By The Death Penalty Information Center

The Death Penalty Information Center’s new report on race and the death penal­ty in Tennessee places the state’s death penal­ty sys­tem in his­tor­i­cal con­text, doc­u­ment­ing how racial dis­crim­i­na­tion and racial vio­lence con­tin­ue to influ­ence the admin­is­tra­tion of the death penal­ty. Doomed to Repeat: The Legacy of Race in Tennessee’s Contemporary Death Penalty, released June 22, 2023, notes that as the Tennessee Department of Correction devel­ops new lethal injec­tion pro­to­cols and pre­pares to resume exe­cu­tions, the state may find it use­ful to under­stand how Tennessee arrived at its cur­rent cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment sys­tem.

The report explains that in the 18th and 19th cen­turies, the use of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in Tennessee was large­ly depen­dent on the race of the defen­dant. There were 13 offens­es for which Black peo­ple could receive the death penal­ty, com­pared to just two offens­es that could result in death sen­tences for white cit­i­zens. From the begin­ning, the death penal­ty was applied dif­fer­ent­ly based on race.  The death penal­ty was not the only form of lethal pun­ish­ment that tar­get­ed Black Tennesseans. The report ties Tennessee’s use of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment to its trou­bled his­to­ry of racial ter­ror. Tennessee was the site of more than 500 lynch­ings, accord­ing to Tennesseans for Historical Justice, and a nation­wide study of death sen­tences between 1989 and 2017 found a sig­nif­i­cant sta­tis­ti­cal rela­tion­ship between a state’s his­to­ry of lynch­ing and the num­ber of death sen­tences giv­en to Black defendants. 

Many of the his­tor­i­cal issues relat­ed to race in the state, includ­ing seg­re­ga­tion and Black vot­er dis­en­fran­chise­ment, are still preva­lent in Tennessee today. For exam­ple, the state has the high­est pro­por­tion of dis­en­fran­chised Black res­i­dents in the United States, with more than 1 in 5 Black peo­ple unable to vote. Concerns regard­ing vot­er dis­en­fran­chise­ment have been height­ened as the state leg­is­la­ture has con­tin­ued to remove pow­er from local­ly elect­ed pros­e­cu­tors to han­dle var­i­ous aspects of cap­i­tal cas­es, and shift­ed the author­i­ty to the state’s Attorney General, who is not elected. 

Washington DC: Death Penalty Information Center, 2023. 69p.

By Marta Nelson, Samuel Feineh and Maris Mapolski

To understand how the United States became one of the most incarcerated nations in the world, it is critical to understand the role that excessive and harsh sentencing has played. In this report, Vera addresses a main driver of mass incarceration: our sentencing system. Dismantling our system of mass incarceration in favor of a narrowly tailored sentencing response to unlawful behavior can produce more safety, repair harm, and reduce incarceration by close to 80 percent, according to modeling on the federal system. This report summarizes the evidence surrounding sentencing’s impact on safety, offers new guiding principles for sentencing legislation that privilege liberty, outlines seven key sentencing reforms in line with these guiding principles, and suggests a “North Star” for sentencing policy with a presumption toward community-based sentences except in limited circumstances. Severe sentences do not deter crime, retribution often does not help survivors of crime heal, and the U.S. sentencing system overestimates who is a current danger to the community and when incarceration is needed for public safety. Instead, we need a system that privileges liberty while creating real safety and repairing harm.

New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 2023. 81p.

By Access Living of Metropolitan Chicago

  According to statistics gathered from the 2011-2012 National Inmate Survey administered by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, an estimated 40 percent of individuals in jail self-reported having at least one disability. 3 Navigating jail with a disability can be complex, overwhelming, and costly. The impact of jailing a person with a disability also impacts their families and communities. The incarceration of one is essentially the incarceration of many. In the United States, the use of jail to confine people with disabilities is closely aligned with efforts to place disabled people in asylums and institutions, similar to the criminalization of black people resulting in mass incarceration following the abolition of slavery. From the end of slavery to today, laws have been enacted to criminalize and devalue both people of color and disabled individuals. These laws further socially justify these populations’ incarceration and further fuel biases and fear towards these groups. 4 Efforts to reduce jail incarceration nationwide have resulted in a range of innovative strategies, such as reducing the use of cash bail5 and the way that prosecutors make decisions about charges. 6 There is certainly a serious effort to shift how jails engage with people who need mental health supports, notably at Cook County Jail. 7 However, despite the general prevalence of disability in jails, there remain a range of under-addressed opportunities to discuss how to further reduce the jail incarceration of people with disabilities overall. A number of disability advocates have been working for many years to bring what is essentially a cross-disability look to criminal justice and restorative justice work; we need to hear and build on these efforts. Moreover, even as the National Inmate Survey showed high rates of self-reported disability status, it also showed that incarcerated people of color tended to underreport disability status.8 This poses a complex challenge to understanding the disability experience in different demographics who are impacted by police contact and jail incarceration. We feel this dynamic is of great note given current national work on reducing racial disparities in arrest trends and jail populations. This is especially important for Access Living, as the majority of people we serve directly are from black and brown neighborhoods in Chicago.  

Chicago: Access Living, 2019. 71p.

By Ashley Nellis

This report documents the rates of incarceration for white, Black and Latinx Americans in each state, identifies three contributors to racial and ethnic disparities in imprisonment, and provides recommendations for reform.

Washington DC: The Sentencing Project, 2021. 25p.

Edited by Rui Abrunhosa Gonçalves 

This book provides international perspectives on corrections, correctional treatment, and penitentiary laws. Although its focus is on African and South American countries, the information provided can be easily expanded to North America and Europe. The chapters present legal frameworks and applied research on prisons and their potential to deter crime and reduce recidivism rates. The book puts the human rights agenda at the forefront and is a useful resource for those who work in corrections, including prison, education, and probation officers.

London: InTechOpen, 2023. 146p.

By Julia Laskorunsky, Gerald G.Gaes and KevinReitz  

When researchers, policymakers, and advocates examine the impact of long sentences, they typically focus on issues such as the statutory lengths of sentences or the roles that prosecutors and judges play in imposing sentences. While analyses of such “front-end” factors are important, they cannot sufficiently explain the role of “back-end” factors, specifically the laws and administrative rules that govern the awarding of different forms of sentence credit and prison release. This constitutes a significant gap in our understanding of how long sentences work. As research by Kevin Reitz and colleagues has documented,1 state prison-release frameworks have far greater discretionary power over the time individuals actually serve-and, by extension, the size of prison populations-than has been previously understood. To assess the impact of the use of long sentences of 10 or more years in the U.S., it is critical to appreciate how the interplay between the laws and administrative rules governing prison release affect the actual length of time individuals spend behind bars. Based on research conducted as part of the Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice’s Prison Release: Degrees of Indeterminacy project,2 this brief’s first section provides an overview of the nation’s parole and non-parole prison release systems. This overview sets up an examination of how these systems’ statutory and administrative policy frameworks influence release decisions, sentence credit awards, and the actual time individuals serve against the sentence they receive in court (i.e., the judicial maximum term). In the second section, the brief uses Colorado as a short case-study to show how one state’s back-end laws and policies affect the time individuals serve. Finally, in the concluding section, the brief points to future research and policy work on prison-release decision making including other empirical factors other than statutory and administrative frameworks that influence how much time an individual serves.  

Washington DC: Council on Criminal Justice, 2022. 23p.

By Roger Pryzybylski, John Maki, Stephanie Kennedy, AaronRosenthal and Ernesto Lopez

  Long prison sentences—defined here as sentences of 10 years or more—may be imposed for several reasons, including to punish people engaged in criminal behavior, to prevent individuals from committing additional crimes in the future, and to warn the general public about the consequences of violating the law. This literature review explores empirical evidence on the relationship between sentence length and public safety. It synthesizes the best available research on the incapacitation and deterrent effects of prison sentences and examines whether, and to what extent, prison sentences affect individual criminal behavior and overall crime rates. The relationship between long prison sentences and public safety is complex. Although long prison sentences may be warranted in individual cases based on one or more of the varied purposes of sentencing, the imposition of such sentences on a large scale offers diminishing returns for public safety. Research consistently shows that a relatively small percentage of individuals are responsible for an outsized share of crime in their communities. But attempts to use long sentences to selectively incapacitate this population have been unable to overcome competing factors like the “replacement effect,” where the incarceration of one person leads to another individual taking their place, and the “age-crime curve,” the criminological fact that offending typically decreases with age. Since relatively few studies have focused specifically on long prison sentences, this analysis encompasses the broader literature on incarceration and crime. The report concludes with recommendations for future research.  

Washington, DC: Council on Criminal Justice, 2022. 17p.

By Kate K. O’Neill, Tyler J Smith, Ian Kennedy

Although men’s incarceration rates have declined in the United States, women’s have stayed steady and even risen in some areas. At the same time, courts have increased their use of monetary sanctions, especially for low-level offenses. We propose that women’s incarceration trends can be partially explained by county dependence on monetary sanctions as a source of revenue. We suggest that monetary sanctions expose female defendants to processes that increase their likelihood of incarceration, especially in counties more reliant on monetary sanctions as a source of revenue, and where women’s poverty rates are high. Using data from Washington State, we find county dependence on monetary sanctions is positively associated with rates of women sentenced to incarceration. Although rural counties’ rates are higher, they depend on monetary sanctions no more than nonrural counties do.

  RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 8(2): 157–72. 2022;  

By Mary Pattillo and Gabriela Kirk

Monetary sanctions include fines, fees, restitution, surcharges, interest, and other costs imposed on people who are convicted of crimes ranging from traffic violations to violent felonies.  We analyze how people in the court system theorize about monetary sanctions with regards to four kinds of justice: constitutional, retributive, procedural, and distributive justice.  Drawing on qualitative interviews with sixty-eight people sentenced to pay monetary sanctions in Illinois, we identify five themes that illuminate how respondents think about these forms of justice: monetary sanctions are: (1) justifiable punishment, (2) impossible to pay due to poverty, (3) double punishment, (4) extortion, and (5) collected by an opaque and greedy state.  We find that for defendants in the criminal justice system, monetary sanctions serve some retributive aims, but do not align with the other three domains of justice.  We discuss the policy implications of these findings.

UCLA Criminal Justice Law Review  Volume 4, Issue 1, 2020.

By Pau Pérez-Sales

FROM THE PREFACE: Sadly, it is highly likely that psychological torture is committed by governments worldwide and yet, notwithstanding the serious moral questions that this disturbing and elusive concept raises, and limited research in the area, there is no operational or legal definition.This pioneering new book provides the first scientific definition and instrument to measure what it means to be tortured psychologically, as well as how allegations of psychological torture can be judged. Ground in cross-disciplinary research across psychology, anthropology, ethics, philosophy, law and medicine, the book is a tour de force which analyses the legal framework in which psychological torture can exist, the harrowing effects it can have on those who have experi- enced it, and the motivations and identities of those who perpetrate it.

NY. Routledge. 2017. 445p.

By Chinwike Okereke, Adrià Cots Fernández & Maria-Goretti Loglo

This briefing paper by IDPC and the African Law Foundation (AFRILAW) presents new evidence on the physical and mental violence faced by people who use drugs in Nigeria, both at the hands of law enforcement agents and in drug treatment centres. Drawing on desk research and on a survey of 79 people who use drugs and other stakeholders in Nigeria, the papers shows that in Nigeria people who use drugs are routinely subject to physical, mental and sexual violence, sometimes meeting the definition of torture or ill-treatment under international law. Many respondents highlighted the gendered aspect of these forms of torture and ill-treatment, while others pointed to a disproportionate impact on those marginalized on the basis of poverty or status. Although the occurrence of violence is widespread and well known, only one survey respondent brought a formal complaint, and none achieved any form of compensation or redress. The report concludes with a series of recommendations on how to prevent and provide redress for the forms of torture and ill-treatment documented in this report. We emphasise the need to reform laws and policies that criminalise people who use drugs, and to ensure access to voluntary, evidence-based, and rights-based drug treatment and harm reduction services.

London: International Drug Policy Consortium, 2022. 24p.

By AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL

From the Introduction: Amnesty International’s research on the global use of the death penalty in 2022 revealed a spike in the number of people known to have been executed worldwide, including a significant increase in executions for drug-related offences. This negative trend contrasts with a countervailing positive tendency: a substantial number of countries have taken decisive steps away from the death penalty in 2022, marking remarkable progress against the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment. Known executions, excluding the thousands believed to have taken place in China, significantly increased by 53% on those for 2021, from 579 (2021) to 883 (2022). The executions recorded in 2022 were the highest since 2017 (993).2 Secrecy and restrictive state practices continued to impair an accurate assessment of the use of the death penalty in several countries, including China, North Korea and Viet Nam.

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL GLOBAL REPORT 2022. 46p.

By Richard Wortley

FROM THE COVER: This book examines the control ofproblem behaviour in prison from a situational crime prevention perspective. Following the success of situational crime prevention in community settings, Richard Wortley argues that the same principles can be used to help reduce the levels of assault, rape, self-harm, drug use, escape and collective violence in our prison systems. This pioneering new study proposes a two-stage model of situational prevention that moves beyond traditional opportunity-reduction: it attempts to reconcile the contradictory urges to control prison disorder by 'tightening-up' and hardening the prison environment on the one hand, and 'loosening-off and normalising it on the other. Combining a comprehensive synthesis and evaluation of existing research with original investigation and ground-breaking conclusions, Situational Prison Control will be of great interest to academics and practitioners both in the areas of corrections and crime prevention more generally.

Cambridge. University of Cambridge Press. 2002.263p. CONTAINS MARK-UP

By Edda Frankot

This open access book analyses the practice of banishment and what it can tell us about the values of late medieval society concerning morally acceptable behaviour. It focuses on the Dutch town of Kampen and considers the exclusion of offenders through banishment and the redemption of individuals after their exile. Banishment was a common punishment in late medieval Europe, especially for sexual offences. In Kampen it was also meted out as a consequence of the non-payment of fines, after which people could arrange repayment schemes which allowed them to return. The book firstly considers the legal context of the practice of banishment, before discussing punishment in Kampen more generally. In the third chapter the legal practice of banishment as a punitive and coercive measure is discussed. The final chapter focuses on the redemption of exiles, either because their punishment was completed, or because they arranged for the payment of outstanding fines.

Bern: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. 140p.

By  Marcelo F. Aebi Léa Berger-Kolopp Christine Burkhardt Mélanie M. Tiago;  The European Union and the Council of Europe

  Country-based information on penal institutions and prison populations was collected through questionnaires sent to the prison administrations of the member states of the Council of Europe. The information collected was analysed by the authors of the study. This publication is divided into four parts across two volumes. Parts 1 to 3 are presented in this volume. Part 4 (volume 2) presents the data received from the prison administrations of the 47 member states of the Council of Europe, as well as the rates, ratios and percentages computed by the authors of this study, which were used to produce the figures included in the present volume. 

Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 2019. 366p.

By Heino Stöver, Anna Tarján, Gergely Horváth & Linda Montanari 

People who inject drugs are often imprisoned, which is associated with increased levels of health risks including overdose and infectious diseases transmission, affecting not only people in prison but also the communities to which they return. This paper aims to give an up-to-date overview on availability, coverage and policy framework of prison-based harm reduction interventions in Europe. Available data on selected harm reduction responses in prisons were compiled from international standardised data sources and combined with a questionnaire survey among 30 National Focal Points of the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction to determine the level of availability, estimated coverage and policy framework of the interventions. …. While 21 countries address harm reduction in prison in national strategic documents, upon-release interventions appear only in 12.

Conclusions. Availability and coverage of harm reduction interventions in European prisons are limited, compared to the community. There is a gap between international recommendations and ‘on-paper’ availability of interventions and their actual implementation. Scaling up harm reduction in prison and throughcare can achieve important individual and public-health benefits.

Harm Reduction Journal volume 18, Article number: 67 (2021) 

By Gabriel Tarde. Translated by Rapelje Howell

From the Introduction by Piers Beirne. ”…. Tarde's interventions in criminology are among the most elusive in the discipline. One among several reasons for this is that he was an insular and often bitter antagonist who cultivated neither the allies nor the disciples required of a systematic intellectual legacy. Indeed, almost to the end of his life, Tarde was unique among French academics in that, despising the intellectual domination of the metropolis, he had no secure position within the all-powerful French university system. Tarde's self-imposed isolation has doubtless contributed to the unfortunate fact that his many intellectual, political, and organizational interventions in the formative years of criminology tend nowadays to be relegated to the status of little more than a footnote in intellectual history….”

New Brunswick. Transaction. 2001. 606p. CONTAINS MARK-UP

Edited by Shampa Bissau and Zane Zalloua

From the Introduction: “Given the events of the last decade, the topic of torture, democ­racy, and the human body hardly needs any justification. Yet it is its apparent obviousness that makes the topic all the more urgent. What is torture? Who defines it? What are its immediate and long­term effects on the human body, on the social body, and the poliucal bond that ties these bodies together, that is, democracy. These quesuons resist easy answers. Torture, like any other contenuous concept, has its own twisted history. In this respect, we might do well to keep in mind Friedrich Nietzsche’s observation that “only that which has no history is definable.” The challenge at hand, however, is not simply to recognize that the interpretation of torture becomes an endless task and battle of interpretive wills, something that we never define once and for all. Rather, a genealogical perspective on the subject displaces the essentialist question “What is torture?" in order to ask instead “What meaning have we given to torture?” or “What is the function and purpose of torture today?” In other words, torture as such cannot be defined in isolation but refers back to systems of belief, social networks of power, and ideological worldviews thai invariably ascribe to torture a certain meaning. The nature of that meaning is precisely what is in question in contemporary debates on torture, and the authors in this volume approach that ques­tion from diverse angles.”

Seattle. University of Washington Press. 2011. 290p.

By Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John G. Rule, E. P. Thompson and Cal Winslow

From one point of view eighteenth-century England, with its settled aristocracy and gentry, its polite arts and culture, its urbane politics of interest and influence, appears as a stable, self-assured civilization. Historians have often described it as such. From another point of view it appears very differently. Year after year new capital offenses were enacted. In the heart of London great crowds asembled at hte regular publichang- ing days, and there were riots beneath the gallows at Tyburn for the possession of the bodies of the condemned. Highwaymen beset the roads of London. Large parties of armed smugglers invested parts of the coast. The estate papers of the great some- times reveal that they were more concerned about wholesale poaching on their lands than they were about rentals or crops.

This book explores these contrasts: a settled ruling class which could only rule through forms of judicial terror; a popu- lace deferential by day but deeply insubordinate by night; a class justice which defended property through the fair form of law. Instead of general description, the authors offer a number of detailed studies. An important introductory chapter discloses the way in which the law replaced religion at the center of the ideology of England's rulers, and analyzes the astonishing adaptability of the legal system to the same pressures of ni- fluence, interest, and property which dominated political life.

NY. Pantheon. 1975. 357p. CONTAINS MARK-UP

By Philip Bean

From the Preface: In 1976 I wrote Rehabilitation and Deviance as an intended polemic against the then prevailing view that rehabilitation was the only acceptable and humanitarian means of dealing with offenders. It brought forth from those who supported rehabilitation a considerable amount of hostility but no real debate. It was almost as if rehabilitation had become a belief system which was open to challenge only from the non-believers. However, in the last f o u ryears the subject matter has movedon a great deal, and it seems now as if the time is right to produce a less polemical and wider view of the issues involved in punishment. What follows therefore i san attempt to examine the major arguments relating to punishment, to show how those arguments relate to justice, and to show how a penal system would operate if any of those argumentsdominated. There is also a concluding chapter on the punishment of children - an area neglected by traditional forms of philosophical inquiry but now assuming increasing importance. The book is written mainly from a philosophical standpoint, for ti seemed to me that criminology must draw on its philosophical foundations fi ti is to continue its development. It also seemed as fi the argument about punishment was a moral one requiring constant justification.

London. Oxford. 1981. 222p. CONTAINS MARK-UP