This volume of "Studies in Law, Politics, and Society" presents a unique special issue "Is the Death Penalty Dying?." Drawing together an array of distinguished scholars from political science, criminology, sociology, and law, this volume provides a comprehensive assessment of the status of the death penalty in the United States, its past, and its trajectory for the future. Taken together, the work published in this volume exemplifies the kind exciting and innovative work now being done by legal scholars from different disciplines.This is a special issue examining the death penalty in the US. It draws together an array of distinguished scholars from political science, criminology, sociology, and law.

The coming of statehood to California in 1850 forced the authorities to face one immediately pressing issue: what to do with the many convicts who were pouring forth from the local county courtrooms in the wake of the great Gold Rush of 1848-49. Lawlessness was everywhere rampant, and something had to be done immediately. The answer was found in establishing the first state prison at Quentin Point in Marin County, soon to be called San Quentin. Librarians Bonnie Petry and Michael Burgess have here gathered together several key documents dealing with the earliest years of the prison, including James Harold Wilkins' seminal work, "The Evolution of a State Prison," together with a list of early convict names, a bibliography of "San Quentiniana" (publications by the convicts themselves) by Herman K. Spector, and a new annotated bibliography of nonfiction resources about the prison compiled by Ms. Petry. Complete with Introduction and Index.

Beginning with an overview of the history and philosophy of punishment, these articles explore penal practices in the modern state and the deeper philosophical and social aspects of retributive justice.

In the context of recent media scrutiny on the state of prisons in the UK, the efficacy of incarcerating large numbers of offenders is an issue which is rising steadily up the political agenda. In 2016, the Howard League for Penal Reform - an organization that has energetically lobbied for improvements in the treatment of offenders throughout its lifetime - celebrated its 150th anniversary. This book considers the life and work of Margery Fry, the woman who created the modern Howard League and dominated it from 1918 until her death in 1958, and places the UK's oldest surviving penal reform pressure group and its current work into their historical context. It examines Fry's legacy as a campaigner for an international standard of prisoners' minimum rights, which resulted in a United Nations charter, for the introduction of compensation for victims of criminal injuries, and for the abolition of the death penalty, and also considers her role in the establishment of criminology as an academic discipline and her organization of the first criminology lectures in Great Britain. It is essential reading for all those engaged in prisons research, penal reform and criminal justice history.

This work features writings by death-row inmates, family members of victims and perpetrators, religious and political figures, journalists, criminologists, and legal experts, along with information on programs designed to help young people who have gone astray. Intimate personal accounts reveal the fear and regret of death-row inmates as well as the horror and anxiety of their loved ones. In one moving chapter, a mother speaks candidly about the murder of her daughter and how she feels toward the murderer. Alternately grief-stricken and angry, she concludes that it is up to every citizen to play a part in helping our troubled children before they grow up to become gun-toting hoodlums. The book advocates rehabilitation programs, a new national emphasis on broken families and the problems of youth, child care for single mothers, and an overhaul of the juvenile-justice system. Dicks calls for a distinction between justice and revenge, and offers a provocative, wrenching, yet realistic look at a problem that threatens the future of our society.

This volume explores the theory and practice of sentencing in England and Wales, exploring issues such as the role of previous convictions, offender remorse and sentencing female offenders, as well as drawing upon a new and unique source of data from the Crown courts.

Currently, there is a lack of resources and information regarding how to best understand and support those impacted by incarceration. As the number of people impacted by incarceration rises, it is important that we acknowledge the issues and address the concerns faced by professionals such as social workers and educators that work with families and the most vulnerable populations impacted by incarceration. Counseling Strategies for Children and Families Impacted by Incarceration provides in-depth information and background regarding the growing group of children and families impacted by incarceration. It sets out to bridge the gap between community and school counseling, mental health counseling, social work, and social and cultural issues and can be used for skills development and social justice reasons. Covering topics such as school counseling resources, community engagement, and trauma, it is ideal for researchers, academicians, practitioners, instructors, policymakers, social workers, social justice advocates, counselors, and students.

In late summer 2015, Sweden embarked on one of the largest self-described humanitarian efforts in its history, opening its borders to 163,000 asylum seekers fleeing the war in Syria. Six months later this massive effort was over. On January 4, 2016, Sweden closed its border with Denmark. This closure makes a startling reversal of Sweden's open borders to refugees and contravenes free movement in the Schengen Area, a founding principle of the European Union. What happened? This book sets out to explain this reversal. In her new and compelling book, Vanessa Barker explores the Swedish case study to challenge several key paradigms for understanding penal order in the twenty-first century and makes an important contribution to our understanding of punishment and welfare states. She questions the dominance of neoliberalism and political economy as the main explanation for the penalization of others, migrants and foreign nationals, and develops an alternative theoretical framework based on the internal logic of the welfare state and democratic theory about citizenship, incorporation, and difference, paying particular attention to questions of belonging, worthiness, and ethnic and gender hierarchies. Her book develops the concept of penal nationalism as an important form of penal power in the twenty-first century, providing a bridge between border control and punishment studies.

The Law Officer's Pocket Manual is a handy, pocket-sized, spiral-bound manual that highlights basic legal rules for quick reference and offers examples showing how those rules are applied. The manual provides concise guidance based on U.S. Supreme Court rulings on constitutional law issues and other legal developments, covering arrest, search, surveillance, and other routine as well as sensitive areas of law enforcement. It includes more than 100 examples drawn from leading cases to provide guidance on how to act in a wide variety of situations. The 2023 edition is completely updated to reflect recent court decisions. This book helps you keep track of everything in a readable and easy-to-carry format. Routledge offers tiered discounts on bulk orders of 5 or more copies: For more information, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/collections/16268

"Doing Time" is an essential text for students in criminology and criminal justice - a one-stop overview of key debates in punishment and imprisonment. This edition, thoroughly revised and updated throughout, is a highly accessible guide, providing the tools to critically engage with today's central issues in penology and penal policy.
Examining imprisonment both historically and sociologically, and in international perspective, "Doing Time" outlines theoretical debates, and goes beyond standard introductory texts to help students develop their own critical and informed opinions.
This new edition includes:
- three new chapters
- an up-to-date bibliography
- fully revised statistical information
- a guide to key internet resources
Issues explored include:
- how incarceration became established as the foremost form of punishment
- the role of space, time and labor in the evolution of prisons and prison life
- why prison populations are rising despite the fall in crime figures
- an examination of key prison populations - juveniles, women and ethnic groups
- crime and the business cycle - links between crime, unemployment and imprisonment
- globalization and crime control
- the future of imprisonment

Newgate in Revolution provides a useful and thought-provoking anthology of radical literature - satirical, philosophical and political writings - issued by the radicals and religious dissenters imprisoned in Newgate during the turbulent and nervous period 1780-1848. Newgate was a dreaded prison during this period and its image and reputation coupled to make it the English equivalent of the French Bastille. For those who found themselves incarcerated in Newgate the experience was debilitating and repressive. However, in the case of the radical prisoners it is a curious irony that this repressive environment actually encouraged a fraternal spirit and fertilised a rich production of ideas and literature, which today offers a rare insight into this unique and fascinating culture. Newgate in Revolution reproduces a representative selection of the radical literature published from Newgate, including the first edited version of the prison diary of Thomas Lloyd.

The morality of capital punishment has been debated for a long time. This however has 1 not resulted in the settlement of the question either way. Philosophers are still divided. In this work I am not addressing the morality of capital punishment per se. My question is different but related. It is this. Whether or not capital punishment is morally right, is it moral or immoral for medical doctors to be involved in the practice? To deal with this question I start off in Chapter One delineating the sort of involvement the medical associations consider to be morally problematic for medical doctors in capital punishment. They make a distinction between what they call 2 "medicalisation" of and "involvement" in capital punishment, and argue that there is a moral distinction between the two. Whilst it is morally acceptable for doctors to be "involved" in capital punishment, according to the medical associations, it is immoral to medicalise the practice. I clarify this position and show what moral issues arise. I then suggest that there should not be a distinction between the two. The medical associations argue that the medicalisation of capital punishment, especially the use by medical doctors of lethal injection to execute condemned prisoners is immoral and therefore should be prohibited, because it involves doctors in doing what is against the aims of medicine.

First published in 1989, Guards Imprisoned provides an in-depth look into the work and working life of prison guards as they perceive and experience it. The author, who was a teacher at Auburn Prison, New York, discovered that little was known about the guard's perceptions of his "place" in the prison community and set out to explore the dynamics of this key correctional occupation from the perspective of those who do it. The raw data was provided by over 160 hours of interviews with guards and is presented in the order of a "natural history" - from their prerecruitment images of prison to the search for satisfaction as experienced guards. The book also includes a follow-up with the officers who were originally interviewed in 1976, assessing patterns of change and stability in their attitudes and behaviors. The Auburn Correctional Facility (renamed from Auburn Prison in 1970) was the second state prison in New York, the site of the first execution by electric chair in 1890, and the namesake of the famed "Auburn System" replicated across the country, in which people worked in groups during the day, were housed in solitary confinement at night, and lived in total silence. The facility is celebrating the 200th anniversary of its groundbreaking in 2016.

In many jurisdictions today, life imprisonment is the most severe penalty that can be imposed. Despite this, it is a relatively under-researched form of punishment and no meaningful attempt has been made to understand its full human rights implications. This important collection fills that gap by addressing these two key questions: what is life imprisonment and what human rights are relevant to it? These questions are explored from the perspective of a range of jurisdictions, in essays that draw on both empirical and doctrinal research. Under the editorship of two leading scholars in the field, this innovative and important work will be a landmark publication in the field of penal studies and human rights.

There is nothing uglier than a catfish. With its scaleless, eel-like body, flat, semicircular head, and cartilaginous whiskers, it looks almost entirely unlike a cat. The toothless, sluggish beasts can be found on the bottom of warm streams and lakes, living on scum and detritus. Such a diet is healthier than it sounds: divers in the Ohio River regularly report sighting catfish the size of small whales, and cats in the Mekong River in Southeast Asia often weigh nearly 700 pounds. Ugly or not, the catfish is good to eat. Deep-fried catfish is a Southern staple; more ambitious recipes add Parmesan cheese, bacon drippings and papri ka, or Amontillado. Catfish is also good for you. One pound of channel catfish provides nearly all the protein but only half the calories and fat of 1 pound of solid white albacore tuna. Catfish is a particularly good source of alpha tocopherol and B vitamins. Because they are both nutritious and tasty, cats are America's biggest aquaculture product."

X'ed Out Part II illustrates how tough it is for Americans to survive in the "real world" after being convicted of a felony. The author, an ex parole officer, delivers information that other writers, publishers, and criminal justice officials are afraid to disclose.

Corporal punishment is often seen as a litmus test for a society's degree of civilization. Its licit use purports to separate modernity from premodernity, enlightened from barbaric cultures. As Geltner argues, however, neither did the infliction of bodily pain typify earlier societies nor did it vanish from penal theory, policy, or practice. Far from displaying a steady decline that accelerated with the Enlightenment, physical punishment was contested throughout Antiquity and the Middle Ages, its application expanding and contracting under diverse pressures. Moreover, despite the integration of penal incarceration into criminal justice systems since the nineteenth century, modern nation states and colonial regimes increased rather than limited the use of corporal punishment. Flogging Others thus challenges a common understanding of modernization and Western identity and underscores earlier civilizations' nuanced approaches to punishment, deviance, and the human body. Today as in the past, corporal punishment thrives due to its capacity to define otherness efficiently and unambiguously, either as a measure acting upon a deviant's body or as a practice that epitomizes - in the eyes of external observers - a culture's backwardness.

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the application of the new theory of contestable markets to the problem of the transition to deregulation in regulated industries. It offers an extensive review of both the theory and practice of contestable markets, as well as guidelines for the practical application of the theory to regulated industries and antitrust, with special consideration given to the problems of the rail industry. As applied in this industry, the theory promised to help balance the conflicting goals of regulatory transition and to define standards for revenue adequacy, cooperation among competitors, maximum reasonable rates, and antitrust immunity for mergers. Unlike other, chiefly theoretical, treatments of the subject, the author has provided a study of the theory of contestable markets as well as its past and potential applications. His introduction discusses such topics as the relevant theory of perfect contestability, implications for economic welfare, and recent applications of the theory. Chapter 2 deals with vertical mergers into contestable markets, while chapter 3 concerns itself largely with the transition to deregulation in regulated industries. Unlike other theoretical studies, however, the work also addresses the theory in practice. Using the insights gained when the theory was employed in the rail industry, the author draws conclusions regarding a broad range of regulatory and antitrust issues affecting all industries, such as economic analysis of vertical mergers and vertical economic practices.

This book provides an introduction to socio-legal forms of mitigation in capital sentencing. It helps mitigation specialists, defense investigators, social scientists, and lawyers in developing socio-cultural themes of mitigation. It examines scientific formulations, concepts, and frameworks for structuring social history investigations and assessments of moral culpability. A fundamental aim of this handbook was to provide mitigation professionals not only with an understanding of the context of mitigation in criminal justice thinking, but also ways of contextualizing issues of blame and culpability. Cases are used to illustrate how to identify, evaluate and present mitigation evidence in assessing issues of culpability in the mitigation of punishment in death penalty cases. It also exposes mitigation professionals to recent developments in the social sciences with implications for assessing issues of practical rationality, diminished volition, unfortunate forms of socialization, criminal propensities, socio-cultural deprivation, and gang involvement. These topics are linked with legal and philosophical conceptions of moral culpability that offer mitigation professionals new ways of thinking about both proximal and remote forms of mitigation. These socially oriented lenses, used in examining these concepts and legal issues, offer alternative ways of thinking about issues of capacity, choice and character in assessing diminished forms of moral culpability. The book concludes with recommendations for future research and other strategies for promoting the improvement of practice in the field of capital mitigation. Unlike other books on death penalty mitigation, this book examines issues of relevance to social scientists, as well as mental health professionals. In fact, it is one of the only books written on the subject that includes opportunities for the inclusion of expert testimony on socio-legal matters by social criminologists, sociologists, social psychologists, and social workers.

Electronic monitoring (EM) is a way of supervising offenders in the community whilst they are on bail, serving a community sentence or after release from prison. Various technologies can be used, including voice verification, GPS satellite tracking and - most commonly - the use of radio frequency to monitor house arrest. It originated in the USA in the 1980s and has spread to over 30 countries since then. This book explores the development of EM in a number of countries to give some indication of the diverse ways it has been utilized and of the complex politics which surrounds its use. A techno-utopian impulse underpins the origins of EM and has remained latent in its subsequent development elsewhere in the world, despite recognition that is it less capable of effecting penal transformations than its champions have hoped. This book devotes substantive chapters to the issues of privatisation, evaluation, offender perspectives and ethics. Whilst normatively more committed to the Swedish model, the book acknowledges that this may not represent the future of EM, whose untrammelled, commercially-driven development could have very alarming consequences for criminal justice. Both utopian and dystopian hopes have been invested in EM, but research on its impact is ambivalent and fragmented, and EM remains undertheorised, empirically and ethically. This book seeks to redress this by providing academics, policy audiences and practitioners with the intellectual resources to understand and address the challenges which EM poses.

Robert Turrell presents a novel approach to the study of capital punishment in 20th-century South Africa. White Mercy focuses on official acts of mercy rather than on miscarriages of justice. Turrell bases his absorbing narrative on a thorough investigation of government statistics, court testimony, and judges' reports. He shows that racism and sexism profoundly influenced death-penalty cases, but not in equal ways. Africans, whom white rulers considered the "weaker" race, and women, whom men called the "weaker" sex, entered a legal realm that both promoted preordained cultural difference and disproportionately granted clemency to females convicted of murder. What will perhaps surprise many readers is that a number of condemned white men went to the gallows because the court believed they exhibited the incorrigible instincts of the "weaker" race. White Mercy stands alone in South African scholarship as the only book-length history of capital punishment. It is also a pioneering study in White Mercy stands alone in South African scholarship as the only book-length history of capital punishment. It is also a pioneering study in the field of gender studies. Turrell's sharp analysis and engrossing vignettes will be welcomed by students in graduate seminars and upper-level undergraduate courses covering a range of themes from race relations and gender studies, to the death penalty and constitutional developments in the United States and South Africa.

This collection explores the intersection between criminology, conflict resolution and restorative justice. It traces the role of criminological discourses in the resolution of conflict at the macro political level (in South Africa and Northern Ireland) and the micro level in settings such as local communities, indigenous justice systems and in the youth justice system. The resulting discourse, drawing upon peacemaking criminology, human rights and restorative justice frameworks, suggests an important symbiosis between the traditionally distinct disciplines of criminology and conflict resolution peace studies.

In 1791, the French femme de lettres Olympe de Gouges wrote that 'as women have the right to take their places on the scaffold, they must also have the right to take their seats in government'. This book explores the issues of female emancipation through the history of female execution, from the burning of Joan of Arc in 1431 to the events of the French revolution. Concentrating on individual victims, the author addresses the sexual attitudes and prejudices encountered by women condemned to death. She examines the horrific treatment of those denounced as witches and reveals the gruesome reality of death by hanging, burning or the guillotine. In an attempt to uncover the historical truth behind such figures as Joan of Arc, Anne Boleyn, Manon Roland and Charlotte Corday, she goes beyond biography to consider their deaths in symbolic terms. She also considers writers such as Genet, Yourcenar and Brecht and their treatment of the tragic, sacrificial and erotic aspects of female execution.