Generation after generation has come up with new forms of punishment to inflict on those guilty (and sometimes innocent) of crimes against property and person. From the stocks and pillory, to flogging, ducking and transportation to foreign lands, this volume brings to life those turbulent times of long ago. Even after suffering the ultimate in punishments - death - the bodies of the convicted could still be punished. Stories of dissection, when the body of the deceased criminal was publicly carved up, or gibbeting, when the corpse would be coated in tar and canvass and displayed in an iron frame on a pole 30ft high, are gruesome in the extreme. Pity poor John Spencer, whose rotting remains were gibbeted for over sixty years until the cage was finally blown down in a storm. Richly illustrated, this book provides a fascinating glimpse into the dark world of punishments through the centuries and will appeal to all those wishing to discover more about Nottinghamshire's intriguing past.

Many Western countries now use electronic monitoring (EM) of some offenders as an alternative to more traditional forms of punishments such as imprisonment. While the main reason for introducing EM is the growing prison population, politicians and administrators also believe that this type of punishment achieves a positive effect by reducing recidivism and the probability of post-release marginalisation. The small existing empirical literature on the effect of EM finds mixed support for this belief, but is, however, based on very small sample sizes. The authors expand this literature by studying the causal effect of EM on social benefit dependency after the sentence has been served. They use administrative data from Statistics Denmark that include information on all Danish offenders who have served their sentence under EM rather than in prison. They compare post-release dependency rates for this group with outcomes for a historical control group of convicted offenders who would have served their sentences with EM had the option been available (ie: who are identical to the EM group on all observed and unobserved characteristics).

"Of all the books which I have read on the death penalty--and that number is considerable--Sarat's probing analysis in these pages is among the best. I turned to some of Sarat's research when I wrote "Dead Man Walking," I trust his scholarship and his ability to construct a probing analysis of cultural assumptions and political and legal practice. Sometimes his insights startle me. Sometimes he jolts me out of intellectual paradigms that had once guided my thinking. I'm very grateful to him for giving us this book. No one who reads it will be the same again. We're talking power here, the power to change consciousness. Fasten your seat belts."--Sister Helen Prejean, CSJ, author of "Dead Man Walking"

""When the State Kills" describes how capital punishment and the politics of vengeance have corrupted the courts, other institutions of government, and our culture. It documents the enormous cost of the death penalty to society far beyond the cases in which it is inflicted. And it reveals the poverty of vision that has kept the United States from joining other nations in abandoning this violent and primitive form of punishment."--Stephen B. Bright, Director, Southern Center for Human Rights

"Sarat's brilliant, probing study lights the way to a new depth of understanding of the dangerous role of capital punishment in American society. It shows how the death penalty, trivially unimportant as a tool of crime control, has become a central focus of this nation's agonized, obsessive struggle to define itself as strong, clear-sighted and self-confident enough to revel in divine power over life and death. Profoundly insightful."--Anthony G. Amsterdam, capital defense lawyer, Professor of Law, New York University

"Capital punishment is one of the main crimes of state. In this lucid, scrupulous, and passionate book, Austin Sarat explores the many facets of capital punishment in order to present the practice fully and unsparingly. He prepares the way for a new critique of capital punishment by articulating the most cogent reasons against it. The book is a triumph of humanist scholarship."--George Kateb, Princeton University

Foundational principles of the contemporary practices of both restorative justice and the concept of therapeutic jurisprudence often import organic and indigenous practices of conflict resolution to resolve insufficiencies and even to explain fundamental ideas. Too often, the indiscriminate use of such practices does not mind the gap between the defining principles, the guiding principles, or the limiting principles that challenge particular features of practical applications. Minding the Gap Between Restorative Justice, Therapeutic Jurisprudence, and Global Indigenous Wisdom gives an authentic voice to practitioners and theorists whose work originates in organic or indigenous conflict resolution. It raises awareness of the diversity of approaches to dispute resolution from the deep perspective of their foundations and understands the challenges that arise in the practical application of restorative justice and therapeutic jurisprudence models when using principles disconnected from their foundation. It further offers ways to bridge the gap so that it is no longer an obstacle but a source of transformation. Covering topics such as justice praxes, indigenous conflict resolution, and global indigenous wisdom, this premier reference source is a dynamic resource for HR managers, lawyers, government officials, mediators, counselors, students and faculty of higher education, librarians, researchers, and academicians.

Today the United States leads the world in incarceration rates. The country increasingly relies on the prison system as a "fix" for the regulation of societal issues. Captivity Beyond Prisons is the first full-length book to explicitly link prisons and incarceration to the criminalization of Latina (im)migrants. Starting in the 1990s, the United States saw tremendous expansion in the number of imprisoned (im)migrants, specifically Latinas/os. Consequently, there was also an increase in the number of deportations. In addition to regulating society, prisons also serve as a reproductive control strategy, both in preventing female inmates from having children and by separating them from their families. With an eye to racialized and gendered technologies of power, Escobar argues that incarcerated Latinas are especially depicted as socially irrecuperable because they are not considered useful within the neoliberal labor market. This perception impacts how they are criminalized, which is not limited to incarceration but also extends to and affects Latina (im)migrants' everyday lives. Escobar also explores the relationship between the immigrant rights movement and the prison abolition movement, scrutinizing a variety of social institutions working on solutions to social problems that lead to imprisonment. Accessible to both academics and those in the justice and social service sectors, Escobar's book pushes readers to consider how, even in radical spaces, unequal power relations can be reproduced by the very entities that attempt to undo them.

Are you a prison officer who feels nervous about dealing with Muslims on the wings? Are you a prison chaplain who wants to know how your chaplaincy affects the lives of prisoners? Are you a policymaker who needs a robust base of evidence for Islam in prison? Are you an academic or a journalist seeking ground-breaking social science in a contentious field? Based on original evidence from 279 Muslim prisoners and 79 prison officers, we explore how Muslims come to be incarcerated, how the practice of Islam affects prison life and rehabilitation, the types of Islam and the effects of Islamic conversion in prison and the professional practice of officers and chaplains. We also investigate the common belief that incarceration fosters Islamist extremism and suggest improvements to faith provision and rehabilitative opportunities for Muslim prisoners.

Based on over thirty years of research of government sentencing policy and work within the criminal justice system, David Fraser demonstrates that Britain's increased reliance on alternatives to imprisonment has allowed violent crime to flourish. The number of life-threatening attacks has increased rapidly over the last forty years but justice officials have masked this development within a blizzard of deceptive statistics. Anti-prison groups tell the public that violent offenders can be managed in the community under supervision and that prison makes offenders worse. Contrary to this misleading propaganda, the evidence presented here informs us that criminals under probation supervision as an alternative to imprisonment commit hundreds of the most serious crimes every year, while the government's figures - which are kept away from the public eye - make it clear that long prison sentences are our best protection against violent crime. Licence to Kill demonstrates that the death penalty was an effective deterrent to homicide but does not argue for its reintroduction. Instead, by acknowledging its effectiveness, David Fraser argues the case for a re-vamped sentencing system that is as effective as was the fear of the hangman's noose. By providing readers with an alternative perspective, he invites them to consider the idea of a new criminal sentencing framework.

Why we punish, who we punish and how we punish are central elements of any discussion of the role of law in modern society.

In this impressive and timely collection, two leading experts on the theory of punishment have selected a range of articles which have made important and influential contributions to the ways in which punishment is understood in contemporary society. The collection is introduced by a lengthy and original discussion of the key concepts of punishment, and each article is prefaced by a short introduction setting out the issues to be discussed.

Throughout the book the aim of the editors is to demonstrate how complex the concept of punishment is, and to illustrate how an understanding of punishment is vitally important for students of law and society.

As the world becomes ever more unequal, people become ever more 'disposable'. Today, governments systematically exclude sections of their populations from society through heavy-handed policing. But it doesn't always go to plan. William I. Robinson exposes the nature and dynamics of this out-of-control system, arguing for the urgency of creating a movement capable of overthrowing it. The global police state uses a variety of ingenious methods of control, including mass incarceration, police violence, US-led wars, the persecution of immigrants and refugees, and the repression of environmental activists. Movements have emerged to combat the increasing militarization, surveillance and social cleansing; however many of them appeal to a moral sense of social justice rather than addressing its root - global capitalism. Using shocking data which reveals how far capitalism has become a system of repression, Robinson argues that the emerging megacities of the world are becoming the battlegrounds where the excluded and the oppressed face off against the global police state.

The British public today endure some of the world's worst crime levels. According to the government's own estimates, 132 million indictable crimes alone are committed every year, the vast majority of which go unrecorded and undetected. Burglary is rife; street crime burgeoning and violence is escalating to unprecedented levels. Fear of crime means that many of us - especially the vulnerable and the elderly - have become prisoners in our own homes, leaving predatory criminals free to roam our streets. In this meticulously researched and passionately argued study of the contemporary British justice system, David Fraser offers a sobering indictment of post-war British governments, who have not only overseen but also fostered this spectacular and terrifying rise in crime. Almost without exception, governments - and the civil servants and academics who abet them - have sought to persuade us that criminals are victims of society and that they are best rehabilitated within the community rather than punished inside prisons. So pervasive has this 'anti-prison propaganda' become that few of whatever political complexion are now prepared to question its truth. However, as David Fraser cogently argues, community supervision and probation orders have simply left criminals free to reoffend, while the criminal justice system's near obsession with the well-being of criminals has come to override its concerns for their victims, whose interests and sufferings are callously ignored. Moreover, he suggests successive governments' failure to carry out what is their first duty - to protect their citizens - threatens to undermine our democracy, as more and more people - exasperated by the blatant injustice of the justice system - take the law into their own hands. Britain has indeed become 'a land fit for criminals'.

The path away from America's prison crisis may lead through the jail. While there may be many positive aspects of jails as sites of confinement, especially when compared with the prisons of mass incarceration, Irwin's analysis pointed to features that could make the new jail-based version of mass incarceration even worse. The local nature and relative obscurity of jails means that the level of legal review and due process obtainable in prisons through the persistent efforts of civil rights lawyers may be even harder to maintain in jails. The historic focus of jails on what Irwin called "rabble management" threatens to undermine the opportunity presented by the present prison crisis to rethink America's overreliance on confinement of all kinds (whether prisons, jails, or immigration detention centers). If so, it is vital that those of us committed to reversing the destructive effects of mass incarceration on American democracy and social equality expand our concern and our research from prisons to the jails that may replace them. The re-publication of John Irwin's The Jail: Managing the Underclass in American Society is a most timely aid to that mission. --From the foreword by Jonathan Simon

Written by two academic scholars and former practitioners, Corrections: From Research, to Policy, to Practice, Second Edition offers students a 21st-century look into the treatment and rehabilitative themes that drive modern-day corrections. Authors Mary K. Stohr and Anthony Walsh expertly weave together research, policy, and practice to give readers a foundational understanding of the field of corrections.

The United States imprisons far more people, total and per capita, than any other country in the world. Among the more than 1.5 million Americans currently incarcerated, minorities and the poor are disproportionately represented. What's more, they tend to come from just a few of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in the country. While the political costs of this phenomenon remain poorly understood, it's become increasingly clear that the effects of this mass incarceration are much more pervasive than previously thought, extending beyond those imprisoned to the neighbors, family, and friends left behind. For Trading Democracy for Justice, Traci Burch has drawn on data from neighborhoods with imprisonment rates up to fourteen times the national average to chart demographic features that include information about imprisonment, probation, and parole, as well as voter turnout and volunteerism. She presents powerful evidence that living in a high-imprisonment neighborhood significantly decreases political participation. Similarly, people living in these neighborhoods are less likely to engage with their communities through volunteer work. What results is the demobilization of entire neighborhoods and the creation of vast inequalities - even among those not directly affected by the criminal justice system. The first book to demonstrate the ways in which the institutional effects of imprisonment undermine already disadvantaged communities, Trading Democracy for Justice speaks to issues at the heart of democracy.