"Startling."
--Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Unusually intimate and powerful."
--New York Times

"A slim volume of indelible impressions. . . . Highly recommended."
--Library Journal

"Gripping. . . . I could not put this book down."
--Jimmy Breslin

"Masterfully opens pathways for thought."
--The Nation

"If the initial response to Christianson's book and exhibit are any indication, Condemned may further erode support for capital punishment."
--Village Voice

"The important achievement of Condemned is not in theorizing about the death penalty . . . it is in forcing the reader to look at it up close and thus get a firmer sense of what it really, truly is. If you favor the death penalty, you ought to know exactly what it is you favor. Based on the book, I will tell you this: It is a horror."
--Scripps Howard News Service

"This is a rare book-haunting fragments from the lives of men and women on their way to the electric chair. A moving and troubling epitaph for the guilty and perhaps the innocent."
"--William Kennedy, author of Ironweed"

In the annals of American criminal justice, two prisons stand out as icons of institutionalized brutality and deprivation: Alcatraz and Sing Sing. In the 70 odd years before 1963, when the death sentence was declared unconstitutional in New York, Sing Sing was the site of almost one-half of the 1,353 executions carried out in the state. More people were executed at Sing Sing than at any other American prison, yet Sing Sing's death house was, to a remarkable extent, one of the most closed, secret and mythologized places in modern America.

In this remarkable book, based on recently revealed archivalmaterials, Scott Christianson takes us on a disturbing and poignant tour of Sing Sing's legendary death house, and introduces us to those whose lives Sing Sing claimed. Within the dusty files were mug shots of each newly arrived prisoner, most still wearing the out-to-court clothes they had on earlier that day when they learned their verdict and were sentenced to death. It is these sometimes bewildered, sometimes defiant, faces that fill the pages of Condemned, along with the documents of their last months at Sing Sing.

The reader follows prisoners from their introduction to the rules of Sing Sing, through their contact with guards and psychiatrists, their pleas for clemency, escape attempts, resistance, and their final letters and messages before being put to death. We meet the mother of five accused of killing her husband, the two young Chinese men accused of a murder during a robbery and the drifter who doesn't remember killing at all. While the majority of inmates are everyday people, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were also executed here, as were the major figures in the infamous Murder Inc., forerunner of the American mafia. Page upon page, Condemned leaves an indelible impression of humanity and suffering.

View the Table of Contents.
Read the Preface.

"Johnson gives these women visibility and voice as they relate their lives, their crimes, and their efforts to remain connected to families and communities...powerful."
-- "Booklist"

"Johnson's "Inner Lives" provides both a serious intervention in the literature on prisons and a venue through which incarcerated and formerly incarcerated Black women can speak for themselves. It challenges readers to take action."--"Black Renaissance"

""Inner Lives" soars when the women are allowed to speak for themselves."
--"Book"

"Johnson illuminates how the race and gender of African American women affect how they are treated in the American criminal justice system."
--"The Women's Review of Books"

"Johnson provides a historical look at African American women in the U.S. criminal justice system from the colonial period to the present."
--"Law's Social Inquiry"

The rate of women entering prison has increased nearly 400 percent since 1980, with African American women constituting the largest percentage of this population. However, despite their extremely disproportional representation in correctional institutions, little attention has been paid to their experiences within the criminal justice system.

Inner Lives provides readers the rare opportunity to intimately connect with African American women prisoners. By presenting the women's stories in their own voices, Paula C. Johnson captures the reality of those who are in the system, and those who are working to help them. Johnson offers a nuanced and compelling portrait of this fastest-growing prison population by blending legal history, ethnography, sociology, andcriminology. These striking and vivid narratives are accompanied by equally compelling arguments by Johnson on how to reform our nation's laws and social policies, in order to eradicate existing inequalities. Her thorough and insightful analysis of the historical and legal background of contemporary criminal law doctrine, sentencing theories, and correctional policies sets the stage for understanding the current system.

Today's high recidivism rates, combined with the rising costs of jails and prisons, are increasingly seen as problems that must be addressed on both moral and financial grounds. Research on prison and jail reentry typically focuses on barriers stemming from employment, housing, mental health, and substance abuse issues from the perspective of offenders returning to urban areas. This book explores the largely neglected topic of the specific challenges inmates experience when leaving jail and returning to rural areas. Rural Jail Reentry provides a thorough background and theoretical framework on reentry issues and rural crime patterns, and identifies perceptions of the most significant challenges to jail reentry in rural areas. Utilizing three robust samples-current inmates, probation and parole officers, and treatment staff-Ward examines what each group considers to be the most impactful factors surrounding rural jail re-entry. A springboard for future research and policy discussions, this book will be of interest to international researchers and practitioners interested in the topic of rural reentry, as well as graduate and upper-level undergraduate students concerned with contemporary issues in corrections, community-based corrections, critical issues in criminal justice, and criminal justice policy.

The growing body of work on imprisonment, desistance and rehabilitation has mainly focused on policies and treatment programmes and how they are delivered. Experiencing Imprisonment reflects recent developments in research that focus on the active role of the offender in the process of justice. Bringing together experts from around the world and presenting a range of comparative critical research relating to key themes of the pains of imprisonment, stigma, power and vulnerability, this book explores the various ways in which offenders relate to the justice systems and how these relationships impact the nature and effectiveness of their efforts to reduce offending. Experiencing Imprisonment showcases cutting-edge international and comparative critical research on how imprisonment is experienced by those people living and working within imprisonment institutions in North America and Northern, Central and Eastern Europe, as well as Scandinavia. The research explores the subjective experience of imprisonment from the perspective of a variety of staff and prisoner groups, including juveniles, adult female and male prisoners, older prisoners, sex offenders, wrongfully convicted offenders and newly released prisoners. Offering a unique view of what it is like to be a prisoner or a prison officer, the chapters in this book argue for a prioritisation of understanding the subjective experiences of imprisonment as essential to developing effective and humane systems of punishment. This is essential reading for academics and students involved in the study of criminology, penology and the sociology of imprisonment. It will also be of interest to Criminal Justice practitioners and policymakers around the globe.

This book views peacemaking as a broad, encompassing process that is expressed in many different shapes and forms. It blends ancient-wisdom traditions, peacemaking criminology, and restorative justice principles as a way of intervening with offenders in both institutional and community-based settings. Philosophical and spiritual contexts for peacemaking are presented that form a foundation for understanding the potential for peacemaking in criminological thought, the criminal justice system, and society in general.

Drawing on original research on the effectiveness of a therapeutic community (TC) in reducing recidivism among juvenile male offenders, Correctional Rehabilitation and Therapeutic Communities: Reducing Recidivism Through Behavior Change provides a comprehensive review of the current state of drug treatment for the offending population, especially the link between juvenile offending and substance abuse. The book assesses the factors predicting successful completion of treatment as well as the methodological limitation of previous TC program reviews, and suggests policy implication and routes for future research. Using improvements such as multiple outcome criteria, long-term follow-up, matching groups on risk and needs, and the employment of a standardized instrument to measure program quality, Correctional Rehabilitation assesses the degree to which participation in the TC affects antisocial attitudes and reduces delinquency. Readers will explore how TCs can be designed to influence adolescent drug offenders and ultimately reduce recidivism. This book is essential reading for students, researchers, practitioners, and other stakeholders focusing on the development of treatment programs.

How does the way we think and feel about the world around us affect the existence and administration of the death penalty? What role does capital punishment play in defining our political and cultural identity? After centuries during which capital punishment was a normal and self-evident part of criminal punishment, it has now taken on a life of its own in various arenas far beyond the limits of the penal sphere. In this volume, the authors argue that in order to understand the death penalty, we need to know more about the "cultural lives"-past and present-of the state's ultimate sanction. They undertake this "cultural voyage" comparatively-examining the dynamics of the death penalty in Mexico, the United States, Poland, Kyrgyzstan, India, Israel, Palestine, Japan, China, Singapore, and South Korea-arguing that we need to look beyond the United States to see how capital punishment "lives" or "dies" in the rest of the world, how images of state killing are produced and consumed elsewhere, and how they are reflected, back and forth, in the emerging international judicial and political discourse on the penalty of death and its abolition. Contributors: Sangmin Bae Christian Boulanger Julia Eckert Agata Fijalkowski Evi Girling Virgil K.Y. Ho David T. Johnson Botagoz Kassymbekova Shai Lavi Jurgen Martschukat Alfred Oehlers Judith Randle Judith Mendelsohn Rood Austin Sarat Patrick Timmons Nicole Tarulevicz Louise Tyler

Some two million Americans are in jail or in prison. Except for the occasional expose, what happens to them is hidden from the rest of us. Is it possible to develop and instill a professional ethic for prison personnel that, in partnership with formal regulatory constraints, will mediate relations among officers, staff, and inmates, or are the failures of imprisonment as an ethically-constrained institution so deeply etched into its structure that no professional ethic is possible? The contributors to this volume struggle with this central question and its broader and narrower ramifications. Some argue that despite the problems facing the practice of incarceration as punishment, a professional ethic for prison officers and staff can be constructed and implemented. Others, however, despair of imprisonment and even punishment, and reach instead for alternative ways of healing the personal and communal breaches constituted by crime. The result is a provocative contribution to practical and professional ethics.

Meticulously examining ethnographic sources, Christophe Darmangeat argues that warfare among Australian Aborigines was often an extension of their penal systems. He demonstrates how violent conflict occurred when circumstances prohibited regulated judicial proceedings.

Executed Women of the 20th and 21st Centuries provides a look into the lives, crimes, and executions of women during the 20th and 21st centuries. Rather than dealing with these women as numbers and statistics, this book presents them as human beings. Each of these women had lives, histories, and families. The purpose is not to condone their actions, but to suggest that those we executed are, in fact, humans-rather than monsters, as they are often portrayed.

Capital punishment attracts strong and opposing moral positions: execution by the state under any condition is wrong versus execution as just retribution for heinous killing. In this book, the author rejects these moral arguments as a basis for determining the social value of the death penalty and considers the issue scientifically by determining whether capital punishment deters willful killing. Using evidence from legal history, the impairment / abolishment of the death penalty between 1968 and 1976 and the right of states to adopt or abolish the death penalty, this book examines the statistical relationship between the death penalty and deterrence. The investigation considers the murder rate during periods with and without the threat of capital punishment, the role of state commitment to its own capital punishment system, and fairness in administering the death penalty.

Mobilities research is now centre stage in the social sciences with wide-ranging work that considers the politics underscoring the movements of people and objects, critically examining a world that is ever on the move. At first glance, the words 'carceral' and 'mobilities' seem to sit uneasily together. This book challenges the assumption that carceral life is characterised by a lack of movement. Carceral Mobilities brings together contributions that speak to contemporary debates across carceral studies and mobilities research, offering fresh insights to both areas by identifying and unpicking the manifold mobilities that shape, and are shaped by, carceral regimes. It features four sections that move the reader through the varying typologies of motion underscoring carceral life: tension; circulation; distribution; and transition. Each mobilities-led section seeks to explore the politics encapsulated in specific regimes of carceral movement. With contributions from leading scholars, and a range of international examples, this book provides an authoritative voice on carceral mobilities from a variety of perspectives, including criminology, sociology, history, cultural theory, human geography, and urban planning. This book offers a first port of call for those examining spaces of detention, asylum, imprisonment, and containment, who are increasingly interested in questions of movement in relation to the management, control, and confinement of populations.

Nicola Lacey presents a new approach to the question of the moral justification of punishment by the State. She focuses on the theory of punishments in context of other political questions, such as the nature of political obligation and the function and scope of criminal law. Arguing that no convincing set of justifying reasons has so far been produced, she puts forward a theory of punishments which places the values of the community at its centre.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203046064

Cesare Beccaria's influential treatise On Crimes and Punishments is considered a foundational work in the field of criminology. Three major themes of the Enlightenment run through the treatise: the idea that the social contract forms the moral and political basis of the work's reformist zeal; the idea that science supports a dispassionate and reasoned appeal for reforms; and the belief that progress is inextricably bound to science. All three provide the foundation for accepting Beccaria's proposals. It is virtually impossible to ascertain which of several versions of the treatise that appeared during his lifetime best reflected Beccaria's thoughts. His use of many Enlightenment ideas also makes it difficult to interpret what he has written. While Enlightenment thinkers advocated free men and free minds, there was considerable disagreement as to how this might be achieved, except in the most general terms. The editors have based this translation on the 1984 Francioni text, the most exhaustive critical Italian edition of Dei delitti e delle pene. This edition is the last that Beccaria personally oversaw and revised. This translation includes an outstanding opening essay by the editors and is a welcome introduction to Beccaria and the beginnings of criminology. .

This volume brings together an unusual collection of British captivity writings - composed during and after imprisonment and in conditions of siege. Writings from the 'Mutiny' of 1857 are well known, but there exists a vast body of texts, from Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Burma, and the Indian subcontinent, that have rarely been compiled or examined. Written in anxiety and distress, or recalled with poignancy and anger, these siege narratives depict a very different Briton. A far cry from the triumphant conqueror, explorer or ruler, these texts give us the vulnerable, injured and frightened Englishman and woman who seek, in the most adverse of conditions, to retain a measure of stoicism and identity. From Robert Knox's 17th-century account of imprisonment in Sri Lanka, through J. Z. Holwell's famous account of the 'Black Hole' of Calcutta, through Florentia Sale's Afghan memoir, and Lady Inglis's 'Mutiny' diary from Lucknow, the book opens up a dark and revealing corner of the colonial archive. Lucid and intriguing, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of modern South Asia, colonial history, literary and culture studies.

Revolution in Penology is a thoroughly original and thought-provoking critique of penal harm, the recursive pains of imprisonment cycle, and the normalization of violence. Relying on selected insights derived from continental philosophy, cultural studies, and chaos theory, internationally renowned social theorists, Bruce A. Arrigo and Dragan Milovanovic, deconstruct the human agency/social structure duality that sustains the prison form, its parts and segments understood as correctional principles/practices, and the prison industrial complex that is informed by and stands above them all.

Winner of the 2017 British Society of Criminology Book Prize The penal voluntary sector and the relationships between punishment and charity are more topical than ever before. In recent years in England and Wales, the sector has featured significantly in both policy rhetoric and academic commentary. Penal voluntary organisations are increasingly delivering prison and probation services under contract, and this role is set to expand. However, the diverse voluntary organisations which comprise the sector, their varied relationships with statutory agencies and the effects of such work remain very poorly understood. This book provides a wide-ranging and rigorous examination of this policy-relevant but complex and little studied area. It explores what voluntary organisations are doing with prisoners and probationers, how they manage to undertake their work, and the effects of charitable work with prisoners and probationers. The author uses original empirical research and an innovative application of actor-network theory to enable a step change in our understanding of this increasingly significant sector, and develops the policy-centric accounts produced in the last decade to illustrate how voluntary organisations can mediate the experiences of imprisonment and probation at the micro and macro levels. Demonstrating how the legacy of philanthropic work and neoliberal policy reforms over the past thirty years have created a complex three-tier penal voluntary sector of diverse organisations, this cutting-edge interdisciplinary text will be of interest to criminologists, sociologists of work and industry, and those engaged in the voluntary sector.

The Myth of Prison Rape provides a nuanced glimpse into the complex sexual dynamics of American prison. Drawing on results from the most comprehensive study of inmate sexuality to date, Mark S. Fleisher and Jessie L. Krienert analyze the intricacies of sexuality and sexual violence in daily inmate life. Pulled from over 500 interviews from male and female high-security inmates, their research assesses inmate perception, belief, opinion, and explanation of their own behavior as it relates directly and indirectly to sexual life and sexual violence. Dynamic case studies and interview excerpts enliven this cultural study of sexuality, safety, and violence in American prisons, and an appendix introduces readers to prison sexual vocabulary.

n Many people across the world know Antonio Negri as an internationally renowned political thinker whose book, Empire, co-authored with Michael Hardt, is an international bestseller.

Much less well known is the fact that, up until 1979, Negri was a university professor teaching in Paris and Padova. On April 7th, 1979 he was arrested, charged with the murder of Italian politician Aldo Moro, accused of 17 other murders, of being the head of the Red Brigades and of fomenting insurrection against the state. He has since been absolved of all these accusations, but thanks to the emergency laws in Italy at the time, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Then, in July 1983, he was elected as a member of parliament, which meant that he was released from prison after four and a half years of preventive detention. After months of debate, the Lower House decided to strip him of his parliamentary immunity o by 300 votes in favour and 293 against. At that point he left Italy for exile in France where he remained until 1997 and continued to maintain his innocence of all the crimes of which he was accused.

This book is Negri's diary in which he tells of his imprisonment, trial, the elections, and his escape to and exile in France. Both personal and political, it recounts a little known aspect of Negri's life and will be of great interest to anyone concerned with the work of this enormously influential political thinker.

This study focuses on the practice of punishment, as it is inflicted by the state. The author's first-hand experience with penal reform, combined with philosophical reflection, has led him to develop a theory of punishment that identifies the principles of sentencing and corrections on which modern correctional systems should be built. This new theory of punishment is built on the view that the central function of the law is to reduce the need to use force in the resolution of disputes. Professor Cragg argues that the proper role of sentencing and sentence administration is to sustain public confidence in the capacity of the law to fulfil that function. Sentencing and corrections should therefore be guided by principles of restorative justice. He points out that, although punishment may be an inevitable concomitant of law enforcement in general and sentencing in particular, inflicting punishment is not a legitimate objective of criminal justice. The strength and appeal of this account is that it moves well beyond the boundaries of conventional discussions. It examines punishment within the framework of policing and adjudication, analyses the relationship between punishment and sentencing, and provides a basis for evaluating correctional practices and such developments as electronic monitoring.

Focusing on three key stages of the criminal justice process, discipline, punishment and desistance, and incorporating case studies from Asia, the Americas, Europe, Africa and Australia, the thirteen chapters in this collection are based on exciting new research that explores the evolution and adaptation of criminal justice and penal systems, largely from the early nineteenth century to the present. They range across the disciplinary boundaries of History, Criminology, Law and Penology. Journeying into and unlocking different national and international penal archives, and drawing on diverse analytical approaches, the chapters forge new connections between historical and contemporary issues in crime, prisons, policing and penal cultures, and challenge traditional Western democratic historiographies of crime and punishment and categorisations of offenders, police and ex-offenders. The individual chapters provide new perspectives on race, gender, class, urban space, surveillance, policing, prisonisation and defiance, and will be essential reading for academics and students engaged in the study of criminal justice, law, police, transportation, slavery, offenders and desistance from crime.

A memoir by a man who tells his story with brutal honesty, this book delves into the darker side of Bristol - a side that few even know about. Paul Scrase ran brothels, had a hand in drugs, and spent time in prison. But he is also shown as a loving family man, someone who managed to successfully run legitimate companies and help train construction workers in the Middle East. No, this is not a book of glamour and airy prose, but a rollicking account of things most readers will find shocking - providing an insight into Bristol like never before. Yet what could amount to a rogue's tale of misdeeds is also an intensely human journey, imparting lessons to us all. "Bristol - a city renown for its creativity, `green' ethos, and vibrant cultural scene. But behind the acclaim and awards is a world of crime, prostitution, grinding poverty and violence. Paul Scrase's book reveals this world like no other."

This book asks how we should make sense of sentencing when, despite huge efforts world-wide to analyse, critique and reform it, it remains an enigma.Sentencing: A Social Process reveals how both research and policy-thinking about sentencing are confined by a paradigm that presumes autonomous individualism, projecting an artificial image of sentencing practices and policy potential. By conceiving of sentencing instead as a social process, the book advances new policy and research agendas. Sentencing: A Social Process proposes innovative solutions to classic conundrums, including: rules versus discretion; aggravating versus mitigating factors; individualisation versus consistency; punishment versus rehabilitation; efficient technologies versus the quality of justice; and ways of reducing imprisonment.

The Myth of Prison Rape provides a nuanced glimpse into the complex sexual dynamics of American prison. Drawing on results from the most comprehensive study of inmate sexuality to date, Mark S. Fleisher and Jessie L. Krienert analyze the intricacies of sexuality and sexual violence in daily inmate life. Pulled from over 500 interviews from male and female high-security inmates, their research assesses inmate perception, belief, opinion, and explanation of their own behavior as it relates directly and indirectly to sexual life and sexual violence. Dynamic case studies and interview excerpts enliven this cultural study of sexuality, safety, and violence in American prisons, and an appendix introduces readers to prison sexual vocabulary.