Punishment

Capital punishment

• Adams, Randall Dale.  Radio Interview.  Adams was mistakenly charged with killing a Dallas policeman, and spent three years on death row.  His life was the subject of the movie The Thin Blue Line. [RealAudio]
  
  
• American Bar Association's statement on the death penalty in the United States.
   
• American Society of Criminology.  (Official association of professional criminologists).  Official Statement on the Death Penalty.  Recent paper on the death penalty, presented to their Policy Board.
  
  
• Bedau, Hugo. "The Case against the Death Penalty."   Bedau is one of the leading academic spokepeople against the death penalty.
  
  
• Death Penalty Information Center.  Numerous resources on bias, costs, etc.
   
• Human Rights Watch's perspectives of the Death Penalty in the US.
   
• Links on the death penalty (from the Clark Country Prosecuting Attorney).  Nice resource.
  
  
• Mill, John Stuart. "Speech in Favor of Capital Punishment."
   
• Penry v. Lynaugh. 492 U.S. 302 (1989).  The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that it is not cruel and unusual to sentence a retarded person to death.  That view was later overturned in Atkins v. Virginia - 536 U.S. 304 (2002),
   
  
• van der Haag, Ernest. "The Ultimate Punishment: A Defense."  (1996) Harvard Law Review Association.
  
  
  

Empirical evidence on various forms of punishment

• Barnett, Cynthia.  "The Measurement of White-Collar Crime Using Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Data."
   
• Bureau of Justice Statistics.  Governmental statistics on incarceration rates, capital punishment, crime rates, prosecution, etc.
  
  
• John Conroy and Rob Warden, "The High Cost of Wrongful Convictions." An accounting of the human and financial costs of wrongful criminal convictions. It is not just that innocent people are wrongfully punished -- which is bad enough. It is that the guilty people are not only not punished, the remain free to commit ever more crimes.
  
  
• Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.  The main government site concerned with juvenile justice.  Links to various resources.
   
• Legal Information Center.  Legal resources for Cornell Law School.
   
• Lead and crime?  Research that suggests that lead in the atmosphere may cause criminality.
   
• National Criminal Justice Reference Service.   Office of Justice Programs. U.S. Department of Justice. Information and statistics on crime, victimization, courses, etc.
   
• National Crime Victimization Survey.  A detailed annual survey indicating who was victimized, by whom, and in what ways.
   
• National White Collar Crime Center.
  
  
• Racial prejudice in punishment (from Human Rights Watch)
  
  
• Sentencing Project.  Links to sites on a variety of issues.  Has data on punishment, incarceration rates, capital punishment, disenfranchisement of felons, etc.
   
• Sourcebook on Crime.   Compilation of statistics from more than 100 sources.  Compiled by SUNY - Albany.
   
• Statistical Abstracts.  Information from the Census Bureau.   Data concerning many aspects of american society.
   
• Uniform Crime Reports.  From the FBI.  Most recent.
  
  

Punishment in general

• American Bar's Association's Criminal Justice Section.  Includes their proposed standards, changes in current laws, etc,
   
• Bentham, Jeremy. The Rationale of Punishment.  A utilitarian account of punishment, including discussions of the aims and forms of punishment.
   
• Boston Review.  Special issue  "Crime, Punishment, and the Limits of Law.' on "Crime, Punishment, and the Limits of Law.'
   
• Criminal Justice Links. Extensive list of links to sites on criminal justice from around the world.  From the University of Leeds (UK).
  
  
• Duff, Antony. "Legal Punishment."  Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.  A detailed and careful introduction to the philosophy of punishment.  Includes bibliography.
  
  
• Families against Mandatory Minimum.  Citizens opposed to laws which do not give judges discretion in sentencing.
  
  
• Kleinig, John. "The Hardness of Hard Treatment."  A philosopher at John Jay School of Criminal Justice discusses the current trend toward harsh punishments.
  
  
• Murphy, Jeffrie. "Punishment and Retribution."  Radio interview on the topic of the paper included in this volume. [RealAudio]
  
  
• Pasquerella, Lynn.  "Making Hard Times ever Harder."  Radio interview on the topic of the paper included in this volume. [RealAudio]
  
  
• Rawls, John. "Two Concepts of Rules."  An attempt to show that the best understanding of punishment includes elements of both deterrence and retributive theories.
   
• Restorative Justice.  From the Center for Restorative Justice and Peacemaking (University of Minnesota).
   
• Restorative Justice.org.  Links to numerous resources.
   
• U.S. Code.  From Cornell University Law School.
  
  
• U.S. Sentencing Commission.  Official proposals for changes in the criminal justice system.  Includes links to various governmental and non-governmental sites.
  

back to home page