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Hangings, lynchings and jail breaks are long forgotten in Pacific County, where tourists flock to quaint attractions every season. But back in the early days, when the first jailhouse was built, this was a rough, rustic setting. Popular cannery worker Lum You was hanged here in 1902 - the only legal execution in county history. Industrious smugglers and creative entrepreneurs outwitted state-sanctioned prohibition measures, though some still did time...
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A bold and provocative interpretation of one of the most religiously vibrant places in America-a state penitentiary.
Baraka, Al, Teddy, and Sayyid, four black men from South Philadelphia, two Christian and two Muslim-are serving life sentences at Pennsylvania's maximum-security Graterford Prison. All of them work in Graterford's chapel, a place that is at once a sanctuary for religious contemplation and an arena for disputing the workings of God...
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Prisons systematically dehumanise the imprisoned. Visualised through mugshots and surveillance recordings, the incarcerated lose control of their own image and identity. The criminal justice system in the United States does not only carry out so-called justice in ways that compound inequality, it also minimises the possibility for empathetic encounters with those who are most marginalised. It is therefore urgent to understand how prisoners are portrayed...
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En mayo de 2018 una noticia marcó los titulares de los medios: dos jóvenes chilenos que hacían un viaje de aventura turística arriesgaban una condena a morir en la horca por el asesinato de una ciudadana trans en Kuala Lumpur, capital de Malasia. Confinados en una cárcel digna del Expreso de medianoche, vivieron un calvario, mientras desde Chile se movilizaban sus familiares, amigos y autoridades. Parlamentarios y la cancillería intervinieron...
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How long did the guillotine's blade hang over the heads of French criminals? Was it abandoned in the late 1800s? Did French citizens of the early days of the twentieth century decry its brutality? No. The blade was allowed to do its work well into our own time. In 1974, Hamida Djandoubi brutally tortured 22 year-old Elisabeth Bousquet in an apartment in Marseille, putting cigarettes out on her body and lighting her on fire, finally strangling her...
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Some time in the early 1960s, during the golden age of organized crime in America-the era that would inspire The Godfather; Goodfellas, and even The Sopranos-federal investigators pulled every known piece of information on more than 800 Mafia members worldwide into a thick, phone-book-sized directory. From old-school gangsters like Lucky Luciano and Mickey Cohen to young turks like Paul Castellano and Vinny "The Chin" Gigante, the guide offered at-a-glance...
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From the author of the classic Race to Incarcerate, a forceful and necessary argument for eliminating life sentences, including profiles of six people directly impacted by life sentences by formerly incarcerated author Kerry Myers Most Western democracies have few or no people serving life sentences, yet here in the United States more than 200,000 people are sentenced to such prison terms.
Marc Mauer and Ashley Nellis of The Sentencing Project argue...
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The Mettray Penal Colony was a private reformatory without walls, established in France in 1840 for the rehabilitation of young male delinquents. Foucault linked its opening to the most significant change in the modern status of prisons and now, at last, Stephen Toth takes us behind the gates to show how the institution legitimized France's repression of criminal youth and added a unique layer to the nation's carceral system.
Drawing on insights...
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Prisons, a community within a community. Violence is everywhere, the smell of fear is around every corner, you need, no must have eyes in the back of your head.
No time to relax, no time to sit back with a brew and put your feet up, the Prison won't let you.
Ever wondered what goes on behind those Prison walls? What really goes on behind those big unforgiving gates?
Ray Deveroux worked within the Prison walls for nearly 25 years, the violence, self-harm,...
50) Prison Noir
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Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies, launched with the summer '04 award-winning best seller Brooklyn Noir. Each book is comprised of all-new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective geographic range of the book. This anthology, with stories set in different prisons across the US, presents an absolutely new perspective on prison literature.
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I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang! is the amazing true story of one man's search for meaning, fall from grace, and eventual victory over injustice.
In 1921, Robert E. Burns was a shell-shocked and penniless veteran who found himself at the mercy of Georgia's barbaric penal system when he fell in with a gang of petty thieves. Sentenced to six to ten years' hard labor for his part in a robbery that netted less than $6.00, Burns was shackled...
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The timeless Carceri etchings of Piranesi (1720–1778) represent not only spectacular artistic accomplishments but also unforgettable expressions of psychological truths. Combining the influences of Tiepolo, Bibiena, and Rembrandt, these works of architectural fantasy challenge the boundaries of perception, creating a vast system of visual provocation. Innumerable staircases, immense vaults, and other ambiguous structures are compounded with projecting...
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What remains anti-democratic in our criminal justice systems, and where does it come from? Geoffroy de Lagasnerie spent years sitting in on trials, watching as individuals were judged and sentenced for armed robbery, assault, rape, and murder. His experience led to this original reflection on the penal state, power, and violence that identifies a paradox in the way justice is exercised in liberal democracies. In order to pronounce a judgment, a trial...
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After 13 years of struggling in the music business, Robert Reilly found himself broke and on the edge of despair. The specter of success in the music business had become a monster about to ruin his family life. Something had to change, or something was going to break beyond repair. A chance conversation with a neighbor led him to apply, somewhat half-heartedly, for a job at the county prison. Although he hated the thought of a "real job," a regular...
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Incarceration has a long and inglorious history, from dungeons in the bowels of castles to oppressive penal colonies in Australia. Karen Farrington brings this history up to the 21st century, exploring some of the world's worst prisons, from Alcatraz to Pollsmoor, and the unending battles that rage between convicts and warders. Inside the prison walls, gangs rule, guards devise sadistic punishments, and newcomers suffer abuse at the hands of experienced...
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When Crime and Punishment in America was first published in 1998, the national incarceration rate had doubled in just over a decade, and yet the United States remained-by an overwhelming margin-the most violent industrialized society in the world.
Today, there are several hundred thousand more inmates in the penal system, yet violence remains endemic in many American communities. In this groundbreaking and revelatory work, renowned criminologist...
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A Grip of Time (prison slang for a very long sentence behind bars) takes readers into a world most know little about-a maximum-security prison-and into the minds and hearts of the men who live there. These men, who are serving out life sentences for aggravated murder, join a fledgling Lifers' Writing Group started by award-winning author Lauren Kessler. Over the course of three years, meeting twice a month, the men reveal more and more about themselves,...
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When teenagers scuffle during a basketball game, they are typically benched. But when Will got into it on the court, he and his rival were sprayed in the face at close range by a chemical similar to Mace, denied a shower for twenty-four hours, and then locked in solitary confinement for a month. One in three American children will be arrested by the time they are twenty-three, and many will spend time locked inside horrific detention centers that...
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Shahrnush Parsipur was an important writer and television producer in her native Iran until 1979 when the Islamic Republic began imprisoning its citizens. Kissing the Sword captures the surreal experience of serving time without being charged with a crime, and witnessing the systematic destruction of any and all opposition to fundamentalist power. It is a memoir filled with both horror and humor: nights blasted by the sounds of machine gun fire as...
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In this long-awaited book from the rising superstar of sportswriting, whose blog "The Edge of Sports" is read each week by thousands of people across the country, Dave Zirin offers a riotously entertaining chronicle of larger-than-life sporting characters and dramatic contests and what amounts to an alternative history of the United States as seen through the games its people played. Through Zirin's eyes, sports are never mere games, but a reflection...
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