For twelve years Robert Blecker, a criminal law professor, wandered freely inside Lorton Central Prison, armed only with cigarettes and a tape recorder. The Death of Punishment tests legal philosophy against the reality and wisdom of street criminals and their guards. Some killers' poignant circumstances should lead us to mercy; others show clearly why they should die. After thousands of hours over twenty-five years inside maximum security prisons and on death rows in seven states...

**#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING MICHAEL B. JORDAN AND JAMIE FOXX • A powerful true story about the potential for mercy to redeem us, and a clarion call to fix our broken system of justice—from one of the most brilliant and influential lawyers of our time.“[Bryan Stevenson’s] dedication to fighting for justice and equality has inspired me and many others and made a lasting impact on our country.”—John LegendNAMED ONE OF THE MOST ...

After more than twenty years in prison, Adnan Syed's murder conviction was overturned, and he was finally set free. Rabia Chaudry's New York Times bestseller and award-winner Adnan's Story reveals how the case was mishandled and became the subject of Sarah Koenig's Peabody Award-winning podcast Serial.In early 2000, Adnan Syed was convicted and sentenced to life plus thirty years for the murder of his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee, a high scho...

Execution is a gruesomely fascinating account of methods of judicial execution from around the world and through the ages, and includes such hair-raising categories as death by cannibalism, being sewn into an animal’s belly and a thousand cuts. In his own darkly humorous style, Geoffrey Abbott describes the instruments used and their effectiveness, and reveals the macabre origins of familiar phrases such as ‘gone west’ or ‘drawn a blank’, as well as the jargon of the underworld.Fro...

A vivid history of America's biggest, baddest prison system and how it came to lead the nation's punitive revolutionIn the prison business, all roads lead to Texas. The most locked-down state in the nation has led the way in criminal justice severity, from assembly-line executions to isolation supermaxes, from prison privatization to sentencing juveniles as adults. Texas Tough, a sweeping history of American imprisonment from the days of slavery to the pres...

There have never been so many killers in Irish prisons. Nearly 1 in 10 Irish prisoners are serving life sentences for murder — and many more are on temporary release. Hardened crime reporter Barry Cummins tells the shocking true stories of some of Ireland's most notorious murderers and their horrific crimes. Lifers covers savage killings going back more than 50 years. This book gives a full account of these depraved crimes, through the investigation, trial and sentencing of the killers to ...

Paddy Armstrong was one of four people falsely convicted of The Guildford Bombing in 1975. He spent fifteen years in prison for a crime he did not commit. Today, as a husband and father, life is wonderfully ordinary, but the memory of his ordeal lives on. Here, for the first time and with unflinching candour, he lays bare the experiences of those years and their aftermath. Life after Life is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the power of forgiveness. It reminds us of th...

In this crucial study, named one of the Washington Post's Notable Nonfiction Books of 2016 and now in paperback, Baz Dreisinger goes behind bars in nine countries to investigate the current conditions in prisons worldwide.Beginning in Africa and ending in Europe, Incarceration Nations is a first-person odyssey through the prison systems of the world. Professor, journalist, and founder of the Prison-to-College-Pipeline program, Dreisinger looks int...

Bill Kurtis, anchor of the wildly popular true-crime TV series Cold Case Files and American Justice, used to support the death penalty. But after observing the machinations of the justice system for thirty years, he came to a stunning realization that changed his life: Capital punishment is wrong. There can be no real justice in America until it is abolished.In The Death Penalty on Trial, Kurtis takes readers on his most remarkable investigative journey y...

On the morning of 7 March 1997, the bodies of two elderly female patients were discovered in their sheltered accommodation at Grangegorman Psychiatric Hospital in Dublin.It would be a further 16 years before Mark Nash was convicted of the notorious Grangegorman murders, but not before Dean Lyons, an innocent man, spent months in prison for a crime he did not commit, only to tragically die of a heroin overdose before his name was cleared. Here Alan Bailey, a retired member of the Garda Síoc...

Since the early 1990s, thanks to inflamed rhetoric in the media about “superpredators” and a wave of get-tough-on-crime laws, the number of juveniles in prison has risen by 35 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, and their placement in adult prison has increased by 208 percent, according to a 2007 survey by the Campaign for Youth. Since 1992, every state except Nebraska has passed laws making it easier to prosecute youth under eighteen as adults, and most states have legal...

A brilliant overview of America’s defining human rights crisis and a “much-needed introduction to the racial, political, and economic dimensions of mass incarceration” (Michelle Alexander)Understanding Mass Incarceration offers the first comprehensive overview of the incarceration apparatus put in place by the world’s largest jailer: the United States.Drawing on a growing body of academic and professional work, Understanding Mass Incarceration