Theodore Hamm uses the 1960 execution of Caryl Chessman as a lens
for examining how politics and debates about criminal justice
became a volatile mix that ignited postwar California. The effects
of those years continue to be felt as the state's three-strikes law
and expanding prison-construction program spark heated arguments
over rehabilitation and punishment.
Known as the Red Light Bandit, Chessman allegedly stalked lovers'
lanes in Los Angeles. Eventually convicted of rape and kidnapping,
he was sentenced to death in 1948. In prison he gained significant
notoriety as a writer, beginning with his autobiographical "Cell
2455 Death Row" (1954). In the following years Chessman presented
himself not only as an innocent man but also as one rehabilitated
from his prior life of crime. He acquired an enthusiastic audience
among leading criminologists, liberal intellectuals, and ordinary
citizens, many of whom engaged in protests to halt Chessman's
execution. Hamm analyzes how Chessman convinced thousands of
Californians to support him, and why Governor Edmund G. (Pat)
Brown, who opposed the death penalty, allowed the execution to go
forward. He also demonstrates the intrinsic limits of the popular
commitment to the rehabilitative ideal.
"Rebel and a Cause" places the Chessman case in a broad cultural
and historical context, relating it to histories of prison reform,
the anti-death penalty movement, the popularization of psychology,
and the successive rise and decline of the New Left and the more
enduring rise of the New Right.
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