revolutions was not a wholesale abandonment of rights, but an embrace of a lower standard of due process, administrative due process." Some of these changes are well known, of course, but "Greenspan's study is brilliant precisely because it problematizes these developments. It identifies the central issue, how thinking about the criminal process has been so fundamentally yet unwittingly transformed." 

This book is a powerful look at these reforms and transformations, presented in the 'Classic Dissertation Series' by Quid Pro Books. Quality ebook formatting includes properly presented tables, active contents, and linked notes. A new paperback edition of this book is also available.

The May 2014 issue of The Yale Law Journal features new articles and essays on law and legal theory by internationally recognized scholars. Contents include:

• Article, "Illegitimate Borders: Jus Sanguinis Citizenship and the Legal Construction of Family, Race, and Nation," by Kristin Collins 

• Article, "Legitimacy and Federal Criminal Enforcement Power," by Lauren M. Ouziel 

• Feature, "The Age of Consent," by Philip C. Bobbitt 

• Review, "Judging Justice on Appeal," by Marin K. Levy    

• Note, "The Growth of Litigation Finance in DOJ Whistleblower Suits: Implications and Recommendations," by Mathew Andrews 

• Note, "Reducing Inequality on the Cheap: When Legal Rule Design Should Incorporate Equity as Well as Efficiency," by Zachary Liscow 

• Note, "Domestic Violence Asylum After Matter of L-R-," by Jessica Marsden  

• Comment, "Beating Blackwater: Using Domestic Legislation to Enforce the International Code of Conduct for Private Military Companies," by Reema Shah 

This quality ebook edition features linked notes, active Contents, active URLs in notes, and proper Bluebook formatting. This May 2014 issue is Volume 123, Number 7. 

Forensic Psychiatry is the first book to cover the clinical, legal and ethical issues for the treatment of mentally disordered offenders for all of the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland jurisdictions. Written by an expert interdisciplinary team from the fields of both law and psychiatry, including the eminent Nigel Eastman who has engaged with many high-profile legal cases, this is a comprehensive and up-to-date guide which includes clinical observations, guidance and ethical advice across the psychiatric discipline. Uniquely focusing on the interface between psychiatry and law and including suggestions, using case examples, on how to navigate this interface successfully, this book contains clear guidance on all aspects of forensic psychiatry, for both mental health and legal professionals. It also contains extensive cross-referencing which allows the reader to access all the relevant clinical, legal and ethical information quickly and effectively. Alongside the practical advice on managing clinical and legal situations, there are also case examples, summaries of relevant legislation and introductions to different ethical approaches and clinical observations, derived from the experience of the authors. Also included are brief summaries of important legal cases and inquiries relevant to the subject.

It is generally assumed that we are justified in punishing criminals because they have committed a morally wrongful act. Determining when criminal liability should be imposed calls for a moral assessment of the conduct in question, with criminal liability tracking as closely as possible the contours of morality. Versions of this view are frequently argued for in philosophical accounts of crime and punishment, and seem to be presumed by lawyers and policy makers working in the criminal justice system. Challenging such assumptions, this book considers the dominant justifications of punishment and subjects them to a piercing moral critique. It argues that none overcome the objection that people who are convicted of a serious crime and sent to prison have their basic human rights violated. The institution of criminal punishment is shown to be a regrettable necessity not deserving of the moral enthusiasm it enjoys among many politicians and the popular press. From a moral point of view, punishment is entitled at best to grudging toleration. In the course of developing the argument, the book introduces the principal issues of criminal law theory with the aim of presenting a morally enlightened perspective on crimes and why we punish them. Enforcement of the law by police, prosecutors, and courts is a matter of concern for political morality, and the principal practices of the criminal justice system are subjected to moral scrutiny. The book offers an engaging, provocative introduction to thinking about the philosophy of crime and punishment, challenging students and other readers to think about whether we are justified in punishing wrongdoers.

We all know that orange is the new black and mass incarceration is the new Jim Crow, but how much do we actually know about the structure, goals, and impact of our criminal justice system? Understanding Mass Incarceration offers the first comprehensive overview of the incarceration apparatus put in place by the world’s largest jailer: the United States.

Drawing on a growing body of academic and professional work, Understanding Mass Incarceration describes in plain English the many competing theories of criminal justice—from rehabilitation to retribution, from restorative justice to justice reinvestment. In a lively and accessible style, author James Kilgore illuminates the difference between prisons and jails, probation and parole, laying out key concepts and policies such as the War on Drugs, broken windows policing, three-strikes sentencing, the school-to-prison pipeline, recidivism, and prison privatization. Informed by the crucial lenses of race and gender, he addresses issues typically omitted from the discussion: the rapidly increasing incarceration of women, Latinos, and transgender people; the growing imprisonment of immigrants; and the devastating impact of mass incarceration on communities.

Both field guide and primer, Understanding Mass Incarceration will be an essential resource for those engaged in criminal justice activism as well as those new to the subject.

On March 18, 1963, in one of its most significant legal decisions, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Gideon v. Wainwright that all defendants facing significant jail time have the constitutional right to a free attorney if they cannot afford their own. Fifty years later, 80 percent of criminal defendants are served by public defenders. In a book that combines the sweep of history with the intimate details of individual lives and legal cases, veteran reporter Karen Houppert movingly chronicles the stories of people in all parts of the country who have relied on Gideon’s promise.

There is the harrowing saga of a young man who is charged with involuntary vehicular homicide in Washington State, where overextended public defenders juggle impossible caseloads, forcing his defender to go to court to protect her own right to provide an adequate defense. In Florida, Houppert describes a public defender’s office, loaded with upward of seven hundred cases per attorney, and discovers the degree to which Clarence Earl Gideon’s promise is still unrealized. In New Orleans, she follows the case of a man imprisoned for twenty-seven years for a crime he didn’t commit, finding a public defense system already near collapse before Katrina and chronicling the harrowing months after the storm, during which overworked volunteers and students struggled to get the system working again. In Georgia, Houppert finds a mentally disabled man who is to be executed for murder, despite the best efforts of a dedicated but severely overworked and underfunded capital defender.

Half a century after Anthony Lewis’s award-winning Gideon’s Trumpet brought us the story of the court case that changed the American justice system, Chasing Gideon is a crucial book that provides essential reckoning of our attempts to implement this fundamental constitutional right.

For nearly forty 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—relying on racist gangs, lockdowns, and Supermax-style segregation units to maintain a tenuous order.

Mass Incarceration on Trial examines a series of landmark decisions about prison conditions—culminating in Brown v. Plata, decided in May 2011 by the U.S. Supreme Court—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 legitimate order to American prisons and, ultimately, lead to the demise of mass incarceration. Simon argues that much like the school segregation cases of the last century, these new cases represent a major breakthrough in jurisprudence—moving us from a hollowed-out vision of civil rights to the threshold of human rights and giving court backing for the argument that, because the conditions it creates are fundamentally cruel and unusual, mass incarceration is inherently unconstitutional.

Since the publication of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, states around the country have begun to question the fundamental fairness of our criminal justice system. This book offers a provocative and brilliant reading to the end of mass incarceration.

Contents

Introduction 

San Francisco Committee of Vigilance 

Montana Vigilantes 

Jackson County Vigilance Committee aka Scarlet Mask Society 

The Nokmim aka The Jewish Avengers

The Lavender Panthers 

Jonathan ‘Jack’ Idema 

Bernhard Goetz aka The Subway Vigilante 

The Sombra Negra

Phoenix Jones and the Rain City Superhero Movement

When we think of vigilantes, superheroes such as Batman and Spiderman immediately come to mind – ordinary men by day, and masked justice-delivering crusaders by night. In reality, this exciting concept, which sees good triumph over evil, is not so black and white. We live in societies governed by law and order, and we are taught to put our faith in the age-old systems in place. For some individuals and groups though, this is incredibly hard to do.

 

In this book, famous cases of ordinary-people-turned-avengers are explored. First we have the cowboys of the Wild West, dishing out justice in towns where the law was barely established. In many of these towns a power struggle raged between a Sheriff and the locals, each side unsure of exactly how to deal with the no-good scavengers descending on the Gold Rush towns of the old mid-West. With no faith in the law, and these newbies showing up out of the blue, causing trouble, someone had to take charge. In the case of the Montana Vigilantes, or the Scarlet Mask Society, they were more than happy to take out the trash. Whether they were dealing with Road Agents or Bounty Hunters, these men were hell-bent on keeping their domain crime-free, even if their methods were technically illegal. 

True tales of sanctioned executions—beheadings, stabbings, chokings, electrocutions, and more—ripped from the annals of history by master mystery author Howard Engel
 
In his first work of true crime, award-winning mystery writer Howard Engel traces the hangman’s tradition from medieval England and early Canada to the present-day United States. Throughout “civilized” history, executioners employed on behalf of the kingdom, republic, or dictatorship have beheaded, chopped, stabbed, choked, gassed, electrocuted, or beaten criminals to death—and Engel doesn’t shy away from the gritty details of the executioner’s lifestyle, focusing on the paragons, buffoons, and sadists of the dark profession.
 
Packed with all-too-true stories, from hapless hangings to butchered beheadings, this historically accurate look at the executioner’s gruesome work makes for a thoroughly gripping read.
 

This fourth edition of the first true textbook on the death penalty engages the reader with a full account of the arguments and issues surrounding capital punishment. The book begins with the history of the death penalty from colonial to modern times, and then examines the moral and legal arguments for and against capital punishment. It also provides an overview of major Supreme Court decisions and describes the legal process behind the death penalty. In addressing these issues, the author reviews recent developments in death penalty law and procedure, including ramifications of newer case law, such as that regarding using lethal injection as a method of execution. The author’s motivation has been to understand what motivates the "deathquest" of the American people, leading a large percentage of the public to support the death penalty. The book will educate readers so that whatever their death penalty opinions are, they are informed ones.

The Death Penalty, Third Edition, brings together all the legal issues related to the death penalty and provides case briefs for the most important United States Supreme Court death penalty cases. No other book available brings together a discussion of the major constitutional issues surrounding the death penalty with a broad array of associated case briefs. The authors classify cases according to legal issues and provide a commentary on the various sub-topics, presenting legal materials in an easily understood form. Though the primary audiences of the book are undergraduates in criminal justice programs and practitioners in the corrections and justice systems, the book will also prove useful to anyone who has an interest in the death penalty, the criminal justice system, or the United States Constitution. Every chapter starts with commentaries regarding general case law in a sub-topic, such as aggravating and mitigating factors, followed by a chart of the cases briefed in the chapter, and then the case briefs. These case briefs acquaint the reader with Supreme Court cases by summarizing facts, issues, reasons, and holdings. The Death Penalty, Third Edition , is a succinct, trusted guide to the law of capital punishment in the United States.

Capital Punishment examines the debate around the death penalty, raising questions and attempting to provide an even-handed examination of this controversial practice. The authors combine analysis of important issues with excerpts from landmark legal decisions, important documents, survey results, and empirical data.

The first part of the book discusses the origins of the death penalty and traces its development from antiquity to contemporary times. Detailed statistical information about capital punishment is presented and discussed, and the death penalty is considered against a constitutional backdrop with various arguments—for and against—articulated. The second part of the book consists of three appendices. The first appendix presents an annotated list of important capital-punishment cases; the second supplies a more general chronological treatment of capital punishment; and the third provides a bibliographic essay directing readers to other relevant sources of interest. A thorough and insightful treatment, Capital Punishment provides both a summary of the current state of capital punishment and a discussion of areas of continuing controversy.

For more than 300 years Massachusetts executed men and women convicted of murder, but with a sharp eye on "due proceeding" and against the backdrop of popular ambivalence about the death penalty's morality, cruelty, efficacy, and constitutionality. In this authoritative book, Alan Rogers offers a comprehensive account of how the efforts of reformers and abolitionists and the Supreme Judicial Court's commitment to the rule of law ultimately converged to end the death penalty in Massachusetts.

In the seventeenth century, Governor John Winthrop and the Massachusetts General Court understood murder to be a sin and a threat to the colony's well-being, but the Puritans also drastically reduced the crimes for which death was the prescribed penalty and expanded a capital defendant's rights. Following the Revolution, Americans denounced the death penalty as "British and brutish" and the state's Supreme Judicial Court embraced its role as protector of the rights extended to all men by the Massachusetts Constitution. In the 1830s popular opposition nearly stopped the machinery of death and a vote in the Massachusetts House fell just short of abolishing capital punishment.

A post--Civil War effort extending civil rights to all men also stimulated significant changes in criminal procedure. A "monster petition" begging the governor to spare the life of a murderer convicted on slight circumstantial evidence and the grim prospect of executing nine Chinese men found guilty of murder fueled a passionate debate about the death penalty in the decade before World War I.

The trials and executions of Sacco and Vanzetti focused unwanted international and national attention on Massachusetts. This was a turning point. Sara Ehrmann took charge of the newly formed Massachusetts Council Against the Death Penalty, relentlessly lobbied the legislature, and convinced a string of governors not to sign death warrants. In the 1970s the focus shifted to the courts, and eventually, in 1980, the Supreme Judicial Court abolished the death penalty on the grounds that it violated the Massachusetts Constitution.

Over the past forty years, the criminal justice system in the United States has engaged in a very expensive policy failure, attempting to punish its way to public safety, with dismal results. So-called "tough on crime" policies have not only failed to effectively reduce crime, recidivism, and victimization but also created an incredibly inefficient system that routinely fails the public, taxpayers, crime victims, criminal offenders, their families, and their communities.

Strategies that focus on behavior change are much more productive and cost effective for reducing crime than punishment, and in this book, William R. Kelly discusses the policy, process, and funding innovations and priorities that the United States needs to effectively reduce crime, recidivism, victimization, and cost. He recommends proactive, evidence-based interventions to address criminogenic behavior; collaborative decision making from a variety of professions and disciplines; and a focus on innovative alternatives to incarceration, such as problem-solving courts and probation. Students, professionals, and policy makers alike will find in this comprehensive text a bracing discussion of how our criminal justice system became broken and the best strategies by which to fix it.

Corrections: A Critical Approach, 3rd edition confronts mass imprisonment in the United States, a nation boasting the highest incarceration rate in the world. This statistic is all the more troubling considering that its correctional population is overrepresented by the poor, African-Americans, and Latinos.

Not only throwing crucial light on matters involving race and social class, this book also identifies and examines the key social forces shaping penal practice in the US - politics, economics, morality, and technology. By attending closely to historical and theoretical development, the narrative takes into account both instrumental (goal-oriented) and expressive (cultural) explanations to sharpen our understanding of punishment and the growing reliance on incarceration.

Covering five main areas of inquiry - penal context, penal populations, penal violence, penal process, and penal state - this book is essential reading for both undergraduate and graduate students interested in undertaking a critical analysis of penology.

Over seven million Americans are either incarcerated, on probation, or on parole, with their criminal records often following them for life and affecting access to higher education, jobs, and housing. Court-ordered monetary sanctions that compel criminal defendants to pay fines, fees, surcharges, and restitution further inhibit their ability to reenter society. In A Pound of Flesh, sociologist Alexes Harris analyzes the rise of monetary sanctions in the criminal justice system and shows how they permanently penalize and marginalize the poor. She exposes the damaging effects of a little-understood component of criminal sentencing and shows how it further perpetuates racial and economic inequality.

Harris draws from extensive sentencing data, legal documents, observations of court hearings, and interviews with defendants, judges, prosecutors, and other court officials. She documents how low-income defendants are affected by monetary sanctions, which include fees for public defenders and a variety of processing charges. Until these debts are paid in full, individuals remain under judicial supervision, subject to court summons, warrants, and jail stays. As a result of interest and surcharges that accumulate on unpaid financial penalties, these monetary sanctions often become insurmountable legal debts which many offenders carry for the remainder of their lives. Harris finds that such fiscal sentences, which are imposed disproportionately on low-income minorities, help create a permanent economic underclass and deepen social stratification.

A Pound of Flesh delves into the court practices of five counties in Washington State to illustrate the ways in which subjective sentencing shapes the practice of monetary sanctions. Judges and court clerks hold a considerable degree of discretion in the sentencing and monitoring of monetary sanctions and rely on individual values—such as personal responsibility, meritocracy, and paternalism—to determine how much and when offenders should pay. Harris shows that monetary sanctions are imposed at different rates across jurisdictions, with little or no state government oversight. Local officials’ reliance on their own values and beliefs can also push offenders further into debt—for example, when judges charge defendants who lack the means to pay their fines with contempt of court and penalize them with additional fines or jail time.

A Pound of Flesh provides a timely examination of how monetary sanctions permanently bind poor offenders to the judicial system. Harris concludes that in letting monetary sanctions go unchecked, we have created a two-tiered legal system that imposes additional burdens on already-marginalized groups.

In this reasoned exploration of justice, retribution, and redemption, the champion of the new monastic movement, popular speaker, and author of the bestselling The Irresistible Revolution offers a powerful and persuasive appeal for the abolition of the death penalty.

The Bible says an eye for an eye. But is the state’s taking of a life true—or even practical—punishment for convicted prisoners? In this thought-provoking work, Shane Claiborne explores the issue of the death penalty and the contrast between punitive justice and restorative justice, questioning our notions of fairness, revenge, and absolution.

Using an historical lens to frame his argument, Claiborne draws on testimonials and examples from Scripture to show how the death penalty is not the ideal of justice that many believe. Not only is a life lost, so too, is the possibility of mercy and grace. In Executing Grace, he reminds us of the divine power of forgiveness, and evokes the fundamental truth of the Gospel—that no one, even a criminal, is beyond redemption.

How do we select those who will be subject to capital punishment? How do we identify the worst of the worst and decide who among them can and should be executed? Today these questions are more pressing than they have ever been. As the number of people sentenced to death and executed declines in the United States, those who are executed stand out as distinctive kinds of criminals, distinctive kinds of people. Does a death sentence affirm or deny their humanity? Is such a sentence an act of revenge or a carefully calculated act of justice?

These are more than questions for policy and law. They are one way of getting a handle on how our culture understands what makes life worth preserving and of delving into its complex calculus of punishment and retribution. Who Deserves to Die? brings together a distinguished group of death penalty scholars to assess the forms of legal subjectivity and legal community that are supported and constructed by the doctrines and practices of punishment by death in the United States. They help us understand what we do and who we become when we decide who is fit for execution.

In addition to the editors, contributors include Vanessa Barker, Thomas L. Dumm, Daniel Markel, Linda Meyer, Ruth A. Miller, Ravit Reichman, Susan R. Schmeiser, Mateo Taussig-Rubbo, and Robert Weisberg.

In 1840, Alexander Maconochie, a privileged retired naval captain, became at his own request superintendent of two thousand twice-convicted prisoners on Norfolk Island, a thousand miles off the coast of Australia. In four years, Maconochie transformed what was one of the most brutal convict settlements in history into a controlled, stable, and productive environment that achieved such success that upon release his prisoners came to be called "Maconochie's Gentlemen". Here Norval Morris, one of our most renowned criminologists, offers a highly inventive and engaging account of this early pioneer in penal reform, enhancing Maconochie's life story with a trenchant policy twist. Maconochie's life and efforts on Norfolk Island, Morris shows, provide a model with profound relevance to the running of correctional institutions today. Using a unique combination of fictionalized history and critical commentary, Morris gives this work a powerful policy impact lacking in most standard academic accounts. In an era of "mass incarceration" that rivals that of the settlement of Australia, Morris injects the question of humane treatment back into the debate over prison reform. Maconochie and his "Marks system" played an influential role in the development of prisons; but for the last thirty years prison reform has been dominated by punitive and retributive sentiments, the conventional wisdom holding that we need 'supermax' prisons to control the 'worst of the worst' in solitary and harsh conditions. Norval Morris argues to the contrary, holding up the example of Alexander Maconochie as a clear-cut alternative to the "living hell" of prison systems today.

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 practices in the United States. Anne-Marie Cusac first looks at punishment in the nation’s early days, when Americans repudiated Old World cruelty toward criminals and emphasized rehabilitation over retribution. This attitude persisted for some 200 years, but in recent decades we have abandoned it, Cusac shows. She discusses the dramatic rise in the use of torture and restraint, corporal and capital punishment, and punitive physical pain. And she links this new climate of punishment to shifts in other aspects of American culture, including changes in dominant religious beliefs, child-rearing practices, politics, television shows, movies, and more.

America now punishes harder and longer and with methods we would have rejected as cruel and unusual not long ago. These changes are profound, their impact affects all our lives, and we have yet to understand the full consequences.

 A new collection of compelling and challenging essays from one of the nation's leading voices on criminal justice reform, Reducing Crime, Reducing Incarceration makes the argument that sometimes small changes on the ground can add up to big improvements in the criminal justice system. 

How do you launch a new criminal justice reform? How do you measure impact? Is it possible to spread new practices to resistant audiences? And what’s the point of small-bore experimentation anyway? Greg Berman answers these questions by telling the story of successful experiments like the Red Hook Community Justice Center in Brooklyn and by detailing the challenges of implementing new ideas within the criminal justice system. As Laurie Robinson, a professor at George Mason University, writes in her introduction: “Berman offers vivid testimony that—even in the face of opposition—it is, in fact, possible to push our criminal justice system closer to realizing its highest ideals. And that, indeed, is good news.” Other experts share their opinions:

“The central insight of Reducing Crime, Reducing Incarceration is that small tweaks in practice within the criminal justice system can sometimes lead to big change on the streets. By telling the story of the Red Hook Community Justice Center and similar innovations, Greg Berman offers a hopeful message: criminal justice reform at the local level can make a difference.” 
— James B. Jacobs 
Warren E. Burger Professor of Law, New York University School of Law

“Innovation is hard work.... Berman offers a look at how change happens at the local level—and how, sometimes, it doesn't. These well-written essays offer a compelling vision of both the challenges and opportunities of criminal justice reform.” 
— Nicholas Turner 
President, Vera Institute of Justice 

“The topic of criminal justice reform has challenged and bedeviled social thinkers for centuries. In this book, Berman offers a clear-eyed and inventive approach to the problem. Recognizing that change is best achieved at the local level with small, incremental steps using demonstration projects, Berman provides concrete examples of both successes and failures stemming from the work of the Center for Court Innovation over the last two decades. For anyone interested in the future of criminal justice, this book should be on the top of the 'must read' list.” 
— John H. Laub 
Distinguished University Professor, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Maryland, College Park 

“Here you will find Berman's compelling case for community justice, along with classic readings on problem-solving courts. Berman writes like all the rest of us wish we did....”
— Candace McCoy 
The Graduate Center and John Jay College< City University of New York 

Presented in print and digital formats in the Contemporary Society Series by Quid Pro Books, the ebook edition uses proper formatting, linked notes, active URLS in notes, and active Contents.

There is no question that the death penalty is disproportionately imposed in cases involving defendants with mental disabilities. There is clear, systemic bias at all stages of the prosecution and the sentencing process – in determining who is competent to be executed, in the assessment of mitigation evidence, in the ways that counsel is assigned, in the ways that jury determinations are often contaminated by stereotyped preconceptions of persons with mental disabilities, in the ways that cynical expert testimony reflects a propensity on the part of some experts to purposely distort their testimony in order to achieve desired ends. These questions are shockingly ignored at all levels of the criminal justice system, and by society in general.

Here, Michael Perlin explores the relationship between mental disabilities and the death penalty and explains why and how this state of affairs has come to be, to explore why it is necessary to identify the factors that have contributed to this scandalous and shameful policy morass, to highlight the series of policy choices that need immediate remediation, and to offer some suggestions that might meaningfully ameliorate the situation. Using real cases to illustrate the ways in which the persons with mental disabilities are unable to receive fair treatment during death penalty trials, he demonstrates the depth of the problem and the way it’s been institutionalized so as to be an accepted part of our system. He calls for a new approach, and greater attention to the issues that have gone overlooked for so long.

So much to read, so little time? This brief overview of The New Jim Crow tells you what you need to know—before or after you read Michelle Alexander’s book.

Crafted and edited with care, Worth Books set the standard for quality and give you the tools you need to be a well-informed reader.
 
This short summary and analysis of The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander includes:
 Historical contextChapter-by-chapter summariesDetailed timeline of key eventsProfiles of the main charactersImportant quotesFascinating triviaGlossary of termsSupporting material to enhance your understanding of the original work 
About The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander:
 
Legal scholar and civil rights lawyer Michelle Alexander’s invaluable and timely work, The New Jim Crow, examines what she calls the new racial caste system in United States: mass incarceration.
 
Following the practices of slavery and institutional discrimination, Alexander argues, mass incarceration is part of America’s legacy to dehumanize and disenfranchise African Americans and Latinos. According to Alexander, “we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”
 
Thanks in a large part to the War on Drugs, more than two million people are in America’s prisons today—an overwhelming majority of them are people of color who’ve been jailed for minor drug charges. When these adults leave prison, they are often denied employment, housing, the right to vote, and a quality education. As a result, they are rarely able to integrate successfully into society.
 
The New Jim Crow is a well-argued call to dismantle a system of policies that continues to deny civil rights, decades after the passing of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.
 
The summary and analysis in this ebook are intended to complement your reading experience and bring you closer to a great work of nonfiction.

Control and Order, Gang Violence, Death Penalty, Spirituality, Rehabilitation, Survival, Redemption, Suicide, Hopelessness, Politics... The Anatomy of Prison Life shares the true story of the Illinois Department of Corrections and the personal experience of retired warden and author Charles Hinsley. You will be shocked. You will be infuriated. And you will be surprised at the power of the truth.

There have never been so many killers in Irish prisons.

Nearly 1 in 10 Irish prisoners are serving life sentences for murder — and many more are on temporary release.

Hardened crime reporter Barry Cummins tells the shocking true stories of some of Ireland’s most notorious murderers and their horrific crimes. Lifers covers savage killings going back more than 50 years. This book gives a full account of these depraved crimes, through to the investigation, trial and sentencing of the killers to life in prison.

They include:Father-of-five John Crerar, convicted on DNA evidence from a semen sample 23 years after he brutally raped, battered and strangled an innocent young woman who had been out Christmas shopping;Mark Nash, who stabbed a couple to death in a frenzied attack and seriously assaulted another woman in a house where six children lay sleeping;Brian Willoughby, who jumped and danced on his teenage victim’s head, while out on bail for three horrific random assaults on men in Dublin city.As this harrowing but compelling book shows, the criminals may not get away with murder, but it’s the victims’ families who really suffer a life sentence.

This innovative volume explores a fundamental issue in the field of sentencing: the factors which make a sentence more or less severe. All sentencing systems allow courts discretion to consider mitigating and aggravating factors, and many legislatures have placed a number of such factors on a statutory footing. Yet many questions remain regarding the theory and practice of mitigation and aggravation. Drawing on legal and sociological perspectives and examining mitigation and aggravation in various jurisdictions, the essays provide practical illustrations of specific factors as well as theoretical justifications. After the foreword by Andrew von Hirsch, a number of contributors address broad conceptual issues raised at sentencing. These contributions are followed by several empirical chapters including an exploration of personal mitigation in English courts. The authors are leading scholars from a range of common law jurisdictions including England and Wales, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.

Despite the rising number of confirmed false confession cases, most people have a hard time grasping why someone would confess to a crime they did not commit, or even why a guilty person would admit to something that could put them in jail for life. How the Police Generate False Confessions takes you inside the interrogation room, exposing the tactics that law enforcement uses to make confessions happen.

James L. Trainum reveals how innocent people can become suspects and then confessed criminals even when they have not committed a crime. Using real stories, he looks at the inherent coerciveness of the interrogation process and why so many false confessions contain so many of the details that only the true perpetrator would know. More disturbingly, the book examines how these same processes corrupt witness and victim statements, create lying informants and cooperators, and induce innocent people to plead guilty. Trainum also offers recommendations for change in the U.S. by looking at how other countries are changing the process to prevent such miscarriages of justice.

The reasons that people falsely confess can be complex and varied; throughout How the Police Generate False Confessions Trainum encourages readers to critically evaluate confessions on their own by gaining a better understanding of the interrogation process.

Streib’s Death Penalty in a Nutshell covers both the substantive and procedural law of capital cases, along with relevant history, jurisprudence, and constitutional law. It addresses: International issues The complex role of defense counsel Systemic bias Execution of the innocent All relevant data, including statutory and caselaw, provide a basis for broad exploration of academic and pragmatic issues for lawyers, law students, and others interested in the worst crimes committed by the worst offenders.

This latest volume in the Penal Theory and Penal Ethics series addresses one of the oldestquestions in the field of criminal sentencing: should an offender's previous convictions affect the sentence? Although there is an extensive literature on the definition and use of criminal history information, the emphasis here is on the theoretical and normative aspects of considering previous convictions at sentencing. Several authors explore the theory underlying the practice of mitigating the punishments for first offenders, while others put forth arguments for enhancing sentences for recidivists.

Almost everyone agrees--Right on Crime, the ACLU, Koch Industries, George Soros's Open Society Foundation, the editorial boards of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal--that America's current systems for sentencing criminal offenders are a shambles, with crazy quilts of incompatible and conflicting laws, policies, and practices in every state and the federal system. Most everyone agrees that punishments are too severe, and too many people are in prison. However, the kinds of major changes required to undo mass incarceration and rebuild American sentencing are simply not happening. Despite well-intentioned rhetoric and media coverage, there has been very little meaningful change. In Sentencing Fragments, Michael Tonry explains what needs to be done to rebuild just systems of sentencing and punishment, and how to do it. This book tells the story of sentencing policy changes since 1975, examines research findings concerning their effects, and explains what does and does not work. Beyond calling attention to the devastating effects on the lives of the poor and disadvantaged and the latest empirical evidence, Tonry identifies the common moral theories behind criminal sentencing--as well as their larger assumptions about human nature--and discusses the ways in which different theories have bred very different sentencing policies. Sentencing Fragments concludes with a set of proposals for creating better policies and practices for the future, calling for American legislators and politicians to remake sentencing into the humane and just process that it always should have been. In lucid and engaging prose, Michael Tonry reveals the historical foundation for the current state of the American criminal justice system, while simultaneously offering a game plan for long overdue reform.

 Missoula by Jon Krakauer | Summary & Analysis

 

Preview:

Missoula by Jon Krakauer is a close examination of the cause and effect of a series of alleged sexual assaults in a Montana college town.

Missoula is the second largest city in Montana, and the Missoula-based University of Montana (UM) Grizzlies football team is a source of significant local pride. In December 2010, a scandal began in which four members of the football team were accused of gang rape, but were not charged with a crime. A year later, an investigation by a former Missouri Supreme Court justice found that unreported and unprosecuted rapes were a significant issue at UM. In 2012, a Department of Justice investigation found a similar problem. The scandal evolved with media coverage although Missoula's rape statistics were not unusual for a college town. It was the mishandling of the rape cases in an apparent effort to protect the football team, the football program, and the reputation…

 

PLEASE NOTE: This is a summary and analysis of the book and NOT the original book. 

 

Inside this Instaread Summary & Analysis of Missoula

• Summary of book
• Introduction to the Important People in the book
• Analysis of the Themes and Author’s Style

 

 

The United States stands alone as the only Western democracy that still practices capital punishment. Yet the American death penalty has gone into noticeable decline, with annual death sentences and executions dwindling steadily in recent years. In Stay of Execution, Charles Lane offers a fresh analysis of this unexpected trend and its moral and political implications. Countering conventional wisdom that attributes the death penalty's decline to public rejection of the "ultimate sanction," he showsthat it is instead related to the ebbing of violent crime itself. The death penalty is not only more popular than critics claim; it is also less flawed by wrongful executions or racial bias. Lane argues that capital punishment should be preserved, while proposing major reforms to address its real inequities and inconsistencies.

Debate has long been waged over the morality of capital punishment, with standard arguments in its favour being marshalled against familiar arguments that oppose the practice. In The Ethics of Capital Punishment, Matthew Kramer takes a fresh look at the philosophical arguments on which the legitimacy of the death penalty stands or falls, and he develops a novel justification of that penalty for a limited range of cases. The book pursues both a project of critical debunking of the familiar rationales for capital punishment and a project of partial vindication. The critical part presents some accessible and engaging critiques of major arguments that have been offered in support of the death penalty. These chapters, suitable for use in teaching courses on capital punishment, valuably take issue with positions at the heart of contemporary debates over the morality of such punishment. The book then presents an original justification for executing truly terrible criminals, a justification that is free-standing rather than an aspect or offshoot of a general theory of punishment. Its purgative rationale, which has not heretofore been propounded in any current philosophical and practical debates over the death penalty, derives from a philosophical reconception of the nature of evil and the nature of defilement. As the book contributes to philosophical discussions of those phenomena, it also contributes importantly to general normative ethics with sustained reflections on the differences between consequentialist approaches to punishment and deontological approaches. Above all, the volume contributes to the philosophy of criminal law with a fresh rationale for the use of the death penalty and with probing assessments of all the major theories of punishment that have been broached by jurists and philosophers for centuries. Although the book is a work of philosophy by a professional philosopher, it is readily accessible to readers who have not studied philosophy. It will stir both philosophers and anyone engaged with the death penalty to reconsider whether the institution of capital punishment can be an appropriate response to extreme evil.

Condemned:Letters from Death Rowby "Ray" and Seán Ó Riain is a collection of letters between a former Cork teacher and a death row inmate that develops into a unique friendship-one thatis in itself a subtle, rallying cry against an American system that still honours the 3,000 year old adage "an eye for eye", serving as a reminder that, as Gandhi observed, "An eye for an eye makes everyone blind".Ray has been convicted of killing a man, a crime he committed as a young man and that he admits and regrets. For his crime, Ray's sentence is death but what he seeks is not a pardon, or pity, or freedom. Simply, he hopes that his sentence will be commuted to life imprisonment without parole. For most of us to hope for a future so bleak seems unimaginable, but for Ray this is the focus of his appeals- a chance to live. Seán Ó Riain has been writing to Ray for several years and, while Seán's careful letters are included, it is Ray's heartfelt depiction of death row life that form the heart and soul of the book. Ray's letters are powerful in their understated descriptions of his difficult life circumstances- from juvenile offender with addict parents and dependent siblings to his current situation. The denied dreams, the unfulfilled desires, the loneliness, and the fear are all brought to devastating reality in his simple words. The men's letters are framed by commentaries, facts, and case-studies from the American death penalty system, clarifying the process of state sanctioned revenge in 36 of the US states: a process directly in violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A process currently viewed by 88% of American Criminologists and by most American police chiefs as the least effective deterrent to violent crime- one that costs $114 million more annually than life imprisonment in one state alone. Since the year 2000, almost 700 people have been executed in the 36 states that still enforcethe death penalty in the US. InCondemned, after several years of writing to Ray, Ó Riain makes us question the prevalence of the death sentence in the American legal system and asks- should any state punishthe death of a citizen with more death?

If a defendant is on trial for a crime such as burglary, to what extent should the fact that he has a previous conviction for burglary feature in his trial? Should the prosecution be allowed to tell the jury about the previous conviction as evidence that the defendant is more likely to have committed burglary? Should the judge give the defendant a longer sentence because he has a previous conviction? These are the fundamental questions examined in Character in the Criminal Trial. Including an in-depth analysis of the character evidence provisions of the Criminal Justice Act 2003, this book assesses the arguments for and against using character evidence to prove a defendant's guilt. It explores the sentencing provisions in the same Act, as well as the general use of criminal record and other character evidence to aggravate and mitigate sentence. Issues examined in the course of the book include: psychological and philosophical debates about the stability of character; criminological research on recidivism and the nature of criminal careers; ethical debates about the use of prior behaviour to prove current or future offending; the process of reasoning underlying the use of bad character evidence; whether bad character evidence is prejudicial; and the use of risk assessment instruments to classify offenders as dangerous. By combining insights from law, psychology, criminology, and philosophy, Redmayne reassesses the use of character in the criminal trial and reflects on the significance of the law's increasing emphasis on character.

This book contains the official guidelines of the federal criminal sentencing polices established by the United States Sentencing Commission. The Federal Sentencing Guidelines are rules that set out a uniform sentencing policy for individuals and organizations convicted of felonies and serious (Class A) misdemeanors in the United States federal courts system. The Guidelines do not apply to less serious misdemeanors. 

The California youth corrections system is undergoing the most sweeping transformation in its 154-year history. The extraordinary nature of this change is revealed by the striking decline in the state’s youth incarceration rate. In 1996, with 10,000 youth confined in 11 state-run correctional facilities, California boasted the nation’s third highest youth incarceration rate. Now, with only 800 youth remaining in a system comprised of just three institutions, California has one of the nation’s lowest youth incarceration rate.

How did such unprecedented changes occur and what were the crucial conditions that produced them? Daniel E. Macallair answers these questions through an examination of the California youth corrections system’s origins and evolution, and the patterns and practices that ultimately led to its demise.

Beginning in the 19th century, California followed national juvenile justice trends by consigning abused, neglected, and delinquent youth to congregate care institutions known as reform schools. These institutions were characterized by their emphasis on regimentation, rigid structure, and harsh discipline. Behind the walls of these institutions, children and youth, who ranged in age from eight to 21, were subjected to unspeakable cruelties. Despite frequent public outcry, life in California reform schools changed little from the opening of the San Francisco Industrial School in 1859 to the dissolution of the California Youth Authority (CYA) in 2005.

By embracing popular national trends at various times, California encapsulates much of the history of youth corrections in the United States. The California story is exceptional since the state often assumed a leadership role in adopting innovative policies intended to improve institutional treatment. The California juvenile justice system stands at the threshold of a new era as it transitions from a 19th century state-centered institutional model to a decentralized structure built around localized services delivered at the county level.

After the Doors Were Locked is the first to chronicle the unique history of youth corrections and institutional care in California and analyze the origins of today’s reform efforts. This book offers valuable information and guidance to current and future generations of policy makers, administrators, judges, advocates, students and scholars.

Virtually every constitutional order in the common law world contains a provision for executive clemency or pardon in criminal cases. This facility for legal mercy is not limited to a single place in modern legal systems, but is instead realized through various practices such as a law enforcement officer’s decision to arrest, a prosecutor’s decision to prosecute, and a judge’s decision to convict and sentence. Doubts about legal mercy in any form as unfair, unguided, or arbitrary are as ubiquitous as the exercise of mercy itself.?

This book presents a comparative analysis of the clemency and pardon power in the common law world. Andrew Novak compares the modern development, organization, and practice of constitutional and statutory schemes of clemency and pardon in the United Kingdom, United States, and Commonwealth jurisdictions. He asks whether the bureaucratization of the clemency power is in line with global trends, and explores how innovations in legislative involvement, judicial review, and executive consultation have made the mercy and pardon procedure more transparent. The book concludes with a discussion on the future of the clemency and pardon power given the decline of the death penalty in the Commonwealth and the rise of the modern institution of parole.

As a work concerned with the practice of mercy in the common law world, this book will be of great interest to researchers and students of international and comparative criminal justice and international human rights law.

From the Code of Hammurabi (1800 BC) to the present, Sentencing: A Reference Handbook follows the historical evolution of the process of criminal punishment, then focuses on the U.S. judicial system to show how American sentencing laws have changed in response to surges of different types of crime, or to other factors such as prison overcrowding.

To help readers understand the complex issue of criminal sentencing, this informative volume describes the major sentencing procedures used in American courts (determinate, indeterminate, guidelines-based, and mandatory), highlighting the merits and flaws of each with well-documented cases and examples. Coverage includes a range of contentious issues, including the disproportionate application of the death penalty, sex offender laws, punishing the addicted and the mentally ill, and balancing punishment with rehabilitation.

Indigenous People, Crime and Punishment examines criminal sentencing courts’ changing characterisations of Indigenous peoples’ identity, culture and postcolonial status. Focusing largely on Australian Indigenous peoples, but drawing also on the Canadian experiences, Thalia Anthony critically analyses how the judiciary have interpreted Indigenous difference. Through an analysis of Indigenous sentencing remarks over a fifty year period in a number of jurisdictions, the book demonstrates how judicial discretion is moulded to dominant white assumptions about Indigeneity. More specifically, Indigenous People, Crime and Punishment shows how the increasing demonisation of Indigenous criminality and culture in sentencing has turned earlier ‘gains’ in the legal recognition of Indigenous peoples on their head. The recognition of Indigenous difference is thereby revealed as a pliable concept that is just as likely to remove concessions as it is to grant them. Indigenous People, Crime and Punishment suggests that Indigenous justice requires a two-way recognition process where Indigenous people and legal systems are afforded greater control in sentencing, dispute resolution and Indigenous healing.

For nearly two centuries in the United States, the punishment of crime was largely aimed, in theory and in practice, at prevention, rehabilitation or incapacitation, and deterrence. In the mid-1970s, a sharp-and some argued permanent-shift occurred. Punishment in the criminal justice system became first and foremost about retribution. Retribution trumped rehabilitation; proportionality outweighed prevention. The retributivist sea change was short-lived, however. After a few decades, some policy makers returned tentatively to individualized approaches to punishment, launching initiatives like drug courts and programs for treatment and reentry. Others promoted policies that retained the rhetoric but betrayed the theory-punishment in proportion to culpability-of retributivism, resulting in mandatory minimum sentences, three-strikes-and-you're-out laws, "dangerous offender" and "sexual predator" laws, "truth in sentencing," and life without the possibility of parole. What now for retributivism? Retributivism Has a Past: Has It a Future? brings thoughtfulness and rigor back into the retributivism debate. This collection of essays trains some of the most influential and brightest established and up-and-coming legal and philosophical minds on how retributivism does, might, or should affect contemporary policy and practices. The volume's aim is neither to condemn nor to justify, but to take new policies and practices seriously and examine them closely. At a time when criminal-justice policy makers are forced to reconsider contemporary approaches to punishment and attempt to devise new ones, Retributivism Has a Past: Has It a Future? offers serious theoretical critiques of the recent past and justifications for possible futures.