[PDF] Too Cruel Not Unusual Enough eBook

Author : Kenneth E. Hartman
Publisher :
Page : 250 pages
File Size : 35,55 MB
Release : 2013-03-14
Category : Capital punishment
ISBN : 9780615685274

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Across the United States, locked tight behind high walls of deadly electrified fences, are more than 41,000 men and women sentenced to die. These are their stories of brutality and beauty, of violence and virtue, of the neverending quest of all human beings to make sense of the lives they are leading. Life without the possibility of parole, the other death penalty, is a sentence condemned by virtually all other countries embraced here in the land of the free. If you're interested in the truth about crime and punishment in America this anthology of writings from behind the walls is a must for you. If you care about the Constitution's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, this collection should be for you. If you value writing straight from the heart, stories that hit hard, literature that leaves you breathless and thinking, this book was written for you.

Author : Kenneth E. Hartman
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 39,2 MB
Release : 2013-09-11
Category : Capital punishment
ISBN : 9781490445632

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A collection of essays about serving life without parole by prisoners (and some others), and about how life without parole really is the death penalty.

Author : Robert A Ferguson
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 283 pages
File Size : 30,78 MB
Release : 2018-04-17
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0300235291

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In the past few years, the need for prison reform in America has reached the level of a consensus. We agree that many prison terms are too long, especially for nonviolent drug offenders; that long-term isolation is a bad idea; and that basic psychiatric and medical care in prisons is woefully inadequate. Some people believe that contracting out prison services to for-profit companies is a recipe for mistreatment. Robert Ferguson argues that these reforms barely scratch the surface of what is wrong with American prisons: an atmosphere of malice and humiliation that subjects prisoners and guards alike to constant degradation. Bolstered by insights from hundreds of letters written by prisoners, Ferguson makes the case for an entirely new concept of prisons and their purpose: an “inner architectonics of reform” that will provide better education for all involved in prisons, more imaginative and careful use of technology, more sophisticated surveillance systems, and better accountability.

Author : Dirk Van Zyl Smit
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 465 pages
File Size : 25,25 MB
Release : 2019-01-14
Category : Law
ISBN : 0674980662

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Life imprisonment has replaced capital punishment as the most common sentence imposed for heinous crimes worldwide. As a consequence, it has become the leading issue in international criminal justice reform. In the first global survey of prisoners serving life terms, Dirk van Zyl Smit and Catherine Appleton argue for a human rights–based reappraisal of this exceptionally harsh punishment. The authors estimate that nearly half a million people face life behind bars, and the number is growing as jurisdictions both abolish death sentences and impose life sentences more freely for crimes that would never have attracted capital punishment. Life Imprisonment explores this trend through systematic data collection and legal analysis, persuasively illustrated by detailed maps, charts, tables, and comprehensive statistical appendices. The central question—can life sentences be just?—is straightforward, but the answer is complicated by the vast range of penal practices that fall under the umbrella of life imprisonment. Van Zyl Smit and Appleton contend that life imprisonment without possibility of parole can never be just. While they have some sympathy for the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights, they conclude that life imprisonment, in many of the ways it is implemented worldwide, infringes on the requirements of justice. They also examine the outliers—states that have no life imprisonment—to highlight the possibility of abolishing life sentences entirely. Life Imprisonment is an incomparable resource for lawyers, lawmakers, criminologists, policy scholars, and penal-reform advocates concerned with balancing justice and public safety.

Author : Jean Casella
Publisher : New Press, The
Page : 241 pages
File Size : 13,31 MB
Release : 2014-11-11
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1620971380

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“An unforgettable look at the peculiar horrors and humiliations involved in solitary confinement” from the prisoners who have survived it (New York Review of Books). On any given day, the United States holds more than eighty-thousand people in solitary confinement, a punishment that—beyond fifteen days—has been denounced as a form of cruel and degrading treatment by the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture. Now, in a book that will add a startling new dimension to the debates around human rights and prison reform, former and current prisoners describe the devastating effects of isolation on their minds and bodies, the solidarity expressed between individuals who live side by side for years without ever meeting one another face to face, the ever-present specters of madness and suicide, and the struggle to maintain hope and humanity. As Chelsea Manning wrote from her own solitary confinement cell, “The personal accounts by prisoners are some of the most disturbing that I have ever read.” These firsthand accounts are supplemented by the writing of noted experts, exploring the psychological, legal, ethical, and political dimensions of solitary confinement. “Do we really think it makes sense to lock so many people alone in tiny cells for twenty-three hours a day, for months, sometimes for years at a time? That is not going to make us safer. That’s not going to make us stronger.” —President Barack Obama “Elegant but harrowing.” —San Francisco Chronicle “A potent cry of anguish from men and women buried way down in the hole.” —Kirkus Reviews

Author : Nolan Bennett
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 25,65 MB
Release : 2019-08-21
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0190060700

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Why have so many figures throughout American history proclaimed their life stories when confronted by great political problems? The Claims of Experience provides a new theory for what makes autobiography political throughout the history of the United States and today. Across five chapters, Nolan Bennett examines the democratic challenges that encouraged a diverse cast of figures to bear their stories: Benjamin Franklin amid the revolutionary era, Frederick Douglass in the antebellum and abolitionist movements, Henry Adams in the Gilded Age and its anxieties of industrial change, Emma Goldman among the first Red Scare and state opposition to radical speech, and Whittaker Chambers amid the second Red Scare that initiated the anticommunist turn of modern conservatism. These historical figures made what Bennett calls a "claim of experience." By proclaiming their life stories, these authors took back authority over their experiences from prevailing political powers, and called to new community among their audiences. Their claims sought to restore to readers the power to remake and make meaning of their own lives. Whereas political theorists and activists have often seen autobiography to be too individualist or a mere documentary source of evidence, this theory reveals the democratic power that life narratives have offered those on the margins and in the mainstream. If they are successful, claims of experience summon new popular authority to surpass what their authors see as the injustices of prevailing American institutions and identity. Bennett shows through historical study and theorization how this renewed appreciation for the politics of life writing elevates these authors' distinct democratic visions while drawing common themes across them. This book offers both a method for understanding the politics of life narrative and a call to anticipate claims of experience as they appear today.

Author : Mark Crispin Miller
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 366 pages
File Size : 41,52 MB
Release : 2004
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780393059175

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In "Cruel and Unusual," Mark Crispin Miller exposes what he calls the Bush Republicans' contempt for democratic practice, their bullying religiosity, their reckless militarism, and their apocalyptic views of the economy and the planet.

Author : John D. Bessler
Publisher : UPNE
Page : 474 pages
File Size : 33,39 MB
Release : 2012
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1555537170

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This indispensable history of the Eighth Amendment and the founders' views of capital punishment is also a passionate call for the abolition of the death penalty based on the notion of cruel and unusual punishment

Author : Marie Gottschalk
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 504 pages
File Size : 35,72 MB
Release : 2016-02-16
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1400880815

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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.

Author : Abraham P. DeLeon
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 218 pages
File Size : 48,94 MB
Release : 2019-03-21
Category : Education
ISBN : 1351583891

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In this book, DeLeon presents a critique of neoliberalism and present times through a metaphor of social collapse and considers what remains once the dust has settled for a different kind of person to emerge. Engaging a variety of social, political and educational theories, along with pop culture and literature, DeLeon positions humanity at the edges of collapse and what will emerge after the fall. Engaging academic and fictional alternatives, he imagines future possibilities through a new kind of person that rises from the rubble. Questioning the foundations of empiricism, standardization and "reproducible" results that reject new forms of social and political projects from materializing, DeLeon discusses the potentials of the imagination and the ways in which it can produce alternative possibilities for our collective future when unleashed and combined with fictional narratives. Moving across multiple intellectual, philosophical, artistic, and historical traditions, he constructs a radical, interdisciplinary vision that challenges us to think about transforming our collective future(s), one in which we construct a new kind of person ready to tackle the challenges of a potentially liberatory future and what this might entail.