By Lane Nelson and Burk Foster

From the cover: Death Watch Is a topical, up-to-date collection of death penalty journalism and personal essays. Drawing on the experiences and perspectives of Lane Nelson, a former death row inmate and current staff writer for "The Angolite," Louisiana's award winning prison news magazine, and Burk Foster, a University of Louisiana-Lafayette criminal justice professor and jail and prison expert witness, Death Watch looks at the death penalty as a legal process, a social reality, and a fundamental issue of public policy. The topics covered in this volume include: ♦  how capital cases are different in the legal process ♦  how death penalty offenders are selected ♦  the selective application of the death penalty to women and juveniles ♦  problems in providing competent counsel to death penalty defendants ♦  medical issues related to organ donation and physician participation in executions ♦  the execution of blacks for rape in the South ♦  how the death penalty was imposed and carried out in the past ♦  reflections on death row life by inmates under death sentence ♦  the last words of men and women before execution ♦  the dilemma of defending the innocent on death row ♦  feature articles on two Louisiana inmates, Antonio James and John A. Brown, Jr., executed in 1996 and 1997. ♦  the ethics of the death penalty today.

Upper Saddle River New Jersey. Prentice Hall. 2001. 307p.

By Ernest van den Haag and John P. Conrad.

From the cover: Never before has there been such a vigorous point- by-point debate in a book on so explosive a topic as the death penalty. Here Ernest van den Haag—a re­nowned conservative—and John P. Conrad—a re­spected liberal—debate with wisdom, sharpness, and vigor yet, in Arthur Goldberg's words, “with scholar­ship, civility, and passion” all questions pertaining to capital punishment. The debaters are well known for their meticulous scholarship and for their distinct compelling styles. Ernest van den Haag is the author of such works as The Jewish Mystique and Punishing Criminals. John P. Conrad's books include Justice and Consequences and In Fear of Each Other. Their debate will provoke the reader with hard-hitting and original arguments for and against the death penalty. Aside from the timeliness of the topic, this book will be appreciated for the sheer excitement of witnessing the ingenious interplay between two brilliant minds.

NY. Plenum. 1983. 302p.

Edited by Arthur L. Stinchcombe, Rebecca Adams, Carol A. Heimer, Kim Lane Scheppele, and Tom W. Smith
D. Garth Taylor.

From the cover: In the past thirty-five years, Americans have become more fearful of crime and more punitive toward criminals—at least in the sense of being more favorable toward capital punishment and other harsh penal­ties. But at the same time they have become more tolerant regarding a whole series of social and civil liberties issues generally associated with a more humane attitude toward criminals. This new book analyzes survey data collected over the years, especi­ally from the Gallup polls and the National Opinion Research Center’s General Social Surveys, in order to explore various aspects of these contradictory developments. The authors consider the hypothesis that rising crime rates cause increased fear of crime and that this in turn causes people to become more punitive. They find that exposure to high crime rates does cause in­creased fear but that fearful people are only slightly more punitive than other people. Furthermore, white people who live in high crime areas are no more punitive than peo­ple living in safer areas, and black people (who tend to live in high crime areas) are less punitive than people living in safer areas. To determine why the liberalization of public opinion on issues of race and civil liberties has not led to more tolerant atti­tudes on questions of crime and punish­ment, the authors examine in detail the relationship between general liberalism in regard to racial or civil liberties and more humane attitudes toward criminals. They also consider why increased fear of crime has not led to increased support for gun registration. This study breaks new ground by using recent innovations in the techniques of sur­vey analysis to study trends in public opin­ion and to analyze the causes of those trends. It thus represents a contribution to the lit­erature on subjective social indicators as well as a model for further explorations of the reasons for change in public opinion over time.

San Francisco, Josses-Bass Inc. Publishers. 1980. 168p.

Edited by Rudolph J. Gerber and Patrick D. McAnany, editors. Foreword by Norval Morris

From the cover: Contemporary Punishment provides a comprehensive and thoughtful overview of the criminal justice system. The authors present the various arguments for the justification of punishment and in the concluding section attempt to reconcile the discrepancies among the competing views. When the question is asked why society punishes criminals, the answer touches the foundations of our political, social and moral life. We have spent centuries dis­cussing how the coercive power of society will be applied to those who break the rules. As Max Weber has said; "It is a fact that most 'fundamental' questions are often left unregulated by law even in legal orders which are otherwise thor­oughly rationalized." This implies that each generation must wrestle with the problem and fashion an answer which satisfies its sense of justice.

London. University of Notre Dame Press. 1972. 263p.

By David J. Rothman

From the cover: This book makes a unique and significant Contribution to American social history and so­cial policy. It explores, as no other work has done, the origins and consequences of the pro­grams that have dominated criminal justice, juvenile justice, and mental health in the twen­tieth century. David Rothman combines his skills as a historian with his knowledge of con­temporary social problems to interpret the practices of probation, parole, and indetermi- late sentences; the juvenile courts; the outpa­tient clinics; and the contemporary design of the penitentiary, the reformatory, and the men­tal hospital. Conscience and Convenience is a worthy suc- jessor to David Rothman’s prizewinning and uglily influential book. The Discovery of the \syhnn. Just as that volume analyzed the ori­gins of institutions for* the deviant and the de­pendent, so this study casts new light on the modern effort to reform the asylum and devise ilternatives for it. And once again, his appraisal urthers our understanding of the fundamental character of social order and disorder in the Jnited States.

The title points to the dynamic that is at the core of the book. Progressive-Era men and ,vomen of good conscience introduced the mea­sures mentioned above with the intention of iroviding individualized cure and treatment or the deviants and thereby solving the prob- ems of crime and mental illness. But to appre­ciate the fate of these reforms, one must reckon .vith convenience. Administrators, from war- lens to judges to mental hospital superin- endents, turned these procedures to their pwn advantage. The result was a hybrid pro­gram whose flaws we are only beginning to Imderstand.

Boston. Little, Brown and Co. 1980. 459p.

By Jan Gorecki

From the Preface: Capital punishment is today among the most controversial prob­lems in America. On the one hand, the heat of the controversy exceeds the weight of the problem; as is pointed out in this book, it is not the presence or absence of capital punishment but other legal reforms that are essential for effective functioning of the criminal justice system in this country. On the other hand, how­ever, whether we send criminals to the gallows presents a moral dilemma of utmost importance. Owing to the heat of the controversy, recommendations abound both for and against retaining the death penalty. This book does not explicitly support either of these stands; the pur­pose here is to understand rather than to recommend. More specifically, the purpose is to analyze and explain what has oc­curred to the death penalty in the United States and to anticipate cautiously what may occur in the future. This does not, how­ever, mean that the book is void of practical implications. If a reader accepts the analysis and explanation to be offered, he may, and probably will, be aided in accepting a stand on what the legal system should do—abolish the death penalty or retain it.

The book starts with a brief analysis of the law of capital pun­ishment. It is a vacillating and confused law, recently shifting from near-abolition to retention. Its development is influenced by a clash of two conflicting forces—the general tendency of social evolution toward milder criminal sanctions and the in­creasingly punitive attitudes in America today. These two forces are scrutinized and accounted for in the second and third parts of the book. The scrutiny not only explains the development of the law but also throws some light on the future of the death penalty in America.

NY. Columbia University Press. 1983. 163p.

By B. F. Skinner

In this profound and profoundly challenging book, the great behaviorist B. F. Skinner, re­garded by many as the most influential and con­troversial living psychologist, author also of the celebrated utopian novel Walden Two, makes his definitive statement about man and society. Insisting that the frightening problems we face in the world today can be solved only by dealing much more effectively with human be­havior, Skinner argues that our traditional con­cepts of freedom and dignity must be sharply revised. They have played an important histori­cal role in man’s struggle against many kinds of tyranny, he acknowledges, but they are now re­sponsible for the futile defense of a free and worthy autonomous man; they are perpetuating our use of punishment and are blocking the de­velopment of more effective cultural practices. Basing his arguments on the massive results of the experimental analysis of behavior in which he pioneered, he rejects traditional explanations of behavior in terms of states of mind, feelings, and other mental attributes in favor of expla­nations to be sought in an individual’s genetic endowment and personal history. He tells why, instead of promoting freedom and dignity as personal attributes, we should direct our atten­tion to the physical and social environments in which people live. It is the environment that must be changed rather than man himself if the traditional goals of the struggle for freedom and dignity are to be reached.

Alfred Knopf. 1971, 293p.

By Erving Goffman

“Asylums is an analysis of life in “total institutions”—closed worlds like prisons, army training camps, naval vessels, boarding schools, monasteries, and old folks’ homes—where the inmates are regimented, surrounded by other inmates, and unable to leave the premises. It describes what these institutions make of the inmate, and what he can make of life inside them. Special attention is focused on mental hos­pitals, drawing on the author’s year of field work in a large American institution. It is the thesis of this book that the most important facto." in forming a mental-hospital patient is his institution, not his illness, and that his reactions and adjustments are those of inmates in other types of total insti­tutions as well.”

NY. Anchor Books. 1961. 382p.

Edited by Kenneth E. Kerle, American Jail Association

“People familiar with the American jail scene realize that jails rank at the bottom of the criminal justice hierarchy in influence. Courts, prosecuting attorneys, police, and even probation and parole offi­cials exert more political clout than jail administrators. Jail popu­lation figures have nearly doubled in a decade, and now more than 300,000 ADP (average daily population) are found in the 3,338 jails in the 3,000 plus counties and cities that operate these institutions of incarceration. During 1987, there were more than 17 million ad­missions and releases from county and city jails. These local gov­ernment agencies serve as the dumping grounds for the arrested criminal, the chronic drunk, the DWI (driving while intoxicated), the mentally ill, the homeless, and juveniles ranging from the run­away to the amoral killer.”

Nelson-Hall. 1991. 299p.

By Sarah Armstrong, Linda Allan, Deborah Cairns, Stuart Allan and Betsy Barkas  

This briefing addresses dying in prison in Scotland, including information about the numbers and circumstances of deaths. Even when presenting statistical data, we never forget that these numbers represent individual people who were part of families and communities, and that their loss is deeply felt. Our motivations for doing this work are to raise awareness of deaths in custody and to provide rigorous evidence about this issue. Ultimately, we aim to prevent deaths and reduce the number of families and friends who are exposed to the often traumatising experience of a fatal accident inquiry on top of their bereavement.   

Glasgow: Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, 2022. 26p.

By Joanna Weill, Amanda Cissner, and Sruthi Naraharisetti

The United States incarcerates more people than any other country in the world, with a rate of 537 of every 100,000 U.S. residents behind bars by the beginning of 2021.  Nearly one-third of those incarcerated are held in local jails, most during the pretrial period, before they have been convicted of any crime. In 2019, local jails across the U.S. held an average of 734,500 individuals each day.  The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 intensified calls to reduce jail populations, since the frequent turnover and commonly cramped communal living conditions proved ideal for spreading the virus. Accordingly, the spring of 2020 saw a dramatically declining jail population for the first time in a decade—the result of both fewer new admissions and expedited release for those already detained.  Still, more than half a million individuals were held in local jails by mid-2020,  and evidence suggests that the early COVID-generated reductions have not been sustained. By the latter half of 2020, jail populations had crept back up, nearing pre-pandemic levels.  Racial and ethnic disparities in jail populations are well-established. While Black individuals comprised 13% of the total U.S. population in 2019, they accounted for a third of those in jail (34%). Racial disparities permeate every step of the criminal justice process: Black individuals are more likely than White individuals to be arrested and detained awaiting trial;  those who are held pretrial are then more likely to be convicted.  Once convicted, Black individuals receive longer jail and prison sentences than White individuals. Declining jail incarceration…..

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  early into the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated existing racial disparities; incarceration rates among Black individuals declined 22% from 2019 through mid-2020, while those for Whites declined 28%; rates for Latinx and Asian individuals decreased 23% and 21% respectively.  This trend underlines the reality that without strategies deliberately tailored to address racial disparities, general efforts to reduce jail populations will not necessarily lead to greater racial and ethnic equity.  

New York: Center for Court Innovation, 2022. 34p.

By Helen Fair and Roy Walmsley

This fifth edition of ICPR’s World Female Imprisonment List shows the number of women and girls held in penal institutions in 221 prison systems in independent countries and dependent territories. The figures include both pre-trial detainees/remand prisoners and those who have been convicted and sentenced. The List also shows the percentage of women and girls within each national prison population and the number of imprisoned women and girls per 100,000 of the national population (the female prison population rate). The information is the latest available at the beginning of August 2022. In addition, this edition includes information about trends in female prison population levels since about 2000

London: Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research (ICPR), 2022. 14p.

By Justice Policy Institute and Prison Policy Initiative

One of the most important criminal legal system disparities has long been difficult to decipher: Which communities throughout the state do incarcerated people come from? Anyone who lives in or works within heavily policed and incarcerated communities intuitively knows that certain neighborhoods disproportionately experience incarceration. But data have rarely been available to quantify how many people from each community are imprisoned with any real precision. But now, thanks to a redistricting reform that ensures incarcerated people are counted correctly in the legislative districts they come from, we can understand the geography of incarceration in Maryland with up-to-date data. Maryland is one of over a dozen states that have ended prison gerrymandering, and now count incarcerated people where they legally reside — at their home address — rather than in remote prison cells for redistricting purposes. This type of reform, as we often discuss, is crucial for ending the siphoning of political power from disproportionately Black and Latino communities to pad out the mostly rural, predominantly white regions where prisons are located. And when reforms like Maryland’s are implemented, they bring along a convenient side effect: In order to correctly represent each community’s population counts, states must collect detailed state-wide data on where imprisoned people call home, which is otherwise impossible to access. Using this redistricting data, we found that in Maryland, incarcerated people come from all over the state, but are disproportionately from Baltimore…..

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  City. Looking at local data, we also find that some areas of the state — like the southern Eastern Shore and Hagerstown — are also disproportionately affected by incarceration. While Maryland incarcerates a smaller share of its residents than all but 13 U.S. states, examining these data by county, city, and even neighborhood reveals surprising and troubling patterns of high incarceration in both specific communities within Baltimore and also the smaller and historically under-resourced Eastern Shore communities. In addition to helping policy makers and advocates effectively bring reentry and diversion resources to these communities, this data has far-reaching implications. Around the country, high imprisonment rates are correlated with other community problems related to poverty, employment, education, and health. Researchers, scholars, advocates, and politicians can use the data in this report to advocate for bringing more resources to their communities.

Washington, DC: Justice Polilcy Institute, Northampton, MA: Prison Policy Initiative, 2022. 13p.

By Kelly Marie King

Extensive research exists documenting national trends in incarceration and the myriad “collateral consequences” individuals face upon returning home from prison or jail. Few studies to date, however, have examined men’s social conditions and lived experiences during periods of confinement, presenting a timely opportunity for qualitative inquiry. Such insight is of particular importance for Black men residing in urban neighborhoods, given the disproportionate burden of incarceration shared by this group. To better understand how incarceration affects men’s social networks and mental health, this dissertation analyzed secondary data from N=22 in-depth, qualitative interviews with N=20 formerly incarcerated Black men in Baltimore, Maryland (MD). Semi-structured interviews, conducted by a Black, female, doctoral student, took place at an academic, community-based research center between October 2014 and June 2015. Inductive analysis was used to uncover salient themes relevant to recently released men’s lives. Chapter 3 explores potential pathways underlying observed associations between incarceration and social network turnover. Losing loved ones to death or incarceration, perceived lack of support, desire to “do different," and social isolation all emerged as possible mechanisms through which imprisonment alters men’s relationships with friends and family. Results highlight the need for additional opportunities for men to foster prosocial connections. Chapter 4 investigates informal social network structures within correctional environments. Men

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  described four social subgroups within the correctional context: preexisting ties, gang membership, “staying to yourself,” and homosexuality. Findings may be used to shape existing correctional policies to support the development of meaningful, nonviolent connections, across subgroups. Chapter 5 assesses the impact of the correctional environment on men’s mental health during and following periods of confinement. High levels of institutional control and exposure to violence emerged as drivers of poor mental health, including hypervigilance, emotional withdrawal, distrust, institutionalization, and suicide. Results help clarify existing relationships between incarceration, depression, anxiety, and PTSD, and underscore the need for appropriate screening and treatment modalities, within and outside of correctional facilities. Finally, Chapter 6 describes the theoretical, programmatic, and policy implications relevant to this dissertation, offers an overview of the strengths and limitations associated with the chosen research design, and provides suggestions for future research.

Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, 2018. 184p.

By Joanna Weill

New York City jails held an average of 5,468 individuals a day in 2021, 1 far below the peak incarceration of over 20,000 in the early 90s, 2 but above the City’s stated aim of 3,300.3 In working towards this goal, New York City expanded its Supervised Release Program (SRP). Through SRP, individuals awaiting trial are released under community supervision to ensure their return to court, rather than having bail set and/or being detained in jail. The program includes phone and in-person check-ins and connections to voluntary services. More recent iterations of the program have allowed judges to set mandatory programming as a condition of release for participants in SRP. This brief looks at the impact of one SRP expansion implemented in June 2019.  

New York: Center for Court Innovation, 2022. 15p.

By Michigan Joint Task Force on Jail and Pretrial Incarceration

Michigan’s jail population has tripled from 1975 to 2016. To learn what led to this dramatic increase and identify alternatives, state and county leaders launched the Michigan Joint Task Force on Jail and Pretrial Incarceration in the spring of 2019. The Task Force examined 10 years of arrest data gathered from more than 600 law enforcement agencies across the state, 10 years of court data collected from nearly 200 district and circuit courts, and three years of individual-level admission data from a diverse sample of 20 county jails. This report includes key findings and 18 recommendations for state lawmakers to help reduce jail admissions.

Ann Arbor: State of Michigan, 2021. 47p.

By The American Civil Liberties Union and The University of Chicago Law School, Global Human Rights Clinic

Our nation incarcerates over 1.2 million people in state and federal prisons, and two out of three of these incarcerated people are also workers. In most instances, the jobs these people in prison have look similar to those of millions of people working on the outside: They work as cooks, dishwashers, janitors, groundskeepers, barbers, painters, or plumbers; in laundries, kitchens, factories, and hospitals. They provide vital public services such as repairing roads, fighting wildfires, or clearing debris after hurricanes. They washed hospital laundry and worked in mortuary services at the height of the pandemic. They manufacture products like office furniture, mattresses, license plates, dentures, glasses, traffic signs, athletic equipment, and uniforms. They cultivate and harvest crops, work as welders and carpenters, and work in meat and poultry processing plants. But there are two crucial differences: Incarcerated workers are under the complete control of their employers, and they have been stripped of even the most minimal protections against labor exploitation and abuse.  From the moment they enter the prison gates, they lose the right to refuse to work. This is because the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which generally protects against slavery and involuntary servitude, explicitly excludes from its reach those held in confinement due to a criminal conviction. More than 76 percent of incarcerated workers report that they are required to work or face additional punishment such as solitary confinement, denial of opportunities to reduce their sentence…..

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  and loss of family visitation, or the inability to pay for basic life necessities like bath soap. They have no right to choose what type of work they do and are subject to arbitrary, discriminatory, and punitive decisions.

The American Civil Liberties Union and The University of Chicago Law School, Global Human Rights Clinic, 2022. 149p.

By Catherine Heard

When COVID-19 was declared a pandemic on 11 March 2020 the need for rapid action in prisons to avert a public health disaster was clear. There were warnings of the risks to prisoners, prison staff and others coming into contact with them, if outbreaks occurred in prisons. The pandemic emerged at a time when most countries’ prison systems were running above their official capacity, after decades of rising prisoner numbers in much of the world. Risks were especially high in countries with overcrowded prisons because of cramped accommodation, low staffing levels, and poor sanitation and healthcare standards. In this report we present evidence of how life in custody changed as a result of the global health emergency, drawn from over 80 interviews with prisoners, ex-prisoners and their loved ones, which we and our research partners conducted before and during the pandemic.   

London: Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research, 2021. 27p.

By Anna Harvey, Orion Taylor and Andrea Wang

This report, updating the September 2020 Impact Report on COVID-19, Jails, and Public Safety, draws on a sample of approximately 19 million daily individual-level jail records collected by New York University's Public Safety Lab between Jan. 1, 2020 and Oct. 22, 2020. We explore how bookings, releases, and rebooking rates changed during the pandemic, relative to the pre-pandemic period. + Jail populations in the sample decreased by an average of 31% over the six weeks following the March 16 issuance of the White House "Coronavirus Guidelines for America," which expired on April 30. Jail populations then increased and have since recovered half of these decreases, despite explosive COVID-19 case growth in many of the counties in the sample. Counties with higher countywide COVID-19 case growth between March 1 and Oct. 22 have not seen larger reductions in jail populations. The decreases in jail populations after the issuance of the White House Guidelines on March 16, and the lack of responsiveness of jail populations to local COVID prevalence after those guidelines expired, suggest the importance of clear policy directives for reducing disease transmission risk within county jails. + Jail bookings dropped sharply in mid-March and remain on average 36% below pre-pandemic levels. As bookings declined, the characteristics of those booked into jails shifted. Those booked into jails between mid-March and late October were booked on more charges on average, were more likely to be booked on felony charges, and were less likely to be booked on lesser charges like…..

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  failure to appear, than those booked into jails prior to this period. + Although jail bookings dropped after mid-March, those booked into jails were detained for longer periods of time. Average detention duration increased sharply after mid-March, doubling from about 15 to 30 days, and remains nearly twice as high as the pre-pandemic average detention duration. This increase has offset reductions in admissions, and contributed to rebounding jail populations observed since mid-March. + Parallel to trends in daily bookings, daily releases dropped sharply in mid-March and remain approximately 40% below baseline levels. Those released from jails between mid-March and late October had been booked on more charges on average, were more likely to have been booked on felony charges, and were less likely to have been booked on lesser charges such as failure to appear, than those released from jails prior to mid-March.  The rate at which those released from detention are rebooked into jail following release is one possible measure of the public safety risk of jail releases. To date, 30-, 60-, 90-, and 180-day rebooking rates among those released during the pandemic have remained 13% - 33% below pre-pandemic rebooking rates. To the extent that rebooking rates measure the average public safety risk of releasing individuals from jail, this risk remains lower now than prior to the pandemic. + While the proportion of Black individuals among daily jail admissions did not change appreciably during the pandemic, the proportion of Black people among those released from jails during the pandemic decreased by approximately 5% relative to the pre-pandemic period. As a result, the proportion of jail populations composed of Black individuals rose during the pandemic.   

Washington, D.C.: Council on Criminal Justice, December 2020. 27p.

BySchnepel, Kevin T., Joanna Abaroa-Ellison, et al.

Across the country, the coronavirus pandemic has had taken a heavy toll on incarcerated populations. High infection and mortality rates stem largely from the crowded conditions and shifting populations within prisons, along with the challenges of implementing effective mitigation strategies, such as physical distancing. This report explores the potential relationship between COVID-19 testing rates and COVID-19 infection and mortality outcomes across the 32 state prison systems where information necessary to conduct such an analysis was publicly available. The report also describes how four states (Colorado, Connecticut, Michigan, and Vermont) conducted mass testing, and details outcomes for their incarcerated populations. Approximately half of the departments in the U.S. attempted to test all individuals in their prisons through some form of mass, or universal, testing program. This report draws on data available as of February 16, 2021.

Washington, DC: Council on Criminal Justice, 2021. 21p.