Penology category: 518 books
A World Apart
Imprisonment in a Soviet Labor Camp During World War II
Language: English
Release Date: June 1, 1996
In 1940, Gustav Herling was arrested after he joined an underground Polish army that fell into Russian hands. He was sent to a northern Russian labour camp, where he spent the two most horrible years of his life. In this book, he tells of the people he was imprisoned with, the hardships they endured,...
Inside Rikers
Stories from the World's Largest Penal Colony
Language: English
Release Date: July 24, 2002
Rikers Island--just six miles from the Empire State Building--is one of the largest, most complex and most expensive penal institutions in the world, yet most New Yorkers couldn't find it on a map.
Jennifer Wynn, the director of the Fresh Start program at Rikers, takes readers into the jails...
The Prisoner
How One Woman's Jail Term Was The Making Of Her
Language: English
Release Date: April 2, 2018
Kerry Tucker seemed to be a typical suburban mother of two, but she was harbouring a terrible secret: over the years she had stolen $2 million from her employers.
When her crime was discovered she was sentenced to seven years at a maximum-security prison, alongside some of Victoria's most notorious...
by Robert E. Burns
Language: English
Release Date: August 15, 2011
Language: English
Release Date: August 15, 2011
I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang! is the amazing true story of one man's search for meaning, fall from grace, and eventual victory over injustice.
In 1921, Robert E. Burns was a shell-shocked and penniless veteran who found himself at the mercy of Georgia's barbaric penal system when...
God of the Rodeo
The Quest for Redemption in Louisiana's Angola Prison
Language: English
Release Date: February 9, 2011
Never before had Daniel Bergner seen a spectacle as bizarre as the one he had come to watch that Sunday in October. Murderers, rapists, and armed robbers were competing in the annual rodeo at Angola, the grim maximum-security penitentiary in Louisiana. The convicts, sentenced to life without parole,...
by Laura Thompson
Language: English
Release Date: November 6, 2018
Language: English
Release Date: November 6, 2018
A riveting account of the notorious “Ilford murder” by the New York Times bestselling author of The Six
The death penalty is never without its ethical conflicts or moral questions. Never more so than when the person being led to the gallows may very well be innocent of the actual crime,...
In the Place of Justice
A Story of Punishment and Deliverance
Language: English
Release Date: April 27, 2010
Wilbert Rideau, an award-winning journalist who spent forty-four years in prison, delivers a remarkable memoir of crime, punishment, and ultimate triumph.
After killing a bank teller in a moment of panic during a botched robbery, Wilbert Rideau was sentenced to death at the age of nineteen. He...
A HANDBOOK ON HANGING
Being a short introduction to the fine art of Execution ...
Language: English
Release Date: May 7, 2014
Charles Duff’s 1928 study of state sanctioned-killing, botched executions and the relative merits and demerits of decapitation. ‘A Handbook on Hanging’ is an anti-capital punishment polemic in the honourably ironic tradition of Jonathan Swift and Stephen Leacock. Duff updated his ‘Handbook’...
The Colonial Problem
An Indigenous Perspective on Crime and Injustice in Canada
Language: English
Release Date: March 8, 2016
Indigenous peoples are vastly overrepresented in the Canadian criminal justice system. The Canadian government has framed this disproportionate victimization and criminalization as being an "Indian problem."
In The Colonial Problem, Lisa Monchalin challenges the myth of the "Indian...
by Sydney Stevens
Language: English
Release Date: June 13, 2016
Language: English
Release Date: June 13, 2016
Hangings, lynchings and jail breaks are long forgotten in Pacific County, where tourists flock to quaint attractions every season. But back in the early days, when the first jailhouse was built, this was a rough, rustic setting. Popular cannery worker Lum You was hanged here in 1902--the only legal...
by Robert Frederick Opie
Language: English
Release Date: March 27, 1997
Language: English
Release Date: March 27, 1997
The guillotine is undoubtedly the most potent image of revolutionary France, the tool whereby a whole society was 'redesigned'. Yet, what came to be seen as an instrument of terror was, paradoxically, introduced as the result of the humanitarian feelings of men intent on revising an ancient and barbaric...
Death and Redemption
The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society
Language: English
Release Date: April 4, 2011
Death and Redemption offers a fundamental reinterpretation of the role of the Gulag--the Soviet Union's vast system of forced-labor camps, internal exile, and prisons--in Soviet society. Soviet authorities undoubtedly had the means to exterminate all the prisoners who passed through the Gulag, but...
Miracle at Sing Sing
How One Man Transformed the Lives of America's Most Dangerous Prisoners
Language: English
Release Date: May 15, 2005
In 1919, Lewis E. Lawes moved his wife and young daughters into the warden's mansion at Sing Sing prison. They shared a yard with 1,096 of the toughest inmates in the world-murderers, rapists, and thieves who Lawes alone believed capable of redemption. Adamantly opposed to the death penalty, Lawes...
Slouching Toward Tyranny
Mass Incarceration, Death Sentences and Racism
Language: English
Release Date: January 5, 2015
As a pastor to Death Row inmates across the South and as a powerful advocate appealing to prison wardens, lawyers, judges, and legislators, Joseph Ingle has come to some shocking conclusions about the United States, champion of human rights throughout the world. He began to recognize another aspect to...