Slavery and the Penal System

Slavery and the Penal System PDF

Author: J. Thorsten Sellin

Publisher: Quid Pro Books

Published: 2016-04-29

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 1610273397

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The classic and groundbreaking study of penal slavery throughout the ages is available again. Previously a rare book, despite the fact that it is widely quoted and cited by scholars in the field of sociology, penology, and criminology, this book can now be accessed easily worldwide and be assigned again to classes. Now in its fortieth anniversary edition, Sellin's classic Slavery and the Penal System adds a new Foreword by Barry Krisberg at Berkeley. This edition also incorporates changes the author originally planned for a second printing, provided to Quid Pro Books by the Library Special Collections at Penn and authorized by his family. Part of the Classics of Law & Society Series from Quid Pro Books, the anniversary edition also includes explanatory Notes of the Series Editor by Steven Alan Childress, senior professor of law at Tulane University. A book that has become a standard part of the canon in its field, but over time grew to be too expensive for researchers and libraries to obtain, is now easily downloaded in a well-formatted ebook. Other features include linked Contents and notes, fully linked and paginated Index, and close reading of the text against the original so that its legacy is properly and accurately presented. This book traces the direct and indirect influences of the social institution of chattel slavery on the evolution of penal systems and practices in Europe and the United States — a dismal story. The author reveals the darkest and most brutal aspects of penal history and the social forces that resisted or nullified the efforts of reformers who sought to bring about humanization of the punishment. The book shows that domestic punishments inflicted on slaves by masters later become legal punishments for crimes committed by low-class freedmen — eventually to become legal sanctions against offenders regardless of social status. A dominant force is the class and caste structure of society that is reflected in the determination of what conduct should be defined as criminal, who should be punished, and what the punishment should be. Topics include ancient Greece and Rome, the Middle Ages in Europe, galley slaves and naval arsenal prisons in maritime countries, penal creation of public works, the rise of houses of correction, invention of the treadmill, practices in England and Russia, slavery in the antebellum South, and twentieth-century U.S. chain gangs, penal farms, and convict-lease system.

Slavery and the Penal System

Slavery and the Penal System PDF

Author: J. Thorsten Sellin

Publisher:

Published: 2016-05-27

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 9781610273503

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The classic and groundbreaking study of penal slavery throughout the ages is finally available again. Previously a rare book, despite the fact that it is widely quoted and cited by scholars in the field of sociology, penology, and criminology, this book can now be accessed easily worldwide and be assigned again to classes. Now in its fortieth anniversary edition, Sellin's classic book adds a new Foreword by researcher Barry Krisberg at Berkeley, and incorporates changes the author originally planned for a second printing, provided to Quid Pro Books by the Special Collections Library at Penn and authorized by his family. Part of the Classics of Law & Society Series from Quid Pro Books, this edition also includes explanatory Notes of the Series Editor by Steven Alan Childress, senior professor of law at Tulane. The original's page numbers are inserted into the text, for continuity of referencing and convenience for classroom assignment. Slavery and the Penal System traces the direct and indirect influences of the social institution of chattel slavery on the evolution of penal systems and practices in Europe and the United States - a dismal story. The author reveals the darkest and most brutal aspects of penal history and the social forces that resisted or nullified the efforts of reformers who sought to bring about humanization of the punishment. The book shows that domestic punishments inflicted on slaves by masters later become legal punishments for crimes committed by low-class freedmen - eventually to become legal sanctions against offenders regardless of social status. A dominant force is the class and caste structure of society that is reflected in the determination of what conduct should be defined as criminal, who should be punished, and what the punishment should be. Topics include ancient Greece and Rome, the Middle Ages in Europe, galley slaves and naval arsenal prisons in maritime countries, penal creation of public works, the rise of houses of correction, invention of the treadmill, practices in England and Russia, slavery in the antebellum South, and later U.S. chain gangs, penal farms, and convict-lease system."

Slavery and the Penal System

Slavery and the Penal System PDF

Author: J. Thorsten Sellin

Publisher:

Published: 2016-05-19

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 9781610273367

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The classic and groundbreaking study of penal slavery throughout the ages is finally available again. Previously a rare book, despite the fact that it is widely quoted and cited by scholars in the field of sociology, penology, and criminology, this book can now be accessed easily worldwide and be assigned again to classes. Now in its fortieth anniversary edition, Sellin's classic book adds a new Foreword by researcher Barry Krisberg at Berkeley, and incorporates changes the author originally planned for a second printing, provided to Quid Pro Books by the Special Collections Library at Penn and authorized by his family. Part of the Classics of Law & Society Series from Quid Pro Books, this edition also includes explanatory Notes of the Series Editor by Steven Alan Childress, senior professor of law at Tulane. A book that has become a standard part of the canon in its field, but became too expensive for researchers and libraries to obtain, is now easily obtained in a modern presentation.

American Prison

American Prison PDF

Author: Shane Bauer

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2019-06-11

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 0735223602

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An enraging, necessary look at the private prison system, and a convincing clarion call for prison reform.” —NPR.org New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2018 * One of President Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2018 * Winner of the 2019 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize * Winner of the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism * Winner of the 2019 RFK Book and Journalism Award * A New York Times Notable Book A ground-breaking and brave inside reckoning with the nexus of prison and profit in America: in one Louisiana prison and over the course of our country's history. In 2014, Shane Bauer was hired for $9 an hour to work as an entry-level prison guard at a private prison in Winnfield, Louisiana. An award-winning investigative journalist, he used his real name; there was no meaningful background check. Four months later, his employment came to an abrupt end. But he had seen enough, and in short order he wrote an exposé about his experiences that won a National Magazine Award and became the most-read feature in the history of the magazine Mother Jones. Still, there was much more that he needed to say. In American Prison, Bauer weaves a much deeper reckoning with his experiences together with a thoroughly researched history of for-profit prisons in America from their origins in the decades before the Civil War. For, as he soon realized, we can't understand the cruelty of our current system and its place in the larger story of mass incarceration without understanding where it came from. Private prisons became entrenched in the South as part of a systemic effort to keep the African-American labor force in place in the aftermath of slavery, and the echoes of these shameful origins are with us still. The private prison system is deliberately unaccountable to public scrutiny. Private prisons are not incentivized to tend to the health of their inmates, or to feed them well, or to attract and retain a highly-trained prison staff. Though Bauer befriends some of his colleagues and sympathizes with their plight, the chronic dysfunction of their lives only adds to the prison's sense of chaos. To his horror, Bauer finds himself becoming crueler and more aggressive the longer he works in the prison, and he is far from alone. A blistering indictment of the private prison system, and the powerful forces that drive it, American Prison is a necessary human document about the true face of justice in America.

Prison and Slavery - A Surprising Comparison

Prison and Slavery - A Surprising Comparison PDF

Author: John Dewar Gleissner

Publisher: John Dewar Gleissner

Published: 2010-11-17

Total Pages: 458

ISBN-13: 1432753835

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This historically accurate and thoroughly researched book compares the modern American prison system to antebellum slavery. The surprising comparison proves that antebellum slavery was not as bad as many believe, while modern mass incarceration is an unrealized social and financial disaster of mammoth proportions.

Slavery by Another Name

Slavery by Another Name PDF

Author: Douglas A. Blackmon

Publisher: Icon Books

Published: 2012-10-04

Total Pages: 429

ISBN-13: 1848314132

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A Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the mistreatment of black Americans. In this 'precise and eloquent work' - as described in its Pulitzer Prize citation - Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history - an 'Age of Neoslavery' that thrived in the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II. Using a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, Blackmon unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude thereafter. By turns moving, sobering and shocking, this unprecedented account reveals these stories, the companies that profited the most from neoslavery, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today.

We Are Not Slaves

We Are Not Slaves PDF

Author: Robert T. Chase

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2019-11-21

Total Pages: 543

ISBN-13: 1469653583

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Hank Lacayo Best Labor Themed Book, International Latino Book Awards Best Book Award, Division of Critical Criminology and Social Justice, American Society of Criminology In the early twentieth century, the brutality of southern prisons became a national scandal. Prisoners toiled in grueling, violent conditions while housed in crude dormitories on what were effectively slave plantations. This system persisted until the 1940s when, led by Texas, southern states adopted northern prison design reforms. Texas presented the reforms to the public as modern, efficient, and disciplined. Inside prisons, however, the transition to penitentiary cells only made the endemic violence more secretive, intensifying the labor division that privileged some prisoners with the power to accelerate state-orchestrated brutality and the internal sex trade. Reformers' efforts had only made things worse--now it was up to the prisoners to fight for change. Drawing from three decades of legal documents compiled by prisoners, Robert T. Chase narrates the struggle to change prison from within. Prisoners forged an alliance with the NAACP to contest the constitutionality of Texas prisons. Behind bars, a prisoner coalition of Chicano Movement and Black Power organizations publicized their deplorable conditions as "slaves of the state" and initiated a prison-made civil rights revolution and labor protest movement. These insurgents won epochal legal victories that declared conditions in many southern prisons to be cruel and unusual--but their movement was overwhelmed by the increasing militarization of the prison system and empowerment of white supremacist gangs that, together, declared war on prison organizers. Told from the vantage point of the prisoners themselves, this book weaves together untold but devastatingly important truths from the histories of labor, civil rights, and politics in the United States as it narrates the transition from prison plantations of the past to the mass incarceration of today.

Criminal Injustice

Criminal Injustice PDF

Author: Glenn McNair

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2009-04-20

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 0813929830

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Criminal Injustice: Slaves and Free Blacks in Georgia’s Criminal Justice System is the most comprehensive study of the criminal justice system of a slave state to date. McNair traces the evolution of Georgia’s legal culture by examining its use of slave codes and slave patrols, as well as presenting data on crimes prosecuted, trial procedures and practices, conviction rates, the appellate process, and punishment. Based on more than four hundred capital cases, McNair’s study deploys both narrative and quantitative analysis to get at both the theory and the reality of the criminal procedure for slaves in the century leading up to the Civil War. He shows how whites moved from the utopian innocence of the colony’s original Trustees, who envisioned a society free of slavery and the depravity it inculcated in masters, to one where slaveholders became the enforcers of laws and informal rules, the severity of which was limited only by the increasing economic value of their slaves as property. The slaves themselves, regarded under the law both as moveable property and--for the purposes of punishment--as moral agents, had, inevitably, a radically different view of Georgia’s slave criminal justice system. Although the rules and procedures were largely the same for both races, the state charged and convicted blacks more frequently and punished them more severely than whites for the same crimes. Courts were also more punitive in their judgment and punishment of black defendants when their victims were white, a pattern of disparate treatment based on race that persists to this day. Informal systems of control in urban households and on rural plantations and farms complemented the formal system and enhanced the power of slaveowners. Criminal Injustice shows how the prerogatives of slavery and white racial domination trumped any hope for legal justice for blacks.

Are Prisons Obsolete?

Are Prisons Obsolete? PDF

Author: Angela Y. Davis

Publisher: Seven Stories Press

Published: 2011-01-04

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 1609801040

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With her characteristic brilliance, grace and radical audacity, Angela Y. Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of the prison. As she quite correctly notes, American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. For generations of Americans, the abolition of slavery was sheerest illusion. Similarly,the entrenched system of racial segregation seemed to last forever, and generations lived in the midst of the practice, with few predicting its passage from custom. The brutal, exploitative (dare one say lucrative?) convict-lease system that succeeded formal slavery reaped millions to southern jurisdictions (and untold miseries for tens of thousands of men, and women). Few predicted its passing from the American penal landscape. Davis expertly argues how social movements transformed these social, political and cultural institutions, and made such practices untenable. In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Professor Davis seeks to illustrate that the time for the prison is approaching an end. She argues forthrightly for "decarceration", and argues for the transformation of the society as a whole.

Incarceration Nations

Incarceration Nations PDF

Author: Baz Dreisinger

Publisher: Other Press, LLC

Published: 2016-02-09

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 159051727X

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Baz Dreisinger travels behind bars in nine countries to rethink the state of justice in a global context Beginning in Africa and ending in Europe, Incarceration Nations is a first-person odyssey through the prison systems of the world. Professor, journalist, and founder of the Prison-to-College-Pipeline, Dreisinger looks into the human stories of incarcerated men and women and those who imprison them, creating a jarring, poignant view of a world to which most are denied access, and a rethinking of one of America’s most far-reaching global exports: the modern prison complex. From serving as a restorative justice facilitator in a notorious South African prison and working with genocide survivors in Rwanda, to launching a creative writing class in an overcrowded Ugandan prison and coordinating a drama workshop for women prisoners in Thailand, Dreisinger examines the world behind bars with equal parts empathy and intellect. She journeys to Jamaica to visit a prison music program, to Singapore to learn about approaches to prisoner reentry, to Australia to grapple with the bottom line of private prisons, to a federal supermax in Brazil to confront the horrors of solitary confinement, and finally to the so-called model prisons of Norway. Incarceration Nations concludes with climactic lessons about the past, present, and future of justice.