This study analyzes the development of criminal law during the first several generations of American life. Its comparison of the substantive and procedural law among the colonies reveals the similarities and differences between the New England and the Chesapeake colonies. Bradley Chapin addresses the often-debated question of the “reception” of English law and makes estimates of the relative weight of the sources and methods of early American law. A main theme of his book is that colonial legislators and judges achieved a significant reform of the English criminal law at a time when a parallel movement in England failed. The analysis is made specific and concrete by statistics that show patterns of prosecutions and crime rates. In addition to the exciting and convincing theme of a “lost period” of great creativity in American criminal law, Chapin gives a wealth of detail on statutory and common-law rulings, noteworthy criminal cases, and judicial views of how the law was to be administered. He provides social and economic explanations of shifts and peculiarities in the law, using carefully arranged evidence from the records. His treatment of the Quaker cases in Massachusetts and the witchcraft prosecutions in New England throws new light on those frequently misunderstood episodes. Chapin's book will be of interest not only to scholars working in the field but also to anyone curious about early American legal history.

Crime and punishment are highly racialized aspects of American society, and have been since the beginning. History has consistently focused on wealthy white males, leaving large gaps in our collective understanding of criminality as it applies to poor people and people of color. My thesis discusses how people of Amherst County in Colonial Virginia navigated imprisonment and their positionality. I engage with constructivist and feminist theories to expose silences in archives which hinders deeper understanding of the archaeological record. Though my research, I have been able to find the names of some of the people that were imprisoned, along with the crimes they were charged with. I discovered that race, class, and gender had a large effect on sentencing outcomes and time in spent in prison if found guilty, if a person was going to be released jail after being found not guilty, punished even after being cleared of charges, or if they were going to spend time in jail at all. I call this privileged criminality, and close my paper by arguing these privileged aspects of being were carried forward into the US after British rule ended, and that we need to study this more to determine how this truly effects the people of today.

Shame punishment has existed for perhaps as long as people have been punished, and the issue has been revisited in recent years to help improve crime reduction efforts. In this collection, shame punishment is examined from various critical perspectives, including its relation with expressivism, the diversity of shame punishment used today, the link between shame punishment and restorative justice, the relationship between dignity and shame punishment, shame punishment and its use for sex offenders, and critics of shame punishment in its different incarnations. The selected essays are from leading experts and represent the most important contributions to scholarly research in the field.