On a misty September morning in rural Georgia, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian found himself cast in a role that he had never imagined for himself: an expert witness in the sentencing trial of a convicted kidnapper, rapist, and murderer. His brief testimony that day would ultimately lead him on a personal journey into the criminal justice system, to confront the actions and decisions of lawyers battling for and against the death penalty, convicts whose lives are at stake, and jurors forced to decide who shall live and who shall die.

In the late nineteenth century, prisoners in Alabama, the vast majority of them African Americans, were forced to work as coal miners under the most horrendous conditions imaginable. Black Prisoners and Their World draws on a variety of sources, including the reports and correspondence of prison inspectors and letters from prisoners and their families, to explore the history of the African American men and women whose labor made Alabama's prison system the most profitable in the nation.

To coal companies and the state of Alabama, black prisoners provided, respectively, sources of cheap labor and state revenue. By 1883, a significant percentage of the workforce in the Birmingham coal industry was made up of convicts. But to the families and communities from which the prisoners came, the convict lease was a living symbol of the dashed hopes of Reconstruction.

Indeed, the lease--the system under which the prisoners labored for the profit of the company and the state--demonstrated Alabama's reluctance to let go of slavery and its determination to pursue profitable prisons no matter what the human cost. Despite the efforts of prison officials, progressive reformers, and labor unions, the state refused to take prisoners out of the coal mines.

In the course of her narrative, Mary Ellen Curtin describes how some prisoners died while others endured unspeakable conditions and survived. Curtin argues that black prisoners used their mining skills to influence prison policy, demand better treatment, and become wage-earning coal miners upon their release.

Black Prisoners and Their World unearths new evidence about life under the most repressive institution in the New South. Curtin suggests disturbing parallels between the lease and today's burgeoning system of private incarceration.

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With a career, a boyfriend, and a loving family, Piper Kerman barely resembles the reckless young woman who delivered a suitcase of drug money ten years before. But that past has caught up with her. Convicted and sentenced to fifteen months at the infamous federal correctional facility in Danbury, Connecticut, the well-heeled Smith College alumna is now inmate #11187-424--one of the millions of people who disappear "down the rabbit hole" of the American penal system. From her first strip search to her final release, Kerman learns to navigate this strange world with its strictly enforced codes of behavior and arbitrary rules. She meets women from all walks of life, who surprise her with small tokens of generosity, hard words of wisdom, and simple acts of acceptance. Heartbreaking, hilarious, and at times enraging, Kerman's story offers a rare look into the lives of women in prison--why it is we lock so many away and what happens to them when they're there.
Praise for "Orange Is the New Black"
"Fascinating . . . The true subject of this unforgettable book is female bonding and the ties that even bars can't unbind."--"People" (four stars)
"I loved this book. It's a story rich with humor, pathos, and redemption. What I did not expect from this memoir was the affection, compassion, and even reverence that Piper Kerman demonstrates for all the women she encountered while she was locked away in jail. I will never forget it."--Elizabeth Gilbert, author of "Eat, Pray, Love"
"This book is impossible to put down because Kerman] could be you. Or your best friend. Or your daughter."--"Los Angeles Times"
"Moving . . . transcends the memoir genre's usual self-centeredness to explore how human beings can always surprise you."--"USA Today"
"It's a compelling awakening, and a harrowing one--both for the reader and for Kerman."--Newsweek.com
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The 1930s was one of the most notorious eras in United States history when it came to career criminals roaring across the country in fast cars reining terror on the public and grabbing headlines in the process. The likes of Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd and many more were robbing banks, committing murders and becoming legends in their own time. Over the Wall: The Men Behind the 1934 Death House Escape, chronicles one of the most daring prison escapes of the time and from one of the most notorious prisons. Never before revealed facts and eyewitness testimony - as well as newly uncovered, controversial photos - highlight the story of the men who dared to escape from the Death House at Walls Unit in Huntsville, Texas.

This, Angela Devlin's classic text, was written at a time when there were few, if any, special arrangements for women in prison in England and Wales. It was a driving force in the creation of a dedicated female prison estate with its own director, regimes and regulations that took account of women's different needs. Until then, the media tended to focus mainly on high profile women prisoners like Myra Hindley and Rosemary West. Most women became 'invisible' as soon as they passed through the prison gates and were subsumed into a world that was predominantly masculine and insensitive to their own situation. The author spent five years visiting prisons taking women, interviewing female prisoners and those whose job it is to care for them - prison officers, education, probation and healthcare staff, chaplains and counsellors. The result is a book that is accessible to the general reader as well as the prison professional. It vividly recreates the realities of prison life for women prisoners. Devlin describes the over-use of medication as a means of control; overcrowding; expenditure cuts; staff shortages; the violence resulting from drug misuse; the plight of ethnic minority and foreign national women; and the self-mutilation and suicide attempts of female prisoners in desperate need of help. Invisible Women has stood the test of time. It enables readers - especially who have never set foot inside a prison - to see the unique impact of imprisonment on women.

Hanging in the Balance traces the history of capital punishment in the United Kingdom from ancient times to the modern day-through periods of reform until hanging for murder was finally abolished by Parliament in 1969. It describes in detail the Parliamentary and public debates, and notes the stance taken by organizations and individuals (including the tenacious and persistent Sydney Silverman MP). The book collates data and references not previously brought together in one place - and in exploring the underlying issues and the recurring arguments about deterrence, retribution and expediency it provides an invaluable resource vis-a-vis the same debate in the many countries where capital punishment still exists. Lord Callaghan was home secretary at the time of abolition. His Foreword conveys how strong his personal feelings were concerning the death penalty from the time he entered Parliament in 1945. The book's closing chapters record how his insistence that abolition should become permanent ultimately overcame the still considerable opposition. Capital punishment was finally abolished in 1999 throughout the UK. For all practical purposes this had already happened in 1969 when the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965 was made fully effective into following a trial period. 'A masterwork': Justice of the Peace

For Emile Durkheim, writing in the nineteenth-century, punishment was simply understood as a clear response to the criminal behavior a society experiences. Today's penal institutions challenge such a simple understanding. Inseparably linked with many aspects of society, they are profoundly shaped by the traumatic events and changes a society undergoes. Nowhere is this clearer than in the American South.

Georgia embraced the concept of the penitentiary as a form of social control earlier than most of its southern neighbors. Its penal code of 1816 replaced or curtailed such traditional punishments as whipping, the pillory, fines, or death. Georgia's control over felony convicts effectively began in 1817, when the state prison at Milledgeville accepted its first convict.

Martha A. Myers finds that Georgia also led the region in embracing the convict lease system as an alternative to incarceration. In Race, Labor, and Punishment in the New South, she examines the social, political, and economic forces that shaped punishment over a seventy-year period. Between 1870 and 1940, Georgia's system of punishment shifted from capital and corporal punishment to hard labor in the penitentiary, then to the convict lease system, then to county-run chain gangs, and then back to incarceration in prison. This book forges a connection between these dramatic shifts and analyzes three facets of punishment for black and white men: rates of admission to the penitentiary, the harshness of sentences, and the ease with which felons achieved release from the penitentiary. Her findings challenge the conventional notion that hard times invariably prompt harsh punishment. In uncovering the complex link betweensocial change and southern punishment, Myers reveals the poverty of current theories of criminal punishment.

The Insitute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge recently undertook,at the behest of the Home Office, a comprehensive study of the literature on criminal deterrence, concentrating on recent research. The result, published in this book, examines the popular claim that 'deterrence works'. That it works in general terms is beyond dispute, but the claim most favoured by law-makers is narrower: that tougher sentences have a direct impact on criminal behaviour, limiting the number and severity of offences committed. This study seeks to discover the truth of that claim. Deterrence as a penal aim, is a broad subject, hence the authors of this work decided to look at two elements of recent research. First they looked at studies which examine the marginal deterrent effects of changing the certainty of punishment, that is, of altering the likelihood of an offender's being apprehended and convicted for a crime. Secondly they looked at studies of the marginal deterrent effects of altering the severity of punishment through changes in sentencing policy. It is their evaluation and analysis of the latter which is the principal focus of the work, and which will make the book essential reading for all those interested in sentencing and penal policy.

This book argues that abusive punishments are particularly deeply rooted in authoritarian states and in some Western countries such as Britain and the USA, from which they have been exported over past centuries. The book surveys a variety of psychological, physically constraining, custodial, corporal and capital punishments. The implicit punitive content of judicial processes such as trial, as well as treatments such as behavioural therapy, may have as much psychological impact as more explicitly physical punishments.

In some states by law, in others by tradition, judges imposing a sentence of death complete the grim ritual with the words "May God have mercy on your soul."
In 1982, in Grundy, Virginia, a young miner named Roger Coleman was sentenced to death for the murder of his sister-in-law. Ten years later, the sentence was carried out, despite the extraordinary efforts of Kitty Behan, a brilliant and dedicated young lawyer who devoted two years of her life to gathering evidence of Coleman's innocence, evidence so compelling that media around the world came to question the verdict. The courts, ruling on technicalities, refused to hear the new evidence and witnesses. Finally, the governor of Virginia ordered a lie-detector test to be administered on the morning of Coleman's scheduled execution, and in a chair that to Coleman surely looked like nothing so much as an electric chair.
In John Tucker's telling, this story is an emotional and unforgettable roller-coaster ride from the awful night of the crime to the equally awful night of the execution. Perhaps it was not Roger Coleman whose soul was in need of God's mercy, but the judges, prosecutors, and politicians who procured his death.

Bruce F. Adams examines how Russia's Main Prison Administration was created, the number of prisoners it managed in what types of prisons, and what it accomplished. While providing a thorough account of prison management at a crucial time in Russia's history, Adams explores broader discussions of reform within Russia's government and society, especially after the Revolution of 1905, when arguments on such topics as parole and probation boiled in the arena of raucous public debate.

It is a fundamental human impulse to seek restitution or retribution when a wrong is done, yet individuals and societies assess responsibility and allocate punishment for wrongdoing in different ways. This book investigates how average citizens in the United States and Japan think about and judge various kinds of wrongdoing, how they determine who is responsible when things go wrong, and how they prefer to punish offenders. Drawing on the results of surveys they conducted in Detroit, Michigan, and Yokohama and Kanazawa, Japan, the authors compare both individual and cultural reactions to wrongdoing. They find that decisions about justice are influenced by whether or not there seems to be a social relationship between the offender and victim: the American tendency is to see actors in isolation while the Japanese tendency is to see them in relation to others. The Japanese, who emphasize the importance of role obligations and social ties, mete out punishment with the goal of restoring the offender to the social network. Americans, who acknowledge fewer "ties that bind" and have firmer convictions that evil resides in individuals, punish wrongdoers by isolating them from the community. The authors explore the implications of "justice among friends" versus "justice toward strangers" as approaches to the righting of wrongs in modern society. Their findings will be of interest to students of social psychology, the sociology of law, and Japanese studies.

This is the first book to describe in detail how judges sentence white-collar criminals. Drawing from lengthy, in-depth interviews with fifty-one judges in seven federal districts, the authors explore such topics as the information available to sentencing judges and how they work with it; the principles of harm, blameworthiness, and consequence that affect judges' decisions; and the conceptual problems that make it difficult to convert a basic agreement on principle into a system of consistent sentences. "Sitting In Judgment will continue to have an impact on the academic and professional community, as well as on sentencing policy and legislation. . . . An eye opener. The presentation is cogent and persuasive. It moves the debate about sentencing to a more informed and less abstract level."-Charles M. Carberry, White-Collar Crime Reporter "Sitting in Judgement hits the bull's-eye in describing a judge's thinking process as to the sentencing of criminal defendants. Its analysis should be of great value to lawyers and other professions dealing with this important subject."-Judge Morris E. Lasker, United States District Court, Southern District of New York "This book should go a considerable way toward rehabilitating the standing of federal judges in the eyes of those who regarded them, in the words of Wheeler and his co-authors, as 'a miscellany of individuals each heading off in his or her own ideological or emotional direction.' And it is valuable in presenting, in their own words, the views of the judges as to how they arrive at the sentences they give to white-collar criminals."-Gilbert Geis, Judicature "Unique and invaluable as a resource for social theory, the book is also quite provocative for policy development. Nonlawyers will not have the slightest difficulty in reading this book."-Jack Katz, Contemporary Sociology

For most of the ninety-three years between 1851, when the California State Legislature faced the problem of what to do with criminals, until 1944, when it finally organized the state's four prisons into one adult penal system, the prisons at San Quentin and Folsom were the only places of incarceration for the state's felons. Bookspan traces the development of a system emphasizing deterrence and retribution to one receptive to reform and rehabilitation. "This is the story," writes Bookspan, "of the penury and personality struggle through which California developed a prison system to assess, and to address, individual needs while retaining its custodial institutions. It is a story of the West, even though eastern penology, with all of its overtones of moral duty, provided the language for prison reform. In a state where chaos preceded the assertion of normative rule, fear, not hope, formed the governing principle of penology. It is a story of America because true reform on an expanded sense of individual potential."

Henry Pontell convincingly demonstrates that despite the expenditure of millions of dollars, the enactment of many new laws exacting harsher punishments, and the growth of a vast criminal justice system, America is losing its "war on crime." By focusing on deterrence through punishment meted out by our criminal justice system, our courts receive more cases than they can handle, and our prisons and jails overflow with inmates. The message from a beleaguered criminal justice system, according to the author, is clear: there is limited capacity to punish. Pontell suggests that the first step toward solving the crime problem is to stop perceiving it and using it as a political issue and to begin to approach it from a reasoned, scientific, humane methodology."

Civilian Internment in Canada examines abuse of the civil rights and liberties of tens of thousands of Canadians and Canadian residents via internment from 1914 to the present day. This ongoing story spans both war and peacetime and has affected people from a wide variety of political backgrounds and ethno-cultural communities, bequeathing a complex legacy for survivors and their descendants. Despite the well-known impounding of tens of thousands of Japanese, Ukrainians, assorted eastern Europeans, Germans, and Italians as 'enemy aliens' during the two World Wars, civilian internment in this country has not been widely discussed, particularly in comparative ways. Indeed, there has been a propensity to sweep these events under the proverbial rug, keeping them out of the national discourse. Civilian Internment in Canada brings together senior scholars in the field of internment and civil liberties studies with emerging scholars, graduate students, community members, teachers, public historians, artists, former internees, descendants of internees, and redress activists to examine the processes and consequences of civilian internment during real and perceived wartime contexts, ranging from the Great War to the Cold War to the 'War on Terror.' It demonstrates the ways in which 'shared authority' between scholars and subjects can both reshape our understanding of crucial episodes in Canada's history and bring a sense of vibrancy and immediacy to the all-too current question of civil liberties and minority rights in today's security state.

One of the founders of the field of criminology sums up a lifetime of work on the issue of capital punishment. He shows the fallacy of the arguments for the deterrent and retributive value of the death penalty. He argues cogently and passionately for the body of evidence showing that 'abolitionist' states suffer no more capital crime than 'retentionist' ones, and that retribution is neither swift, certain nor equitable. 'This is an impressive book by an established American criminologist...A short review cannot do justice to the careful argument, backed up by detailed evidence, which is contained here. The book is readable and clear, and anyone interested in the subject should certainly refer to it.' -- Bramshill Journal, Vol 1 No 3, July 1982 '...this book will almost certainly become a standard reference work for criminologists and laymen interested in the "ultimate" punishment.' -- International Social Science Review, Spring 1983 'In the unlikely event that there is any doubt that Thorsten Sellin is the foremost scholar of capital punishment that the world has ever known, that doubt will be eliminated by perusal of his latest work.In this fact-packed little volume, more questions on penalties for murder are answered than other writings even ask' -- Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 'This book must be considered among the finest available dealing with the death penalty' -- Criminal Justice History

Challenging incarceration and policing was central to the postwar Black Freedom Movement. In this bold new political and intellectual history of the Nation of Islam, Garrett Felber centers the Nation in the Civil Rights Era and the making of the modern carceral state. The book examines efforts to build broad-based grassroots coalitions among liberals, radicals, and nationalists to oppose the carceral state and struggle for local Black self-determination. It captures the ambiguous place of the Nation of Islam specifically, and Black nationalist organizing more broadly, during an era which has come to be defined by nonviolent resistance, desegregation campaigns, and racial liberalism. Exhaustively researched, Felber illuminates new sites and forms of political struggle as Muslims prayed under surveillance in prison yards and used courtroom political theater to put the state on trial. This history captures familiar figures in new ways--Malcolm X the courtroom lawyer and A. Philip Randolph the Harlem coalition builder--while highlighting the forgotten organizing of rank-and-file activists in prisons such as Martin Sostre. This definitive account is a halting reminder that Islamophobia, state surveillance, and police violence have deep roots in the state repression of Black Muslim communities.

A vivid look at the end of the line in the American legal system, where the rule of law gives way to the "correctional process." "Prisons: Houses of Darkness" reveals the astonishing lawlessness by which sentencing judges, prison authorities, and parole boards actually operate. It provides an eye-opening history of prisons and an overview of daily prison routine from Attica to Soledad-- much of it related in the inmates' own words-- which shatters the myth of rehabilitation and exposes the injustices of prison life. This is an urgent call for reform, a powerful case for applying the rule of law to the American way of punishment.

In diesem Band 2 der Edition "Forschung und Entwicklung in der Strafrechtspflege" entfalten und vertiefen die Autoren das Konzept der Sozialen Strafrechtspflege und analysieren die Starken und Schwachen der Umsetzung in die Praxis der Strafverfolgung und Strafvollstreckung - sowohl auf der Ebene des Einzelfalls als auch des Managements und der Systementwicklung. In einem weiteren Schwerpunkt werden Innovationsstrategien dargelegt und erfolgreiche Innovationsprojekte prasentiert. Ein Ausblick entwickelt eine Agenda fur wirksame und nachhaltige Aktivitaten in den nachsten Jahren und Jahrzehnten.