Download or read book Crime and Its Punishment and Life in the Penitentiary written by S. G. Lathrop and published by . This book was released on 1866 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Meaning of Life written by Marc Mauer and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2018-12-11 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I can think of no authors more qualified to research the complex impact of life sentences than Marc Mauer and Ashley Nellis. They have the expertise to track down the information that all citizens need to know and the skills to translate that research into accessible and powerful prose." —Heather Ann Thompson, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Blood in the Water From the author of the classic Race to Incarcerate, a forceful and necessary argument for eliminating life sentences, including profiles of six people directly impacted by life sentences by formerly incarcerated author Kerry Myers Most Western democracies have few or no people serving life sentences, yet here in the United States more than 200,000 people are sentenced to such prison terms. Marc Mauer and Ashley Nellis of The Sentencing Project argue that there is no practical or moral justification for a sentence longer than twenty years. Harsher sentences have been shown to have little effect on crime rates, since people "age out" of crime—meaning that we're spending a fortune on geriatric care for older prisoners who pose little threat to public safety. Extreme punishment for serious crime also has an inflationary effect on sentences across the spectrum, helping to account for severe mandatory minimums and other harsh punishments. A thoughtful and stirring call to action, The Meaning of Life also features moving profiles of a half dozen people affected by life sentences, written by former "lifer" and award-winning writer Kerry Myers. The book will tie in to a campaign spearheaded by The Sentencing Project and offers a much-needed road map to a more humane criminal justice system.
Download or read book Crime and Its Punishment and Life in the Penitentiary written by S. G. Lathrop and published by Palala Press. This book was released on 2016-04-26 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Download or read book Prison City written by Ruth Massingill and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2007 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prison City looks beneath the placid surface of Huntsville, Texas, execution capital of the world, and sheds light on controversial issues usually hidden behind penitentiary walls. The authors draw on a multitude of voices from the community surrounding the prison - from inmates and guards to neighboring residents and local politicians - to reflect on questions of crime and punishment, vengeance, and forgiveness. We see how the sophisticated communication techniques employed by inmates, information officers, and community leaders shape opinions in the small towns where prisons are a principal industry. The poignant, evocative stories that run throughout the book highlight the incarcerated population's increasing influence in the political, cultural, and economic landscape in the United States. Most of all, Prison City offers opportunities to understand why the Texas justice system has become a global metaphor for incarceration and capital punishment.
Download or read book Punishment and Reformation written by Frederick Howard Wines and published by . This book was released on 1910 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Being Imprisoned written by M. Schinkel and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-10-16 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the way in which criminal punishment is interpreted and narrated by offenders, this book examines the meaning offenders ascribe to their sentence and the consequences of this for future desistance.
Download or read book The Death of Punishment written by Robert Blecker and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2013-11-19 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For twelve years Robert Blecker, a criminal law professor, wandered freely inside Lorton Central Prison, armed only with cigarettes and a tape recorder. The Death of Punishment tests legal philosophy against the reality and wisdom of street criminals and their guards. Some killers' poignant circumstances should lead us to mercy; others show clearly why they should die. After thousands of hours over twenty-five years inside maximum security prisons and on death rows in seven states, the history and philosophy professor exposes the perversity of justice: Inside prison, ironically, it's nobody's job to punish. Thus the worst criminals often live the best lives. The Death of Punishment challenges the reader to refine deeply held beliefs on life and death as punishment that flare up with every news story of a heinous crime. It argues that society must redesign life and death in prison to make the punishment more nearly fit the crime. It closes with the final irony: If we make prison the punishment it should be, we may well abolish the very death penalty justice now requires.
Download or read book Prison and the Penal System written by Michael Newton and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An overview of the criminal justice system in the United States that reviews the history of prisons and the penal system from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the early twenty-first, and discusses methods of punishment; local, state, and federal prisons; alternative sentencing, and related topics.
Download or read book Death by Prison written by Christopher Seeds and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2022-07-19 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In recent decades, life imprisonment without the possibility of parole (LWOP) has developed into a distinctive penal form in the United States, one firmly entrenched in US policy-making, judicial and prosecutorial decision-making, correctional practice, and public discourse. LWOP is now a routine part of contemporary US criminal justice, even engrained in the nation's cultural imaginary, but how it came to be so remains in question. Fifty years ago, imprisoning a person until death was an extraordinary sentence; today, it accounts for an increasing percentage of all US prisoners. What explains the shifts in penal practice and the social imagination by which we have become accustomed to imprisoning individuals until death without any reevaluation or reasonable expectation of release? Combining a wide historical lens with detailed state- and institutional-level research, Death by Prison offers a provocative new foundation for questioning this deeply problematic practice that has escaped close scrutiny for too long. The rise of life without parole, this book demonstrates, is not simply a matter of growth: it is a phenomenon of change, inclusive of changes in definitions, practices, and meanings. Death by Prison shows that the complex processes by which life without parole became imprisonment until death and perpetual confinement became a routine part of American punishment must be understood not only in terms of punitive attitudes and political efforts but as a matter of background conditions and transformations in penal institutions. The book also reveals how the social and sociological relevance of life without parole extends beyond its punitive element: imbued in the history of life without parole are a variety of forms of disregard--for human dignity, for social consequences, and for the myriad responsibilities that go along with state punishment"--
Download or read book The Oxford History of the Prison written by Norval Morris and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1995-11-30 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The word "prison" immediately evokes stark images: forbidding walls spiked with watchtowers; inmates confined to cramped cells for hours on end; the suspicious eyes of armed guards. They seem to be the inevitable and permanent marks of confinement, as though prisons were a timeless institution stretching from medieval stone dungeons to the current era of steel boxes. But centuries of development and debate lie behind the prison as we now know it--a rich history that reveals how our ideas of crime and practices of punishment have changed over time. In The Oxford History of the Prison, a team of distinguished scholars offers a vivid account of the rise and development of this critical institution. Penalties other than incarceration were once much more common, from such bizarre death sentences as the Roman practice of drowning convicts in sacks filled with animals to a frequent reliance on the scaffold and on to forms of public shaming (such as the classic stocks of colonial America). The first decades of the nineteenth century saw the rise of the full-blown prison system--and along with it, the idea of prison reform. Alexis de Tocqueville originally came to America to write a report on its widely acclaimed prison system. The authors trace the persistent tension between the desire to punish and the hope for rehabilitation, recounting the institution's evolution from the rowdy and squalid English jails of the 1700s, in which prisoners and visitors ate and drank together; to the sober and stark nineteenth-century penitentiaries, whose inmates were forbidden to speak or even to see one another; and finally to the "big houses" of the current American prison system, in which prisoners are as overwhelmed by intense boredom as by the threat of violence. The text also provides a gripping and personal look at the social world of prisoners and their keepers over the centuries. In addition, thematic chapters explore in-depth a variety of special institutions and other important aspects of prison history, including the jail, the reform school, the women's prison, political imprisonment, and prison and literature. Fascinating, provocative, and authoritative, The Oxford History of the Prison offers a deep, informed perspective on the rise and development of one of the central features of modern society--capturing the debates that rage from generation to generation on the proper response to crime.
Download or read book Punishment and Inequality in America written by Bruce Western and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 2006-05-25 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last thirty years, the prison population in the United States has increased more than seven-fold to over two million people, including vastly disproportionate numbers of minorities and people with little education. For some racial and educational groups, incarceration has become a depressingly regular experience, and prison culture and influence pervade their communities. Almost 60 percent of black male high school drop-outs in their early thirties have spent time in prison. In Punishment and Inequality in America, sociologist Bruce Western explores the recent era of mass incarceration and the serious social and economic consequences it has wrought. Punishment and Inequality in America dispels many of the myths about the relationships among crime, imprisonment, and inequality. While many people support the increase in incarceration because of recent reductions in crime, Western shows that the decrease in crime rates in the 1990s was mostly fueled by growth in city police forces and the pacification of the drug trade. Getting "tough on crime" with longer sentences only explains about 10 percent of the fall in crime, but has come at a significant cost. Punishment and Inequality in America reveals a strong relationship between incarceration and severely dampened economic prospects for former inmates. Western finds that because of their involvement in the penal system, young black men hardly benefited from the economic boom of the 1990s. Those who spent time in prison had much lower wages and employment rates than did similar men without criminal records. The losses from mass incarceration spread to the social sphere as well, leaving one out of ten young black children with a father behind bars by the end of the 1990s, thereby helping perpetuate the damaging cycle of broken families, poverty, and crime. The recent explosion of imprisonment is exacting heavy costs on American society and exacerbating inequality. Whereas college or the military were once the formative institutions in young men's lives, prison has increasingly usurped that role in many communities. Punishment and Inequality in America profiles how the growth in incarceration came about and the toll it is taking on the social and economic fabric of many American communities.
Download or read book Halfway Home written by Reuben Jonathan Miller and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2021-02-02 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A "persuasive and essential" (Matthew Desmond) work that will forever change how we look at life after prison in America through Miller's "stunning, and deeply painful reckoning with our nation's carceral system" (Heather Ann Thompson). Each year, more than half a million Americans are released from prison and join a population of twenty million people who live with a felony record. Reuben Miller, a chaplain at the Cook County Jail in Chicago and now a sociologist studying mass incarceration, spent years alongside prisoners, ex-prisoners, their friends, and their families to understand the lifelong burden that even a single arrest can entail. What his work revealed is a simple, if overlooked truth: life after incarceration is its own form of prison. The idea that one can serve their debt and return to life as a full-fledge member of society is one of America's most nefarious myths. Recently released individuals are faced with jobs that are off-limits, apartments that cannot be occupied and votes that cannot be cast. As The Color of Law exposed about our understanding of housing segregation, Halfway Home shows that the American justice system was not created to rehabilitate. Parole is structured to keep classes of Americans impoverished, unstable, and disenfranchised long after they've paid their debt to society. Informed by Miller's experience as the son and brother of incarcerated men, captures the stories of the men, women, and communities fighting against a system that is designed for them to fail. It is a poignant and eye-opening call to arms that reveals how laws, rules, and regulations extract a tangible cost not only from those working to rebuild their lives, but also our democracy. As Miller searchingly explores, America must acknowledge and value the lives of its formerly imprisoned citizens. PEN America 2022 John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Finalist Winner of the 2022 PROSE Award for Excellence in Social Sciences 2022 PROSE Awards Finalist 2022 PROSE Awards Category Winner for Cultural Anthropology and Sociology An NPR Selected 2021 Books We Love As heard on NPR’s Fresh Air
Download or read book The Expanding Prison written by David Cayley and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 1998 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Expanding Prison is a provocative, cogent argument for prison reform. David Cayley argues that our overpopulated prisons are more reflective of a society that is becoming increasingly polarized than of an actual surge in crime. This book considers proven alternatives to imprisonment that emphasize settlement-oriented techniques over punishment, and move us towards a vision of justice as peace-making rather than one of vengeance."
Download or read book Life Without Parole written by Charles J. Ogletree and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2012-06-04 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is life without parole the perfect compromise to the death penalty? Or is it as ethically fraught as capital punishment? This comprehensive, interdisciplinary anthology treats life without parole as “the new death penalty.” Editors Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. and Austin Sarat bring together original work by prominent scholars in an effort to better understand the growth of life without parole and its social, cultural, political, and legal meanings. What justifies the turn to life imprisonment? How should we understand the fact that this penalty is used disproportionately against racial minorities? What are the most promising avenues for limiting, reforming, or eliminating life without parole sentences in the United States? Contributors explore the structure of life without parole sentences and the impact they have on prisoners, where the penalty fits in modern theories of punishment, and prospects for (as well as challenges to) reform.
Download or read book The Future of Imprisonment written by Michael Tonry and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-04-08 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The imprisonment rate in America has grown by a factor of five since 1972. In that time, punishment policies have toughened, compassion for prisoners has diminished, and prisons have gotten worse-a stark contrast to the origins of the prison 200 years ago as a humanitarian reform, a substitute for capital and corporal punishment and banishment. So what went wrong? How can prisons be made simultaneously more effective and more humane? Who should be sent there in the first place? What should happen to them while they are inside? When, how, and under what conditions should they be released? The Future of Imprisonment unites some of the leading prisons and penal policy scholars of our time to address these fundamental questions. Inspired by the work of Norval Morris, the contributors look back to the past twenty-five years of penal policy in an effort to look forward to the prison's twenty-first century future. Their essays examine the effects of current high levels of imprisonment on urban neighborhoods and the people who live in them. They reveal how current policies came to be as they are and explain the theories of punishment that guide imprisonment decisions. Finally, the contributors argue for the strategic importance of controls on punishment including imprisonment as a limit on government power; chart the rise and fall of efforts to improve conditions inside; analyze the theory and practice of prison release; and evaluate the tricky science of predicting and preventing recidivism. A definitive guide to imprisonment policies for the future, this volume convincingly demonstrates how we can prevent crime more effectively at lower economic and human cost.
Download or read book Doing Life written by Howard Zehr and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1996-12-01 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean to face a life prison sentence? What have "lifers" learned about life—from having taken a life? Photographer Howard Zehr has interviewed and made portraits of men and women in Pennsylvania prisons who are serving life sentences without possibility of parole. Readers see the prisoners as people, de-mystified. Brief text accompanies each portrait, the voice of each prisoner speaking openly about the crime each has committed, the utter violation of another person each has caused. They speak of loneliness, missing their children growing up, dealing with the vacuum, caught between death and life. A timely book.
Download or read book America s Jails written by Derek Jeffreys and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A look at the contemporary crisis in U.S. jails with recommendations for improving and protecting the dignity of inmates Twelve million Americans go through the U.S. jail system on an annual basis. Jails, which differ significantly from prisons, are designed to house inmates for short amounts of time, and are often occupied by large populations of legally innocent people waiting for a trial. Jails often have deplorable sanitary conditions, and there are countless records of inmates being brutalized by staff and other inmates while in custody. Local municipalities use jails to institutionalize those whom they perceive to be a threat, so hundreds of thousands of inmates suffer from mental illness. People abandoned by families or lacking health insurance, or those who cannot afford bail, often cycle in and out of jails. In America’s Jails, Derek Jeffreys draws on sociology, philosophy, history, and his personal experience volunteering in jails and prisons to provide an understanding of the jail experience from the inmates’ perspective, focusing on the stigma that surrounds incarceration. Using his research at Cook County Jail, the nation’s largest single-site jail, Jeffreys attests that jail inmates possess an inherent dignity that should govern how we treat them. Ultimately, fundamental changes in the U.S. jail system are necessary and America’s Jails provides specific policy recommendations for changing its poor conditions. Highlighting the experiences of inmates themselves, America’s Jails aims to shift public perception and understanding of jail inmates to center their inherent dignity and help eliminate the stigma attached to their incarceration.
