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The United States has built a carceral state that is unprecedented among Western countries and in US history. Nearly one in 50 people, excluding children and the elderly, is incarcerated today, a rate unsurpassed anywhere else in the world. What are some of the main political forces that explain this unprecedented reliance on mass imprisonment? Throughout American history, crime and punishment have been central features of American political development. This 2006 book examines the development of four key movements that mediated the construction of the carceral state in important ways: the victims' movement, the women's movement, the prisoners' rights movement, and opponents of the death penalty. This book argues that punitive penal policies were forged by particular social movements and interest groups within the constraints of larger institutional structures and historical developments that distinguish the United States from other Western countries.
In this book, for the first time, we can hear the startling, moving voices of adventurous and rebellious Japanese women as they eloquently challenged the social repression of prewar Japan. The extraordinary women whose memoirs, recollections, and essays are presented here constitute a strong current in the history of modern Japanese life from the 1880s to the outbreak of the Pacific War.
"131 women were hanged in England and Wales between 1797 and 1837, executed for crimes including murder, baby-killing, theft, arson, sheep-stealing and passing forged bank notes. Most of them were extremely poor and living in desperate situations. Some were mentally ill. A few were innocent. And almost all are now forgotten, their voices unheard for generations. Mary Morgan – a teenager hanged as an example to others. Eliza Fenning – accused of adding arsenic to the dumplings. Mary Bateman – a ‘witch’ who duped her neighbours out of their savings. Harriet Skelton – hanged for passing counterfeit pound notes in spite of efforts by Elizabeth Fry and the Duke of Gloucester to save her. Naomi Clifford has unearthed the events that brought these ‘unfortunates’ to the gallows and has used contemporary newspaper accounts and documents to tell their stories"--
On 24 April 1942, Czechoslovak journalist and active CPC member Julius Fucik was detained in Pankrác Prison in Prague, where he was subsequently interrogated and tortured, before being sent to Germany to stand trial for high treason. It was during this time that Fucik’s Notes from the Gallows (Czech: Reportáž psaná na oprátce, literally Reports Written Under the Noose) arose—written on pieces of cigarette paper and smuggled out by two sympathetic prison warders named Kolinsky and Hora. The notes were treated as great literary works after his death in 1943 and translated into many languages worldwide, resulting in this book, which was first published in English in 1948. It describes events in the prison since Fucik’s arrest and is filled with hope for a better, Communist future.
Why, in the recent campaigns for universal health care, did organized labor maintain its support of employer-mandated insurance? Did labor's weakened condition prevent it from endorsing national health insurance? Marie Gottschalk demonstrates here that the unions' surprising stance was a consequence of the peculiarly private nature of social policy in the United States. Her book combines a much-needed account of labor's important role in determining health care policy with a bold and incisive analysis of the American welfare state. Gottschalk stresses that, in the United States, the social welfare system is anchored in the private sector but backed by government policy. As a result, the private sector is a key political battlefield where business, labor, the state, and employees hotly contest matters such as health care. She maintains that the shadow welfare state of job-based benefits shaped the manner in which labor defined its policy interests and strategies. As evidence, Gottschalk examines the influence of the Taft-Hartley health and welfare funds, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (E.R.I.S.A.), and experience-rated health insurance, showing how they constrained labor from supporting universal health care. Labor, Gottschalk asserts, missed an important opportunity to develop a broader progressive agenda. She challenges the movement to establish a position on health care that addresses the growing ranks of Americans without insurance, the restructuring of the U.S. economy, and the political travails of the unions themselves.
At the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, Albert Speer, Hitler’s one-time number two, persuaded the judges that he ‘knew nothing’ of the Holocaust and related atrocities. Narrowly escaping execution, he was sentenced to twenty years in Spandau Prison, Berlin. In 1961, the newly commissioned author, as the British Army Spandau Guard Commander, was befriended by Speer, who taught him German. Adrian Greaves’ record of his conversations with Speer over a three year period make for fascinating reading. While the top Nazi admitted to Greaves his secret part in war crimes, after his 1966 release he determinedly denied any wrongdoing and became an intriguing and popular figure at home and abroad. Following Speer’s death in 1981 evidence emerged of his complicity in Hitler’s and the Nazi’s atrocities. In this uniquely revealing book the author skilfully blends his own personal experiences and relationship with Speer with a succinct history of the Nazi movement and the horrors of the 1930s and 1940s. In so doing new light is thrown on the character of one of the 20th century’s most notorious characters.
George Orwell set out 'to make political writing into an art', and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels of all time, this new series of his essays seeks to bring his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. A Hanging, the ninth in the Orwell's Essays series, tells the story of the execution of an unnamed convict in Burma. With the veracity of the story unknown, but thought to be loosely based on Orwell's own experiences in Burma, the haunting tale leaves the reader contemplating the heavy topic of colonialism, and the right of one to take the life of another.
From 1895 to 1937, 93 men were hanged at California's Folsom State Prison, and this book is the first to tell all of their stories, recounting long-forgotten tales of murder and swift justice, or sometimes, swift injustice that hanged an innocent man. Based on a treasury of historical information that has been hidden from the public for nearly 70 years, the full stories of these 93 executed men are presented in this collection including their origins, their crimes, the investigations that brought them to justice, their trials, and their deaths at the gallows. This wealth of previously unpublished historical detail gives a vivid view of the sociology of early 20th-century crime and of the resulting prison life. Readers take a trip back in time to the hard-boiled early 20th-century California that inspired the novels of Dashiell Hammett and countless other crime writers. Illustrated throughout with authentic and haunting prison photographs of each of the condemned men, the crimes and punishments of a vanished era are brought into a sharp and realistic light.
"This book is the first to systematically investigate the capital punishment of girls and women in one jurisdiction in the United States during nearly four centuries. Using Connecticut as an essential case study because of its long history as a colony and a state, this study is the first of its kind not only for New England but for the United States. The author uses rich archival sources to look critically at the gendered differential in the application of the death penalty from the seventeenth century until the abolition of capital punishment in Connecticut in 2012. In addition to analyzing cases of executions, this monograph offers an innovative focus on women and girls who escaped judicial execution with death sentences that were avoided, reversed, reprieved, or commuted. The book fully describes the impact of the rise and fall of witchcraft allegations during the last half of the seventeenth century, the clash between the degradation of slavery and Enlightenment ideals that was the provocation for the de facto end of female capital punishment in the New Republic, the introduction of two degrees of murder that effectively provided an escape hatch from the gallows, and a detailed look at the unique case of Lydia Sherman, whose sentence to life in prison under the Connecticut murder statute of 1846 emphatically confirmed the unofficial state exemption of females from the gallows. The book will attract attention from a broad audience interested in criminology, criminal justice, capital punishment, women's studies, and legal history. Anti-death penalty advocates, law school activists, public defenders, capital punishment litigators, and jurists will also find the book useful. Pivotal cases since 1900 are also examined"--