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Harsh Justice
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.
With Us Always
Although welfare reform is currently the government's top priority, most discussions about the public's responsibility to the poor neglect an informed historical perspective. This important book provides a crucial examination of past attempts, both in this country and abroad, to balance the efforts of private charity and public welfare. The prominent historians in this collection demonstrate how solutions to poverty are functions of culture, religion, and politics, and how social provisions for the poor have evolved across the centuries.
Taking Life Imprisonment Seriously
Life imprisonment is a complex and drastic penal sanction. It gives the State the power to curtail the liberty of offenders for the rest of their lives. In many jurisdictions life imprisonment is the ultimate sanction for the most serious crimes. It is frequently touted as an alternative to the death penalty. At the same time, life imprisonment is often imposed as a preventive measure, where the offence alone does not justify using the ultimate sanction in the penal arsenal. The complexity of life imprisonment is frequently overlooked. Often it is assumed that it is not as drastic as it sounds, as it will not be enforced for the whole life of the offender. There may also be a reluctance to s...
The Role of Prison in Europe
This book discusses the role of the prison in Europe across a divide of over 200 years. Inspired by the travels of the prison reformer John Howard (1726-1790), who visited prisons across Europe in the eighteenth century, it fundamentally reflects on centuries of the practice of locking people up as punishment. Howard travelled across Europe to visit prisons, with a simple method: he travelled and knocked on prison doors on his journey and entered the premises. He then observed the situation in the prison, took notes and left to visit other locations. Howard's influential book The State of the Prisons resulted from his experiences, provoking debate among prison reformers and academics worldwi...
The Bedroom
An erudite and highly enjoyable exploration of the most intriguing of personal spaces, from Greek and Roman antiquity through today The winner of France’s prestigious Prix Femina Essai (2009), this imaginative and captivating book explores the many dimensions of the room in which we spend so much of our lives—the bedroom. Eminent cultural historian Michelle Perrot traces the evolution of the bedroom from the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans to today, examining its myriad forms and functions, from royal king’s chamber to child’s sleeping quarters to lovers’ trysting place to monk’s cell. The history of women, so eager for a room of their own, and that of prisons, where the principal cause of suffering is the lack of privacy, is interwoven with a reflection on secrecy, walls, the night and its mysteries. Drawing from a wide range of sources, including architectural and design treatises, private journals, novels, memoirs, and correspondences, Perrot’s engaging book follows the many roads that lead to the bedroom—birth, sex, illness, death—in its endeavor to expose the most intimate, nocturnal side of human history.
Prison Architecture and Punishment in Colonial Senegal
For the past four decades, a rich scholarship has investigated the emergence of the prison in Europe and North America, mainly the connection between institutional architecture, techniques of social control, and mechanisms of discipline. Prison Architecture and Punishment in Colonial Senegal asks if these connections did exist in colonial Senegal since prisons in Africa had never been the focus of such scholarship. This book addresses three main themes. First, it analyzes prison buildings and their changing architectural forms throughout the colonial period to highlight how the French used prison architecture to control Africans. Second, it describes the connections between the internal layo...
Cultures of Confinement
Prisons are on the increase from the United States to China, as ever-larger proportions of humanity find themselves behind bars. While prisons now span the world, we know little about their history in global perspective. Rather than interpreting the prison's proliferation as the predictable result of globalization, Cultures of Confinement underlines the fact that the prison was never simply imposed by colonial powers or copied by elites eager to emulate the West, but was reinvented and transformed by a host of local factors, its success being dependent on its very flexibility. Complex cultural negotiations took place in encounters between different parts of the world, and rather than assigning a passive role to Latin America, Asia, and Africa, the authors of this book point out the acts of resistance or appropriation that altered the social practices associated with confinement. The prison, in short, was understood in culturally specific ways and reinvented in a variety of local contexts examined here for the first time in global perspective.
Criminology and Criminal Policy Movements
These studies recover the historical roots of thinking that are in conflict with, and critical of, present-day tendencies. Criminological theory over the last few decades has oscillated between extremes: on one side there are calls for increasing the state exercise of punitive power as the only means of providing security, in the face of both urban and international rime; while the other side highlights the need for reducing the exercise of punitive power because of the paradoxical effects that it produces. Useful for academics, practitioners, professionals and students, this book will certainly contribute to a wider awareness in crime prevention and criminal justice.
