Criminal punishment in America is harsh and degrading--more so than anywhere else in the liberal west. Executions and long prison terms are commonplace in America. Countries like France and Germany, by contrast, are systematically mild. European offenders are rarely sent to prison, and when they are, they serve far shorter terms than their American counterparts. Why is America so comparatively harsh? In this novel work of comparative legal history, James Whitman argues that the answer lies in America's triumphant embrace of a non-hierarchical social system and distrust of state power which have contributed to a law of punishment that is more willing to degrade offenders.
Investigates the pervasive and persistent commitment to "rough justice" that characterized rural and working class areas of most of the United States in the late nineteenth century. This work examines the influence of race, gender, and class on understandings of criminal justice and shows how they varied across regions.
In this deeply researched prequel to his 2006 study Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874–1947, Michael J. Pfeifer analyzes the foundations of lynching in American social history. Scrutinizing the vigilante movements and lynching violence that occurred in the middle decades of the nineteenth century on the Southern, Midwestern, and far Western frontiers, The Roots of Rough Justice: Origins of American Lynching offers new insights into collective violence in the pre-Civil War era. Pfeifer examines the antecedents of American lynching in an early modern Anglo-European folk and legal heritage. He addresses the transformation of ideas and practices of social ordering, law, and collective violence in the American colonies, the early American Republic, and especially the decades before and immediately after the American Civil War. His trenchant and concise analysis anchors the first book to consider the crucial emergence of the practice of lynching of slaves in antebellum America. Pfeifer also leads the way in analyzing the history of American lynching in a global context, from the early modern British Atlantic to the legal status of collective violence in contemporary Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. Seamlessly melding source material with apt historical examples, The Roots of Rough Justice tackles the emergence of not only the rhetoric surrounding lynching, but its practice and ideology. Arguing that the origins of lynching cannot be restricted to any particular region, Pfeifer shows how the national and transatlantic context is essential for understanding how whites used mob violence to enforce the racial and class hierarchies across the United States.
The story of the movement to establish the International Criminal Court, its tumultuous first decade, and the challenges it will continue to face in the future.
Charles Chatman believed he would die in a Texas prison. He was sent there at age 21, convicted of raping a 52 year old white woman in his neighborhood, and sentenced to 99 years. The victim had picked his picture out of a line-up and the jury had ignored the testimony of his witnesses, that he was at work when the rape occurred. His court-appointed attorney made feeble efforts to defend him. He had served 27 years when Michelle Moore, a public defender working with the Innocence Project of Texas arranged a DNA test which proved him innocent, and District Judge John Creuzot ordered him released from prison. Richard Miles was more fortunate. After he had served 14 years of a 40 year sentence for murder, investigators for Centurion Ministries discovered police reports which had been hidden from him and his attorney, Ed Gray. A new trial was ordered, then the sole witness who had identified Miles recanted his testimony and claimed that he had been instructed to lie by a Dallas prosecutor. Over 250 prisoners in the U.S. have been exonerated in the last 20 years, some on death row and others serving long sentences. DNA testing has freed the majority, proof of false identification and misconduct by police and prosecutors the others. Dallas County, with one percent of the U.S. population, has accounted for 25 wrongful convictions, ten percent of the total. Henry Wade, Dallas County District Attorney for 32 years, ran the most aggressive and successful prosecutor's office in the country. Ed Gray, as Assistant District Attorney and criminal defense attorney had a ringside seat to the Henry Wade era. In these pages he explains how some of the innocent were convicted. TOUGH JUSTICE is the first book which attempts to portray the career and the history of Henry Wade, the most famous prosecutor in the history of Texas and perhaps the United States. After graduating from the University of Texas Business School and Southern Methodist University School of Law, Ed Gray was a civil law firm associate when he was appointed to represent an indigent defendant in Dallas District Court in 1969. In his first trial, Ed won a Not Guilty verdict and a job offer from District Attorney Henry Wade. He was quickly promoted to Felony Court, where he led the Dallas D. A.'s office in trials and convictions for the next four years. He was lead counsel in 15 murder trials, 13 attempted murder and aggravated assault trials, 8 rape trials, and 49 robbery trials resulting in sentences as high as death and 1200 years and only one Not Guilty verdict. Ed Gray has been a board certified criminal defense attorney since 1975, and has tried 525 criminal jury trials in state and federal courts.
The first of the History Farce Series sends you back to the time of the Bloody Code. With over 200 crimes carrying the death penalty the players take on the roles of the Defence and Prosecution Barristers and their various allies as they fight for what they see as justice whether they're getting a guilty crook off or hanging an innocent one.
The author critiques the American obsession with imprisonment as punishment, calling it "retributive degradation" of the incarcerated. His analysis draws on both salient empirical data and material from a variety of disciplines - social history, anthropology, law and penal theory, philosophy of religion - as he uncovers the devastating social consequences (both direct and collateral) of imprisonment on such a large, unprecedented scale. The book develops a Christian social ethics of "good punishment" embodied as a politics of "healing memories" and "ontological intimacy"
A major reappraisal of crime and punishment in America The huge prison buildup of the past four decades has few defenders, yet reforms to reduce the numbers of those incarcerated have been remarkably modest. Meanwhile, an ever-widening carceral state has sprouted in the shadows, extending its reach far beyond the prison gate. It sunders families and communities and reworks conceptions of democracy, rights, and citizenship—posing a formidable political and social challenge. In Caught, Marie Gottschalk examines why the carceral state remains so tenacious in the United States. She analyzes the shortcomings of the two dominant penal reform strategies—one focused on addressing racial disparities, the other on seeking bipartisan, race-neutral solutions centered on reentry, justice reinvestment, and reducing recidivism. With a new preface evaluating the effectiveness of recent proposals to reform mass incarceration, Caught offers a bracing appraisal of the politics of penal reform.
This brand new text identifies the macroeconomic forces relevant to imprisonmentpoverty and political powerlessnessand explores viable and humane alternatives to our current incarceration binge.
