In this compelling book, Lawrence M. Friedman looks at situations where killing is condemned by law but not by social norms and, therefore, is rarely punished. He shows how penal codes categorize homicides by degree of intent, which are in turn based on society's sense of moral outrage. Despite being officially defined as murder, many homicides have historically gone unpunished. Friedman looks at early vigilante justice, crimes of passion, murder of necessity, mercy killings, and assisted suicides. In his explorations of these unpunished homicides, Friedman probes what these circumstances tell us about conflicts in social and cultural norms, and the interaction of law and society.

A revelatory account of the misdemeanor machine that unjustly brands millions of Americans as criminals. Punishment Without Crime offers an urgent new interpretation of inequality and injustice in America by examining the paradigmatic American offense: the lowly misdemeanor. Based on extensive original research, legal scholar Alexandra Natapoff reveals the inner workings of a massive petty offense system that produces over 13 million cases each year. People arrested for minor crimes are swept through courts where defendants often lack lawyers, judges process cases in mere minutes, and nearly everyone pleads guilty. This misdemeanor machine starts punishing people long before they are convicted; it punishes the innocent; and it punishes conduct that never should have been a crime. As a result, vast numbers of Americans -- most of them poor and people of color -- are stigmatized as criminals, impoverished through fines and fees, and stripped of drivers' licenses, jobs, and housing. For too long, misdemeanors have been ignored. But they are crucial to understanding our punitive criminal system and our widening economic and racial divides. A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2018

Translation of: Chernobyl 20 let spust'ia.

The Rackets Committee of the United States Senate, of which Senator John L. McClellan was chairman, was engaged for more than five years in a bitter battle against criminals at all levels of our society, whether in labor unions or in great corporations, whether sleek, polished leaders of national crime syndicates or furtive, fly-by-night tinhorns who help their bosses extort upwards of fifty billion dollars annually from united States citizens. In this report of the committee’s activities, Senator McClellan tells how some of the greatest labor unions in the nation were corrupted by conscienceless men, how racketeers prey upon honest businessmen, how criminal influences have become so widespread that they threaten the very future of our nation. In Crime Without Punishment, Senator McClellan takes his readers behind the scenes of the nationally televised hearings and shows how they were developed by a dedicated staff of top-notch investigators, formerly headed by the committee’s chief counsel, Robert F. Kennedy, who became Attorney General of the United States. The reader sees the full picture of James Hoffa and Dave Beck, of the mammoth Teamsters Union, of the invasion of racketeers into many other unions, of the operations of the nation’s top-level gangsters in the fields of labor and management. This report of the committee’s activities and findings does more, however, than tell a fascinating story: it sounds a warning to every citizen of the nation. It reveals in stark terms the national apathy which permits criminals to travel their evil pathways without stop or hindrance. It raises a question that must be answered: are the punishments, the penalties, to be exacted from the men who committed the crime—or must they be visited upon the entire nation? Crime Without Punishment is important, vital reading. “Pulls no punches—names names...from top to bottom of the crime hierarchy.”—Miami Herald

In the spring of 1940, the Soviet Union carried out the mass executions of 14,500 Polish prisoners of war - army officers, police, gendarmes, and civilians - taken by the Red Army when it invaded eastern Poland in September 1939. This work details the Soviet killings, the elaborate cover-up of the crime, and the subsequent revelations.

Explores different examples of unpunished homicides and what these tell us about the interaction of law and society.

Golash addresses the value of punishment in contemporary society.

Today, we know that crime is often not just a matter of making bad decisions. Rather, there are a variety of factors that are implicated in much criminal offending, some fairly obvious like poverty, mental illness, and drug abuse and others less so, such as neurocognitive problems. Today, we have the tools for effective criminal behavioral change, but this cannot be an excuse for criminal offending. In The Future of Crime and Punishment, William R. Kelly identifies the need to educate the public on how these tools can be used to most effectively and cost efficiently reduce crime, recidivism, victimization and cost. The justice system of the future needs to be much more collaborative, utilizing the expertise of a variety of disciplines such as psychology, psychiatry, addiction, and neuroscience. Judges and prosecutors are lawyers, not clinicians, and as we transition the justice system to a focus on behavioral change, the decision making will need to reflect the input of clinical experts. The path forward is one characterized largely by change from traditional criminal prosecution and punishment to venues that balance accountability, compliance, and risk management with behavioral change interventions that address the primary underlying causes for recidivism. There are many moving parts to this effort and it is a complex proposition. It requires substantial changes to law, procedure, decision making, roles and responsibilities, expertise, and funding. Moreover, it requires a radical shift in how we think about crime and punishment. Our thinking needs to reflect a perspective that crime is harmful, but that much criminal behavior is changeable.

Cost-effective methods for improving crime control in America Since the crime explosion of the 1960s, the prison population in the United States has multiplied fivefold, to one prisoner for every hundred adults—a rate unprecedented in American history and unmatched anywhere in the world. Even as the prisoner head count continues to rise, crime has stopped falling, and poor people and minorities still bear the brunt of both crime and punishment. When Brute Force Fails explains how we got into the current trap and how we can get out of it: to cut both crime and the prison population in half within a decade. Mark Kleiman demonstrates that simply locking up more people for lengthier terms is no longer a workable crime-control strategy. But, says Kleiman, there has been a revolution—largely unnoticed by the press—in controlling crime by means other than brute-force incarceration: substituting swiftness and certainty of punishment for randomized severity, concentrating enforcement resources rather than dispersing them, communicating specific threats of punishment to specific offenders, and enforcing probation and parole conditions to make community corrections a genuine alternative to incarceration. As Kleiman shows, "zero tolerance" is nonsense: there are always more offenses than there is punishment capacity. But, it is possible—and essential—to create focused zero tolerance, by clearly specifying the rules and then delivering the promised sanctions every time the rules are broken. Brute-force crime control has been a costly mistake, both socially and financially. Now that we know how to do better, it would be immoral not to put that knowledge to work.

Over the last quarter of a century a new system of global criminal justice has emerged. But how successful has it been? Are we witnessing a new era of cosmopolitan justice or are the old principles of victors’ justice still in play? In this book, Daniele Archibugi and Alice Pease offer a vibrant and thoughtful analysis of the successes and shortcomings of the global justice system from 1945 to the present day. Part I traces the evolution of this system and the cosmopolitan vision enshrined within it. Part II looks at how it has worked in practice, focusing on the trials of some of the world’s most notorious war criminals, including Augusto Pinochet, Slobodan Milošević, Radovan Karad ić, Saddam Hussein and Omar al-Bashir, to assess the efficacy of the new dynamics of international punishment and the extent to which they can operate independently, without the interference of powerful governments and their representatives. Looking to the future, Part III asks how the system’s failings can be addressed. What actions are required for cosmopolitan values to become increasingly embedded in the global justice system in years to come?