Showing 20 results for subject:"Social Science / Penology"
The Innocent Man
Murder and Injustice in a Small Town
John Grisham
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • LOOK FOR THE NETFLIX ORIGINAL DOCUMENTARY SERIES • “Both an American tragedy and [Grisham’s] strongest legal thriller yet, all the more gripping because it happens to be true.”—Entertainment Weekly John Grisham’s first work of nonfiction: a true crime masterpiece that tells the story of small town justice gone terribly awry. In the Major League draft of 1971, the first player chosen from the state of Oklahoma was Ron Williamson. When he signed with the Oakland A’s, he said goodbye to his hometown of Ada and left to pursue his dreams of big league glory. Six years later he was back, his dreams broken by a bad arm and bad habits. He began to show signs of mental illness. Unable to keep a job, he moved in with his mother and slept twenty hours a day on her sofa. In 1982, a twenty-one-year-old cocktail waitress in Ada named Debra Sue Carter was raped and murdered, and for five years the police could not solve the crime. For reasons that were never clear, they suspected Ron Williamson and his friend Dennis Fritz. The two were finally arrested in 1987 and charged with capital murder. With no physical evidence, the prosecution’s case was built on junk science and the testimony of jailhouse snitches and convicts. Dennis Fritz was found guilty and given a life sentence. Ron Williamson was sent to death row. If you believe that in America you are innocent until proven guilty, this book will shock you. If you believe in the death penalty, this book will disturb you. If you believe the criminal justice system is fair, this book will infuriate you. Don’t miss Framed, John Grisham’s first work of nonfiction since The Innocent Man, co-authored with Centurion Ministries founder Jim McCloskey.
Race to Incarcerate
Marc Mauer
An updated account of the explosion in America's prison population.
Orange Is the New Black
My Year in a Women's Prison
Piper Kerman
Follows the author's incarceration for drug trafficking, during which she gained a unique perspective on the criminal justice system and met a varied community of women living under exceptional circumstances.
Turning the Tables
From Housewife to Inmate and Back Again
Teresa Giudice, K.C. Baker
Convicted on federal fraud charges, Giudice was sentenced to fifteen months in prison. Her tiny prison cubicle in Connecticut felt so far removed from the glamorous world portrayed on The Real Housewives of New Jersey. What was a skinny Italian to do? Keep a diary, of course.... Now she comes clean on all things Giudice: growing up as an Italian-American, dealing with chaos and catfights on national television, and eventually, coming to terms with the reality of life in prison.
Ultimate Punishment
A Lawyer's Reflections on Dealing with the Death Penalty
Scott Turow
The #1 New York Times -bestselling legal thriller writer delivers "the most convincing, levelheaded analysis of [the death penalty] I have encountered" ( The Washington Post ). Scott Turow is known to millions as the author of peerless novels about the troubling regions of experience where law and reality intersect. In "real life," as a respected criminal lawyer, he has been involved with the death penalty for more than a decade, including successfully representing two different men convicted in death-penalty prosecutions. In this vivid account of how his views on the death penalty have evolved, Turow describes his own experiences with capital punishment from his days as an impassioned young prosecutor to his recent service on the Illinois commission which investigated the administration of the death penalty and influenced Governor George Ryan's unprecedented commutation of the sentences of 164 death row inmates on his last day in office. Along the way, he provides a brief history of America's ambivalent relationship with the ultimate punishment, analyzes the potent reasons for and against it, including the role of the victims' survivors, and tells the powerful stories behind the statistics, as he moves from the Governor's Mansion to Illinois' state-of-the art "super-max" prison and the execution chamber. Ultimate Punishment—this gripping, clear-sighted, necessary examination of the principles, the personalities, and the politics of a fundamental dilemma of our democracy—has all the drama and intellectual substance of Turow's celebrated fiction. "[ Ultimate Punishment ] deserves a huge audience. The writing is . . . elegant, the thinking deep, the insider experiences on which he bases his arguments irrefutable." — San Francisco Chronicle "Thought-provoking, heart-wrenching, and deserving of a close read." — The Denver Post
The Colonial Bastille
A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862-1940
Peter Zinoman
"Zinoman makes original contributions on multiple fronts, including colonial systems; prisons as social institutions; political life in prison; public campaigns concerning prisons; and released prisoners in action. He also takes us beyond the colonial/anticolonial, nationalist/communist, and war/peace dichotomies that have long dominated Vietnam studies."—David Marr, author of Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920-1945 "This is a wonderful, lucidly argued, and meticulously documented book."—Ann Stoler, author of Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things
Crimes of Punishment
America's Culture of Violence
Theodore L. Dorpat
This groundbreaking book by an award-winning psychoanalyst and forensic psychiatrist presents a comprehensive exploration of a timely but often taboo topic: the failure of punishment to deter crime and violence, an issue that affects us both individually and as a culture. Written at the culmination of the author s fifty-year career as a psychoanalyst, forensic psychologist and scholar, this wide-ranging work identifies the origins of violence and investigates the surprising consequences of punishment from a multitude of perspectives. In his treatment of the topic, Dr. Dorpat utilizes scienti.
The Handbook of Crime & Punishment
Michael H. Tonry
Consisting of 28 articles, this comprehensive reference work on the study of crime, examines: its causes, effects, trends, and institutions, current philosophies of punishment and ways of controlling crime.
The Society of Captives
A Study of a Maximum Security Prison
Gresham M. Sykes
'The Society of Captives' is a classic of modern criminology and one of the most important books ever written about prison. This new edition features a new introduction by Bruce Western and a new epilogue by the author. It will continue to serve as an indispensable text for coming to terms with the nature of modern power.
The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment
Franklin E. Zimring
This novel thesis argues that a tradition of popular justice conflicts with the legal tradition of due process.
Discipline and Punish
The Birth of the Prison
Michel Foucault
In this brilliant work, the most influential philosopher since Sartre suggests that such vaunted reforms as the abolition of torture and the emergence of the modern penitentiary have merely shifted the focus of punishment from the prisoner's body to his soul.
To Serve and Protect
Privatization and Community in Criminal Justice
Bruce L. Benson
In his provocative analysis, Benson (economics, Florida State U.; The Independent Institute, Oakland, CA) argues for contracting out and other controversial "private justice" options as preferable to government's pervasive and misguided criminal justice role. "Why the timing may be right" is the theme of the preface by Marvin Wolfgang, Director of the U. of Pennsylvania's Sellin Center for Studies in Criminology and Criminal Law. The Austrian School of the series title favors less government economic control. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
When Prisoners Come Home
Parole and Prisoner Reentry
Joan Petersilia
Every year, hundreds of thousands of jailed Americans leave prison and return to society. Largely uneducated, unskilled, often without family support, and with the stigma of a prison record hanging over them, many if not most will experience serious social and psychological problems after release. Fewer than one in three prisoners receive substance abuse or mental health treatment while incarcerated, and each year fewer and fewer participate in the dwindling number of vocational or educational pre-release programs, leaving many all but unemployable. Not surprisingly, the great majority is rearrested, most within six months of their release. What happens when all those sent down the river come back up--and out? As long as there have been prisons, society has struggled with how best to help prisoners reintegrate once released. But the current situation is unprecedented. As a result of the quadrupling of the American prison population in the last quarter century, the number of returning offenders dwarfs anything in America's history. What happens when a large percentage of inner-city men, mostly Black and Hispanic, are regularly extracted, imprisoned, and then returned a few years later in worse shape and with dimmer prospects than when they committed the crime resulting in their imprisonment? What toll does this constant "churning" exact on a community? And what do these trends portend for public safety? A crisis looms, and the criminal justice and social welfare system is wholly unprepared to confront it. Drawing on dozens of interviews with inmates, former prisoners, and prison officials, Joan Petersilia convincingly shows us how the current system is failing, and failing badly. Unwilling merely to sound the alarm, Petersilia explores the harsh realities of prisoner reentry and offers specific solutions to prepare inmates for release, reduce recidivism, and restore them to full citizenship, while never losing sight of the demands of public safety. As the number of ex-convicts in America continues to grow, their systemic marginalization threatens the very society their imprisonment was meant to protect. America spent the last decade debating who should go to prison and for how long. Now it's time to decide what to do when prisoners come home.
Hard Time Blues
How Politics Built a Prison Nation
Sasha Abramsky
In 1980, 300,000 Americans were in prisons across the country. In 2000, that number is nearing 2 million. "Hard Time Blues" investigates the culture of incarceration and the astonishing growth of the American prison system over the past 20 years.
Sentenced to Science
One Black Man's Story of Imprisonment in America
Allen M. Hornblum
"The story of the Holmesburg trials was documented by Allen Hornblum in his 1998 book Acres of Skin. The more general history of African Americans as human guinea pigs has most recently been told by Harriet Washington in her 2007 book Medical Apartheid. The subject is currently a topic of heated public debate in the wake of a 2006 report from an influential panel of medical experts recommending that the federal government loosen the regulations in place since the 1970s that have limited the testing of pharmaceuticals on prison inmates.".
An Essay on Crimes and Punishments
Cesare marchese di Beccaria
Penal laws, so considerable a part of every system of legislation, and of so great importance to the happiness, peace, and security of every member of society, are still so imperfect, and are attended with so many unnecessary circumstances of cruelty in all nations, that an attempt to reduce them to the standard of reason must be interesting to all mankind. Its is not surprising, then, that this little book has engaged the attention of all ranks of people in every part of Europe.
Inside Rikers
Stories from the World's Largest Penal Colony
Jennifer Wynn
"Jennifer Wynn has been going in for seven years. She entered first as a journalist, volunteered as a writing teacher, and then served as director of a unique rehabilitation program known as Fresh Start."--BOOK JACKET.
Doing Time on the Outside
Incarceration and Family Life in Urban America
Donald Braman
Publisher Description
Disguised as a Poem
My Years Teaching Poetry at San Quentin
Judith Tannenbaum
"Tannenbaum reminds readers not only that men and women behind bars are human, and therefore deserving of our respect and compassion, but that they have much to tell us about our propensity for both barbarism and beauty." -- Booklist