By Rafael Di Tella and Juan Dubra

We describe the evolution of selective aspects of punishment in the United States over the period 1980–2004. We note that imprisonment increased around 1980, a period that coincides with the ‘‘Reagan revolution’’ in economic matters. We build an economic model where beliefs about economic opportunities and beliefs about punishment are correlated. We present three pieces of evidence (across countries, within the United States, and an experimental exercise) that are consistent with the model.

Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2011. 53p.

By John McElroy.

A Story of Rebel Military Prisons By John McElroy, late of Co.L. 16th III Can. 15 months a guest of the so-called Southern Confederacy. A Private soldiers experience in Richmond, Andersonville, Savannah, Millen Blackshear and Florence.

Harrow and Heston Classic Reprint. (1879) 675 pages.

By Andrew Silke and John Morrison

Recent cases of attacks by released terrorist prisoners highlight issues around the risk of re-offending posed by former terrorist prisoners. What are the appropriate processes and systems for managing and risk assessing such individuals, and to what extent is rehabilitation possible in the context of terrorist offending? This Policy Brief will explore these and related issues to help inform wider discussion and debates on appropriate policy in this area.

In this Policy Brief, the authors critically analyse the definition of ‘recidivism’, and demonstrate the need for a concrete operational definition before one is able to truly analyse recidivist activity. Following this, the authors discuss terrorist recidivism in a range of international contexts, ranging from Northern Ireland to Sri Lanka, the United States to Israel. By taking this broader perspective it allows the reader to gain a greater understanding of what factors related to recidivism rates may be context-specific, and which are universal.

The Hague: International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT), 2020. 13p.

By Rachel E. Bennett.

Capital punishment has a long and storied global history. Within the annals of this penal narrative, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have offered a sustained attraction to historians of Western Europe. However, studies of the Scottish capital punishment experience have remained limited by comparison. This book seeks to redress this scholarly lacuna. Based upon an extensive gathering and analysis of previously untapped resources, it takes the reader on a journey from the courtrooms of Scotland to the theatre of the gallows. It introduces them to several of the malefactors who faced the hangman’s noose and explores the traditional hallmarks of the spectacle of the scaffold. The study demonstrates that the period between 1740 and 1834 was one of discussion, debate and fundamental change in the use of the death sentence and how it was staged in practice. In addition, it contextualises the use of capital punishment against the backdrop of key events in Scottish history in this period including Anglo-Scottish relations in the wake of the 1707 Act of Union, the aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion and the rapid industrialisation and urbanisation witnessed by the country. In doing so, the current study goes beyond redressing a scholarly gap and instead demonstrates that an exploration of Scotland’s unique capital punishment history enhances the current feld in some areas but provides a crucial caveat to the broader narrative in others. Finally, this study writes the post-mortem punishment of the criminal corpse into Scotland’s capital punishment history. In demonstrating that the journey of several capitally convicted offenders, predominantly murderers, did not end upon the scaffolds of Scotland, it takes the reader from the theatre of the gallows to the dissection tables of Scotland’s main universities and to the foot of the gibbets from which criminal bodies were displayed. In doing so it identifes an intermediate stage in the long-term disappearance of public bodily punishment.

Basingstoke, UK: Springer Nature, 2018. 243p.

By Clementine van Eck.

Honour Killings amongst Turks in the Netherlands.

Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2002. 304p.

By Sarah Tarlow and Emma Battell.

This open access book is the culmination of many years of research on what happened to the bodies of executed criminals in the past. Focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it looks at the consequences of the 1752 Murder Act. These criminal bodies had a crucial role in the history of medicine, and the history of crime, and great symbolic resonance in literature and popular culture. Starting with a consideration of the criminal corpse in the medieval and early modern periods, chapters go on to review the histories of criminal justice, of medical history and of gibbeting under the Murder Act, and ends with some discussion of the afterlives of the corpse, in literature, folklore and in contemporary medical ethics. Using sophisticated insights from cultural history, archaeology, literature, philosophy and ethics as well as medical and crime history, this book is a uniquely interdisciplinary take on a fascinating historical phenomenon.

Lowman. Palgrave (2018) 277 pages.

By Floris Tomasini.

Posthumous Punishment, Harm and Redemption over Time. “In the main, this book is a cross-fertilisation of history and philosophy in the broadest possible sense. Ideas of death, posthumous harm, punishment and redemption germinate in both the conceptual ground of philosophical analysis and the empirical ground of historical case study.”

Palgrave (2017) 106p.

Edited by Ksenya Kiebuzinski and Alexander Motyl.

A Sourcebook. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, executed a staggering number of political prisoners in Western Ukraine-somewhere between 10,000 and 40,000-in the space of eight days, in one of the greatest atrocities perpetrated by the Soviet state. Yet the Great West Ukrainian Prison Massacre of 1941 is largely unknown. This sourcebook aims to change that, offering detailed scholarly analysis, eyewitness testimonies and profiles of known victims, and a selection of fiction, memoirs, and poetry that testifies to the lasting impact of the massacre in the collective memory of Ukrainians.

Amsterdam University Press. (217) 433 pages.

By Sarah Tarlow.

”The story of Tom Otter, a murderer who was executed and gibbeted in 1806, has many striking features. Not least, this form of brutal and bodily post-mortem punishment seems rather anachronistic during a period often described in terms of increasing gentility and humanity. It took place within the legal context of the Murder Act (1752), which specified that the bodies of murderers had to be either dissected or hung in chains. Other aggravated death penalties were applied to those convicted of treason and suicide. A number of common misconceptions about the gibbet need to be corrected.” Palgrave (2017) 163p.

By Graeme R. Newman.

This is a classic reprint of the original edition of The Punishment Response, originally published in 1976. An acclaimed treatise on the history,  philosophy and psychology of punishment. "...read with enormous appreciation for its erudition and method of analysis..." -- Michel Foucault.

Harrow and Heston Classic Reprint. 1985.312p.

Introduction by Charles Tibbits.

“ The name of London's famous and terrible prison Newgate has for centuries conjured to the public mind the gloomiest picture that the imagination of the listener could conceive of human retribution on the criminal and depraved. What the name of theBastille was in France to the person who might find himself at variance with political powers the name of Newgate was to the person who bore in himself the consciousness of crime. Its terrible reputation as the place of vengeance on offenders against theLaws seems to have a remarkable antiquity. Which prison was first instituted there is no record. As early as 121 1 however we have the news of its dungeons being filled with offenders. In I334..a commission was appointed by the authorities to consider the tortures then in use to extort confessions from the unfortunate wretches within its grim hold. From one end of the country to the;other Newgate became known as a place where all the terrors of the Law awaited the guilty. Dipping Into its gloomy annals one cannot help also arriving at the conviction that its terrors were not wholly reserved for the guilty. They overtook the unfortunate innocent sometimes. The inscription on the old Edinborough Tolbooth would excellently apply to it-—even as it will apply to many of our prisons to-day.”

London: Sisley's, 1908. 327p.

By David T. Johnson.

“By arguing that he opposes capital punishment but not in this case, Murakami is articulating a sensibility—the death penalty is “unavoidable” (yamu o enai)—that is ubiquitous in Japan’s culture of capital punishment.”

Palgrave (2019) 139p.

By Ida B. Wells-Barnett.

Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States. “ From 1865 to 1872, hundreds of colored men and women were mercilessly murdered and the almost invariable reason assigned was that they met their death by being alleged participants in an insurrection or riot. But this story at last wore itself out. No insurrection ever materialized; no Negro rioter was ever apprehended and proven guilty, and no dynamite ever recorded the black man's protest against oppression and wrong.􏰎􏰍

Harrow and Heston Classic Reprint. (1895) 112 pages.

By Peter King.

Aggravated Forms of the Death Penalty in England. While eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century historians have extensively studied the ‘Bloody Code’ and the resulting interactions around the ‘Hanging Tree’, they have largely ignored an important dimension of the capital punishment system – the courts extensive use of aggravated and post-execution punishments. With this book, Peter King aims to rectify this neglected historical phenomenon.

Palgrave (2017) 221 pages.

By Joachim J. Savelsberg.

Conflicting Responses to Human Rights Violations in Darfur. “It has often been argued for the case of Rwanda that the United Nations’ and the US government’s reluctance to call the 1994 mass killings genocidal prevented an appropriate response and cost hundreds of thousands of additional lives. It thus matters whether we define mass violence as a form of genocide specifically, as criminal violence generally, or as something else altogether.”

UC Press. (2015) 363 pages.

By Stefan Eklöf Amirell

Colonisation and Maritime Violence in Southeast Asia. “The suppression of piracy and other forms of maritime violence was a keystone in the colonisation of Southeast Asia. Focusing on what was seen in the nineteenth century as the three most pirate-infested areas in the region – the Sulu Sea, the Strait of Malacca and Indochina – this comparative study in colonial history explores how piracy was defined, contested and used to resist or justify colonial expansion, particularly during the most intense phase of imperial expansion in Southeast Asia from c. 1850 to c. 1920.”

Cambridge University Press. (2019) 278 pages.

Read/Download

Report of the Principal Keeper.

Contains many statistics on inmates and other day-to-day activities in the penitentiary. In his introduction, the Keeper pronounces the penitentiary in perfect condition.

Harrow and Heston Classic Reprint. (1892) 112 pages.

By Pietro Marongiu and Graeme R. Newman

Gli Autori di questo saggio, che costituisce una pietra miliare negli studi sulla Vendetta, sono eminenti criminologi che hanno riunito diverse suggestioni provenienti dalla storia, dall’antropologia, dalla sociologia, dalla letteratura classica e dalla mitologia nell’intento di migliorare la nostra comprensione della violenza, della giustizia penale e del vigilantismo nella società moderna. Partendo da diverse rappresentazioni classiche della Vendetta nei miti greci, nei drammi di Shakespeare, nell’Inferno di Dante Alighieri, nel folklore del selvaggio west, fino alle saghe contemporanee dei supereroi come Batman e Superman, vengono indagate le radici storiche e culturali del desiderio universale di restituire i torti subiti. Marongiu e Newman affermano che tutti i comportamenti vendicativi originano da un “elementare senso di ingiustizia, un sentimento primitivo di ribellione contro un potere tirannico contro il quale si è impotenti a reagire” e che tutte le vendette sono fondamentalmente motivate da un bisogno generale e insopprimibile di uguaglianza, giustizia e reciprocità. Il libro ricostruisce la nascita e i cambiamenti che il bisogno di vendetta ha subito nel corso dei secoli e come esso ha influenzato i nostri sistemi legali, i nostri codici morali e i miti della nostra cultura.

Harrow and Heston Publishers. 2012. 152p.

By Pietro Marongiu and Graeme R. Newman.

As relevant to the 21st century as it was in the 20th century when it was first written, in this second edition of Vengeance: The Fight Against Injustice, the authors provide a cogent appraisal of the most recent scholarship on vengeance that has generally confirmed the theses developed in the first edition, and offer new insights into the nature and role of punishment in modern society. The authors examine the historic and cultural manifestations of the need to inflict punishment on one's enemies. They trace the ways the deep seated desire for vengeance has developed and changed over the centuries and has affected our legal system, moral codes, and cultural myths. By bringing together insights from history, anthropology, sociology, classical and literary studies, and mythology, the authors have produced a landmark study that greatly enlarges our understanding of the problems of violence, criminal justice, and vigilantism in modern society.

Harrow and Heston Publishers. 2019. 196p.

By Graeme R. Newman

The classical philosophical and historical analysis of punishment. Explains, for the most part, why we punish the way we do, who for the most part are the objects of punishment, and who are the onlookers.

Harrow and Heston Publishers. 1985. 318p.

Published by Transaction Press, now Routledge. 2005.