BiblioVault - Books about Criminal Law

The Fall and Rise of Blasphemy Law

Edited by Paul Cliteur and Tom Herrenberg

Leiden University Press, 2017

In contemporary politics two conflicting trends have influenced freedom of expression. The first confirms that many Western countries have become less strict about sacrilegious expression and repealed their blasphemy laws or withdrew much of their punishment for blasphemy. Yet the second trend manifests in an opposing movement, often couched in terms of religious freedom, which attempts to reconcile free speech with freedom of religion by punishing expressions deemed, for instance, “hate speech.” With contributions by scholars from a wide range of disciplines, this book offers an examination of topical issues relating to both of these movements, looking at freedom of expression, censorship, and blasphemy in contemporary multicultural democracies.

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Fear of Judging

Sentencing Guidelines in the Federal Courts

Kate Stith and José A. Cabranes

University of Chicago Press, 1998

For two centuries, federal judges exercised wide discretion in criminal sentencing. This changed in 1987, when a hopelessly complex bureaucratic apparatus was imposed on the federal courts. Though termed Sentencing "Guidelines," the new sentencing rules are mandatory. Reformers hoped that the Sentencing Guidelines would address inequities in sentencing. The Guidelines have failed to achieve this goal, according to Kate Stith and José Cabranes, and they have sacrificed comprehensibility and common sense.

Fear of Judging is the first full-scale history, analysis, and critique of the new sentencing regime. The authors show that the present system has burdened the courts, dehumanized the sentencing process, and, by repressing judicial discretion, eroded the constitutional balance of powers. Eschewing ideological or politically oriented critiques of the Guidelines and offering alternatives to the current system, Stith and Cabranes defend a vision of justice that requires judges to perform what has traditionally been considered their central task—exercising judgment.

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Fighting the Death Penalty

A Fifty-Year Journey of Argument and Persuasion

Eugene G. Wanger

Michigan State University Press, 2019

Michigan is the only state in the country that has a death penalty prohibition in its constitution—Eugene G. Wanger’s compelling arguments against capital punishment is a large reason it is there. The forty pieces in this volume are writings created or used by the author, who penned the prohibition clause, during his fifty years as a death penalty abolitionist. His extraordinary background in forensics, law, and political activity as constitutional convention delegate and co-chairman of the Michigan Committee Against Capital Punishment has produced a remarkable collection. It is not only a fifty-year history of the anti–death penalty argument in America, it also is a detailed and challenging example of how the argument against capital punishment may be successfully made.

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The Forgotten Men

Serving a Life without Parole Sentence

Leigey, Margaret E

Rutgers University Press, 2015

Today there are approximately fifty thousand prisoners in American prisons serving life without parole, having been found guilty of crimes ranging from murder and rape to burglary, carjacking, and drug offences. In The Forgotten Men, criminologist Margaret E. Leigey provides an insightful account of a group of aging inmates imprisoned for at least twenty years, with virtually no chance of release.

These men make up one of the most marginalized segments of the contemporary U.S. prison population. Considered too dangerous for rehabilitation, ignored by prison administrators, and overlooked by courts disinclined to review such sentences, these prisoners grow increasingly cut off from family and the outside world. Drawing on in-depth interviews with twenty-five such prisoners, Leigey gives voice to these extremely marginalized inmates and offers a look at how they struggle to cope. She reveals, for instance, that the men believe that permanent incarceration is as inhumane as capital punishment, calling life without parole “the hard death penalty.” Indeed, after serving two decades in prison, some wished that they had received the death penalty instead. Leigey also recounts the ways in which the prisoners attempt to construct meaningful lives inside the bleak environment where they will almost certainly live out their lives.

Every state in the union (except Alaska) has the life-without-parole sentencing option, despite its controversial nature and its staggering cost to the taxpayer. The Forgotten Men provides a much-needed analysis of the policies behind life-without-parole sentencing, arguing that such sentences are overused and lead to serious financial and ethical dilemmas.

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Fostering Innovation in Community and Institutional Corrections

Identifying High-Priority Technology and Other Needs for the U.S. Corrections Sector

Brian A. Jackson

RAND Corporation, 2015

Given the challenges posed to the U.S. corrections sector, such as tightened budgets and increasingly complex populations under its charge, it is valuable to identify opportunities where changes in tools, practices, or approaches could improve performance. In this report, RAND researchers, with the help of a practitioner Corrections Advisory Panel, seek to map out an innovation agenda for the sector.

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From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime

The Making of Mass Incarceration in America

Elizabeth Hinton

Harvard University Press, 2016

Co-Winner of the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
A Wall Street Journal Favorite Book of the Year
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year
A Publishers Weekly Favorite Book of the Year

In the United States today, one in every thirty-one adults is under some form of penal control, including one in eleven African American men. How did the “land of the free” become the home of the world’s largest prison system? Challenging the belief that America’s prison problem originated with the Reagan administration’s War on Drugs, Elizabeth Hinton traces the rise of mass incarceration to an ironic source: the social welfare programs of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society at the height of the civil rights era.

“An extraordinary and important new book.”
—Jill Lepore, New Yorker

“Hinton’s book is more than an argument; it is a revelation…There are moments that will make your skin crawl…This is history, but the implications for today are striking. Readers will learn how the militarization of the police that we’ve witnessed in Ferguson and elsewhere had roots in the 1960s.”
—Imani Perry, New York Times Book Review

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