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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.”
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.
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.
"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.
• 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In Lord High Executioner, award-winning writer Howard Engel traces the traditions of capital punishment 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
An important book that will appeal to those involved in the death penalty debate and to general religious studies and American studies scholars, as well.
Behind the proud façade of Canada's criminal justice system lie the shattered lives of the people unjustly caught within its web. Justice Miscarried tells the heartwrenching stories of twelve innocent Canadians, including David Milgaard,
Donald Marshall, Guy Paul Morin, Clayton Johnson, William Mullins-Johnson, and Thomas Sophonow, who were wrongly convicted and the errors in the nation's justice system that changed their lives forever.