By Magnus Hörnqvist.
Based on a reading of contemporary philosophical arguments, this book accounts for how punishment has provided audiences with pleasure in different historical contexts. Watching tragedies, contemplating hell, attending executions, or imagining prisons have generated pleasure, according to contemporary observers, in ancient Greece, in medieval Catholic Europe, in the early-modern absolutist states, and in the post-1968 Western world.
Routledge (2021) 181p.
By Graeme R. Newman
In this second volume, Newman helps us experience criminal punishment through the lens of artists, brilliant and mundane, never failing to confront us with the awful things we do to those who have broken the law. These 148 images show us what we are truly capable of, and how necessary it is to be convinced that the recipients of horrible punishments really deserve what they get. As such, it is essential that the guilt of the accused be established beyond reasonable doubt. Newman's poignant and concise commentaries on every picture both educate and engage, uncovering the emotive psychology of criminal punishment (that is, hypocrisy) that lies at the heart of all functioning societies. It is punitive justice at its best -- or worst. 232 pages. A great complement to any college graduate or undergraduate courses on punishment, social order, or criminal justice.
Harrow and Heston Publishers. 2021. 219p.
By Graeme R. Newman.
In Book 1, Newman's poignant and concise commentaries on each of the 102 illustrations of renowned artists, both educate and engage, uncovering the ancient emotive psychology of punishment that lies at the heart of all societies. 212 pages. A great complement to any college graduate or undergraduate courses on punishment, social order, or criminal justice.
New York. Harrow and Heston Publishers. 2021. 204p.
By Peter Caster.
A prison official in 1888 declared that it was the freeing of slaves that actually created prisons: “we had to establish means for their control. Hence came the penitentiary.” Such rampant racism contributed to the criminalization of black masculinity in the cultural imagination, shaping not only the identity of prisoners (collectively and individually) but also America’s national character. Caster analyzes the representations of imprisonment in books, films, and performances, alternating between history and fiction to describe how racism influenced imprisonment during the decline of lynching in the 1930s, the political radicalism in the late 1960s, and the unprecedented prison expansion through the 1980s and 1990s. Offering new interpretations of familiar works by William Faulkner, Eldridge Cleaver, and Norman Mailer, Caster also engages recent films such as American History X, The Hurricane, and The Farm: Life Inside Angola Prison alongside prison history chronicled in the transcripts of the American Correctional Association. This book offers a compelling account of how imprisonment has functioned as racial containment, a matter critical to U.S. history and literary study.
Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2008. 279p.
