Crime & Punishment

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Below are groups and resources (books, articles, websites, etc.) related to this topic. Click on an item’s title to go its resource page with author, publisher, description/abstract and other details, a link to the full text if available, as well as links to related topics in the Subject Index. You can also browse the Title, Author, Subject, Chronological, Dewey, LoC, and Format indexes, or use the Search box.
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Connexions Library

Alternative Press Annual 1984, The
Case, Patricia (ed)
Book
American Methods: Torture and the Logic of Domination
Williams, Kristian
Book
2006
A damning audit of the US record in underwriting human rights violations around the globe and at home, and about the centrality of rape, racism, and conquest to both the state and US national culture.
Ballad of Sacco and Vanzetti
Guthrie, Woody
Audio
1946
An album of songs written and recorded by Woody Guthrie about the notorious case of Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants and anarchists in the 1920s who were charged and eventually executed afte...
The Capital Punishment Debate
Diemer, Ulli
Article
1984
The death penalty make us all complicit in killing, and degrades us as a society.
Converse
Article
1976
The role of church people in the correctional system.
Convict Labor in America: Book review
Ortiz, Paul
Article
1998
Convict labour, like antebellum slavery, was an American way of life, a cultural practice that tied northern capitalists, plantation owners, university-trained social reformers, federal officials and ...
Convicts, Collateral Damage, and the "War on Drugs": The Real Crime is the War Itself
Nevins, Joseph
Article
2012
Two recent court cases in southern California provide insight into the identity of those smuggle drugs across the international boundary between the two countries. But more importantly what they do is...
Crime and Criminals: Address to the Prisoners in the Chicago Jail
Darrow, Clarence
Article
1902
So long as big criminals can get the coal fields, so long as the big criminals have control of the city council and get the public streets for street cars and gas rights, this is bound to send thousan...
Crime and Punishment
de Cleyre, Voltairine
Article
1903
Let us have done with this savage idea of punishment, which is without wisdom. Let us work for the freedom of man from the oppressions which make criminals, and for the enlightened treatment of all th...
Crime and Punishment in America: Why the Solutions to America's Most Stubborn Social Crisis Have Not Worked... and What Will
Currie, Elliott
Book
1998
Currie explores why being 'tough on crime' will only serve to exacerbate the problem.
Criminalizing Truancy: Should Kids be Jailed for Skipping School?
Fuentes, Annette
Article
2012
American jurisdictions are increasingly turning to the criminal justice system to deal with truancy. Students and parents are being fined, and in some cases jailed, for missing school.
Deaths in Custody and Detention: Volume 33, No. 4 (2006) of Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict, and World Order
Serial Publication (Periodical)
2006
A special issue on the investigation of, and inquiry into, deaths in custody and detention (including state hospitals and mental health, police and prison custody, and young offenders' institutions). ...
Dillon, Read & Co. Inc. and the Aristocracy of Prison Profits: Six-part article
Fitts, Catherine Austin
Article
2006
Inside the Financial World, Government Agencies and their Private Contractors Lies a Hidden System of Money Laundering, Drug Trafficking and Rigged Stock Market Riches.
Execution Day in Zhengzhou
Hongda , Wu; Creger, John
Article
1991
A first-hand account of an execution day in China.
The Fear Factor: Stephen Harper's "Tough on Crime" Agenda
Mallea, Paula
Article
2010
This study analyses the financial and human costs of the Harper government's tough on crime agenda and concludes it is wrong-headed, expensive, and counter-productive. In fact, it will likely lead to ...
Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime
Rodriguez, Dylan
Book
2005
The dramatic rise and consolidation of America's prison system has devastated lives and communities, but it has also transformed prisons into sites of political discourse and resistance, as they have ...
The Fortress Economy: The Economic Role of the U. S. Prison System
Lichtenstein, Alexander C.; Kroll, Michael A.
Book
1990
The economic role of the US Prison System examined.
History is a Weapon: Lockdown America in 22 Minutes
Parenti, Christian
Audio
2001
A talk by Christian Parenti, author of Lockdown America: Police And Prisons in the Age of Crisis, about the thirty year explosion in prisons in the United States, at the Stop The ACA(American Correcti...
In Russian and French Prisons
Kropotkin, Peter
Book
1906
Kropotkin's criticism of the penal system, and an inside look into the horrors and realities of what life in prison entails.
Intractable: Hell Has a Name: Life Inside Australia's First Super-Max Prison
Matthews, Bernie
Book
2006
A firsthand account spanning two generations of high-security confinement in the 1970s NSW Australian prison system.
Iraq: Guerrilla War in Sadr City: Against The Current vol. 114
Schwartz, Michael
Article
2005
In attacking first Najaf, then Tal Afar and Samarra, and finally tackling the center of Sunni resistance in Fallujah, the United States was seeking to reverse this process. But these attacks were not...
Jails for Jesus
Shapiro, Samantha M.
Article
2003
President Bush wants faith-based programs to take over social services. But what happens when evangelical Christians try their hand at running prisons?
Justice Behind the Walls: Human Rights in Canadian Prisons
Jackson, Michael
Book
2003
An account of the state of justice in Canadian prisons, weaving together the threads of correctional history, penal philosophy, landmark court decisions, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and legisl...
Live From Death Row
Abu-Jamal, Mumia
Book
1995
A collection of prison writing by Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was sentenced to death in 1982 for the murder of a police officer after a dubious trial.
Lock 'Em Up: The Prison State
Yates, Michael
Article
2010
Without a doubt, most of those enmeshed in the (in)justice system are not dangers to society and would not have been in it at all in a society that wasn't so racist and so shot through with every kind...
Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis
Parenti, Christian
Book
1999
Why is criminal justice so central to American politics? Lockdown America not only documents the horrors and absurdities of militarized policing, prisons, a fortified border, and the federalization of...
Lockdown High: When the Schoolhouse Becomes a Jailhouse
Fuentes, Annette
Book
2011
Schools in the U.S. are increasingly imposed unprecedented restrictions on students' rights, dignity, and educational freedom. In what is being called the school-to-prison pipleline, the police and pr...
Make the Don a Museum of Horrors
Diemer, Ulli
Article
1977
A museum depicting what prison is really like might motivate us to demand radical changes to the way we deal with offenders.
Maximum, Minimum, Medium: A Journey Through Canadian Prisons
Melnitzer, Julius
Book
1995
Serving a nine-year sentence, Melnitzer documented his experience in three different prisons, along with his own introspections.
No Longer Barred From Prison
Culhane, Claire
Book
1991
An account of one individual's determined efforts to get inside prisons to see what is actually happening there. As her story makes clear, the penal system cannot tolerate such close scrutiny: she her...
The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society
Morris, Norval; Rothman, David J. (eds.)
Book
1997
Thematic chapters explore a variety of aspects and institutions.
Penal transportation: Connexipedia Article
Article
The deporting of convicted criminals to a penal colony. Examples include transportation by France to Devil's Island and by the UK to its colonies in the Americas, from the 1610s through the American R...
Prison Abolition & Alternatives: Nine Perspectives for Prison Abolitionists
Article
1976
A argument for the abolition of prisons and a discussion of alternatives.
The Prison-Industrial Complex
Schlosser, Eric
Article
1998
Correctional officials see danger in prison overcrowding. Others see opportunity. The nearly two million Americans behind bars "the majority of them nonviolent offenders" mean jobs for depressed regio...
Prison Labor: Workin' For The Man: Article in Covert Action Quarterly #54, Fall 1995
Erlich, Reese
Article
1995
Article analysing the roots of prison labour in America.
Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America's Poor
Herivel, Tara; Wright, Paul
Book
2002
Essays on the cruelty and inhumanity of the American prison system.
Prisoners' Rights Group
Culhane, Claire
Article
1978
Prisons: A Social Crime and Failure
Goldman, Emma
Article
1917
The methods of coping with crime have no doubt undergone several changes, but mainly in a theoretic sense. In practice, society has retained the primitive motive in dealing with the offender; that is,...
Prisons in Canada
Gosselin, Luc
Book
1996
Gosselin provides a political and historical view of the prison system and its inherent contradictions. He argues that the penal system is used by the State to maintain its authority. He remarks on co...
Quaker Prison Committee: A series of reflections by Ruth Morris, director of Canadian Friends Service Committee
Morris, Ruth
Article
1977
A look at two case histories vis. the bail system and pre-trial treatment of those charged.
Race, Incarceration, and American Values
Loury, Glenn C., with Pamela Karlan, Tommie Shelby and Loïc Wacquant
Book
2008
Glenn Loury argues that the extraordinary mass incarceration rate in the USA is not a response to rising crime rates. Instead, it is the product of a decision to become a more punitive society. He con...
Rampant Racism in the Criminal Justice System
Quigley, Bill
Article
2010
The biggest crime in the U.S. criminal justice system is that it is a race-based institution where African-Americans are directly targeted and punished in a much more aggressive way than white people.
The Real War on Crime: The Report of the National Criminal Justice Commission
Donziger, Steven R.
Book
1996
A thorough examination of the American criminal justice system.
Texas Tough: The Rise of America's Prison Empire
Perkinson, Robert
Book
2010
A history of imprisonment, race, and politics from slavery to the present, with an emphasis on Texas, the most locked-down state in the USA.
The Threat of the Tag
Morris, Fanella
Article
Tracking anklets for convicts are not a good way to alleviate prison overcrowding.
Too Big to Jail: Not Too Big to Resist
DeWalt, Dan
Article
2013
US rich evade punishment while the poor are criminalized in the two-tier justice system.
Twice Removed: Double Punishment and Racial Profiling in Canada
Boctor, Lillian
Film/Video
2013
Immigrants who commit criminal offences are punished twice: once when they're sentenced for their crime, and again when they are permanently removed from Canada, even if they had lived here since chil...
The Violence of Incarceration
Scraton, Phil; McCulloch, Mude (eds.)
Book
2008
Argues that the revelations of extreme brutality perpetrated by allied soldiers in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo represent the inevitable end-product of domestic incarceration predicated on the us...
When the Prisoners Ran Walpole: A true story in the movement for prison abolition
Bissonette, Jamie
Book
2008
In the months before they took over running the Walople maximum-security facility in 1973, prisoners and outside advocates created programs that sent more prisoners home for good. This account reveals...

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Bureau of Public Secrets
Articles from a Situationist perspective.

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Sources Library

Files that may shed light on colonial crimes still kept secret by UK
Cobain, Ian; Norton-Taylor, Richard
2013
Secret government files from the final years of the British empire are still being concealed despite a pledge by William Hague, the foreign secretary, that they would be declassified and opened to the...

From the Connexions Archives

Bulldozer
Periodical profile published 1982
Serial Publication (Periodical)
1982
Intended as a vehicle for prison reform, Bulldozer publishes letters, poems and articles by and about prisoners in North American maximum security institutions.
Bulldozer
Periodical profile published 1984
Serial Publication (Periodical)
1984
Counterpunch
Periodical profile
Serial Publication (Periodical)
Progressive U.S. website/newsletter.
The Journal of Prisoners on Prisons
Periodical profile published 1989
Serial Publication (Periodical)
1989
Quaker Committee on Jails and Justice
Organization profile published 1982
Organization
1982
QUAKER COMMITTEE ON JAILS AND JUSTICE (AQCJJ) holds, as its long-term goal, the abolition of prisons; that is the building of supportive community which has no need of prisons.
Quaker Committee on Jails and Justice
Organization profile published 1984
Organization
1984
A Quaker Committee on Jails and Justice Newsletter
Serial Publication (Periodical)
1979
A newsletter that argues against capital punishment.