A Criminal History of Mankind PDF Download

Author: Colin Wilson
Publisher: Diversion Books
ISBN: 1626818673
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 892

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Book Description
This “immensely stimulating story of true crime down the ages” tells the history of human violence, from Peking Man to the Mafia (The Times, London). This landmark work offers a completely new approach to the history and psychology of human violence. Its sweep is broad, its research meticulous and detailed. Colin Wilson explores the bloodthirsty sadism of the ancient Assyrians and the mass slaughter by the armies led by Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Ivan the Terrible, and Vlad the Impaler. He delves into modern history, exploring the genocides practiced by Stalin and Hitler. He then takes a chilling look into the sex crimes and mass murders that have become symbols of the neuroses and intensity of modern life. With breathtaking audacity and stunning insight, Wilson puts criminality firmly in a wide, illuminating historical context. “A work of massive energy, compulsively readable, splendidly informative . . . it establishes Wilson in a European tradition of thought that includes H. G. Wells, Sartre and Shaw.” —Time Out London “A tremendous resource for crime buffs as well as a challenging exposition for some of the more subtle criminological thinking of our time.” —Kirkus Reviews

Author: Gregory Ashe
Publisher: Hodgkin and Blount
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 682

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Book Description
It all starts to go wrong at the shooting gallery. Emery Hazard and his boyfriend, John-Henry Somerset, just want to enjoy the day at the Dore County Independence Fair. At the shooting gallery, though, Hazard comes face to face with one of his old bullies: Mikey Grames. Even as a drugged-out wreck, Mikey is a reminder of all the ugliness in Hazard’s past. Worse, Mikey seems to know something Hazard doesn’t—something about the fresh tension brewing in town. When the Chief of Police interrupts Hazard’s day at the fair, she has a strange request. She doesn’t want Hazard and Somers to solve a murder. She wants them to prevent one. The future victim? Mayor Sherman Newton—a man who has tried to have Hazard and Somers killed at least once. Hazard and Somers try to work out the motive of the man threatening Newton, and the trail leads them into a conspiracy of corrupt law enforcement, white supremacists, and local politicians. As Hazard and Somers dig into the case, their search takes them into the past, where secrets have lain buried for twenty years. Determined to get to the truth, Hazard finds himself racing for answers, but he discovers that sometimes the past isn’t buried very deep. Sometimes, it isn’t dead. Sometimes, it isn’t even past. And almost always, it’s better left alone.

Author: James B. Jacobs
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 067496716X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 413

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Book Description
For over sixty million Americans, possessing a criminal record overshadows everything else about their public identity. A rap sheet, or even a court appearance or background report that reveals a run-in with the law, can have fateful consequences for a person’s interactions with just about everyone else. The Eternal Criminal Record makes transparent a pervasive system of police databases and identity screening that has become a routine feature of American life. The United States is unique in making criminal information easy to obtain by employers, landlords, neighbors, even cyberstalkers. Its nationally integrated rap-sheet system is second to none as an effective law enforcement tool, but it has also facilitated the transfer of ever more sensitive information into the public domain. While there are good reasons for a person’s criminal past to be public knowledge, records of arrests that fail to result in convictions are of questionable benefit. Simply by placing someone under arrest, a police officer has the power to tag a person with a legal history that effectively incriminates him or her for life. In James Jacobs’s view, law-abiding citizens have a right to know when individuals in their community or workplace represent a potential threat. But convicted persons have rights, too. Jacobs closely examines the problems created by erroneous record keeping, critiques the way the records of individuals who go years without a new conviction are expunged, and proposes strategies for eliminating discrimination based on criminal history, such as certifying the records of those who have demonstrated their rehabilitation.

Author: Kathleen Winter
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781932418446
Category : American poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Poetry. NOSTALGIA FOR THE CRIMINAL PAST by Kathleen Winter is the winner of the 2011 Antivenom Poetry Award published by Elixir Press. Contest judge, Deborah Bogen, had this to say about it: "NOSTALGIA FOR THE CRIMINAL PAST is Kathleen Winter's complicated, insightful, intriguing, sometimes sad and always artful song." And Cynthia Hogue said this: "By turns witty, gutsy, and passionate, Kathleen Winter's NOSTALGIA FOR THE CRIMINAL PAST pulls the reader into a capacious verbal terrain. 'Penumbra's a conundrum, / conundrum is penumbra. / An umbrella's humdrum,' one poem playfully opens. There is in these poems a subtle, delicate narrative of loss, grief, and survival, but as a poet trained in the law, Winter knows that any truth, like joy, is rare and precious. 'Joy is brief. / It turns away, extends its limbs, / feathered, reptilian,' one speaker opines. These poems are the nimble, profound products of experience alchemized into wisdom. NOSTALGIA FOR THE CRIMINAL PAST is a dazzling debut."

Author: Regina G. Kunzel
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
Sex is usually assumed to be a closely guarded secret of prison life. But it has long been the subject of intense scrutiny by both prison administrators and reformers—as well as a source of fascination and anxiety for the American public. Historically, sex behind bars has evoked radically different responses from professionals and the public alike. In Criminal Intimacy, Regina Kunzel tracks these varying interpretations and reveals their foundational influence on modern thinking about sexuality and identity. Historians have held the fusion of sexual desire and identity to be the defining marker of sexual modernity, but sex behind bars, often involving otherwise heterosexual prisoners, calls those assumptions into question. By exploring the sexual lives of prisoners and the sexual culture of prisons over the past two centuries—along with the impact of a range of issues, including race, class, and gender; sexual violence; prisoners’ rights activism; and the HIV epidemic—Kunzel discovers a world whose surprising plurality and mutability reveals the fissures and fault lines beneath modern sexuality itself. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including physicians, psychiatrists, sociologists, correctional administrators, journalists, and prisoners themselves—as well as depictions of prison life in popular culture—Kunzel argues for the importance of the prison to the history of sexuality and for the centrality of ideas about sex and sexuality to the modern prison. In the process, she deepens and complicates our understanding of sexuality in America.

Author: James W. Osterburg
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131752327X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 720

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Book Description
This text presents the fundamentals of criminal investigation and provides a sound method for reconstructing a past event (i.e., a crime), based on three major sources of information — people, records, and physical evidence. Its tried-and-true system for conducting an investigation is updated with the latest techniques available, teaching the reader new ways of obtaining information from people, including mining the social media outlets now used by a broad spectrum of the public; how to navigate the labyrinth of records and files currently available online; and fresh ways of gathering, identifying, and analyzing physical evidence.

Author: Emily Baxter (Attorney)
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780999209004
Category : Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
One in four people in the US has a criminal record; four in four have a criminal history. These are their stories.We Are All Criminals combines criminal justice statistics and statutes with compelling photography and first-person narrative to personalize the destruction caused by decades of mass criminalization, while leaving the reader with a sense of hope and inspiration to affect change.From the pediatrician who blew up a porta potty to the chiefs of police who burglarized a liquor warehouse to the countless students who smoked and sold pot, this 279 page photo-packed book is filled with stories of people who got away with crimes--and parallel stories of people laboring under the stigma of a criminal record. It's an examination of criminality, privilege, punishment, and second chances. Woven throughout is incisive commentary on the havoc our carceral state has wreaked upon the nation; the disparate impact of our legal system on poor communities and communities of color; and the exploration of innumerable life barriers created by criminal and juvenile records.

Author: Jeffrey L. Kirchmeier
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199967938
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
In 1987, the United States Supreme Court decided a case that could have ended the death penalty in the United States. Imprisoned by the Past: Warren McCleskey and the American Death Penalty examines the long history of the American death penalty and its connection to the case of Warren McCleskey, revealing how that case marked a turning point for the history of the death penalty. In this book, Jeffrey L. Kirchmeier explores one of the most important Supreme Court cases in history, a case that raised important questions about race and punishment, and ultimately changed the way we understand the death penalty today. McCleskey's case resulted in one of the most important Supreme Court decisions in U.S. history, where the Court confronted evidence of racial discrimination in the administration of capital punishment. The case currently marks the last time that the Supreme Court had a realistic chance of completely striking down capital punishment. As such, the case also marked a turning point in the death penalty debate in the country. Going back nearly four centuries, this book connects McCleskey's life and crime to the issues that have haunted the American death penalty debate since the first executions by early settlers through the modern twenty-first century death penalty. Imprisoned by the Past ties together three unique American stories. First, the book considers the changing American death penalty across centuries where drastic changes have occurred in the last fifty years. Second, the book discusses the role that race played in that history. And third, the book tells the story of Warren McCleskey and how his life and legal case brought together the other two narratives.

Author: Richard Ashby Wilson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139498266
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Why do international criminal tribunals write histories of the origins and causes of armed conflicts? Richard Ashby Wilson conducted research with judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys and expert witnesses in three international criminal tribunals to understand how law and history are combined in the courtroom. Historical testimony is now an integral part of international trials, with prosecutors and defense teams using background testimony to pursue decidedly legal objectives. In the Slobodan Milošević trial, the prosecution sought to demonstrate special intent to commit genocide by reference to a long-standing animus, nurtured within a nationalist mindset. For their part, the defense called historical witnesses to undermine charges of superior responsibility, and to mitigate the sentence by representing crimes as reprisals. Although legal ways of knowing are distinct from those of history, the two are effectively combined in international trials in a way that challenges us to rethink the relationship between law and history.

Author: Carl Suddler
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479806757
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
A startling examination of the deliberate criminalization of black youths from the 1930s to today A stark disparity exists between black and white youth experiences in the justice system today. Black youths are perceived to be older and less innocent than their white peers. When it comes to incarceration, race trumps class, and even as black youths articulate their own experiences with carceral authorities, many Americans remain surprised by the inequalities they continue to endure. In this revealing book, Carl Suddler brings to light a much longer history of the policies and strategies that tethered the lives of black youths to the justice system indefinitely. The criminalization of black youth is inseparable from its racialized origins. In the mid-twentieth century, the United States justice system began to focus on punishment, rather than rehabilitation. By the time the federal government began to address the issue of juvenile delinquency, the juvenile justice system shifted its priorities from saving delinquent youth to purely controlling crime, and black teens bore the brunt of the transition. In New York City, increased state surveillance of predominantly black communities compounded arrest rates during the post–World War II period, providing justification for tough-on-crime policies. Questionable police practices, like stop-and-frisk, combined with media sensationalism, cemented the belief that black youth were the primary cause for concern. Even before the War on Crime, the stakes were clear: race would continue to be the crucial determinant in American notions of crime and delinquency, and black youths condemned with a stigma of criminality would continue to confront the overwhelming power of the state.