The United States has built a carceral state that is unprecedented among Western countries and in US history. Nearly one in 50 people, excluding children and the elderly, is incarcerated today, a rate unsurpassed anywhere else in the world. What are some of the main political forces that explain this unprecedented reliance on mass imprisonment? Throughout American history, crime and punishment have been central features of American political development. This 2006 book examines the development of four key movements that mediated the construction of the carceral state in important ways: the victims' movement, the women's movement, the prisoners' rights movement, and opponents of the death penalty. This book argues that punitive penal policies were forged by particular social movements and interest groups within the constraints of larger institutional structures and historical developments that distinguish the United States from other Western countries.

In this book, for the first time, we can hear the startling, moving voices of adventurous and rebellious Japanese women as they eloquently challenged the social repression of prewar Japan. The extraordinary women whose memoirs, recollections, and essays are presented here constitute a strong current in the history of modern Japanese life from the 1880s to the outbreak of the Pacific War.

"131 women were hanged in England and Wales between 1797 and 1837, executed for crimes including murder, baby-killing, theft, arson, sheep-stealing and passing forged bank notes. Most of them were extremely poor and living in desperate situations. Some were mentally ill. A few were innocent. And almost all are now forgotten, their voices unheard for generations. Mary Morgan – a teenager hanged as an example to others. Eliza Fenning – accused of adding arsenic to the dumplings. Mary Bateman – a ‘witch’ who duped her neighbours out of their savings. Harriet Skelton – hanged for passing counterfeit pound notes in spite of efforts by Elizabeth Fry and the Duke of Gloucester to save her. Naomi Clifford has unearthed the events that brought these ‘unfortunates’ to the gallows and has used contemporary newspaper accounts and documents to tell their stories"--

On 24 April 1942, Czechoslovak journalist and active CPC member Julius Fucik was detained in Pankrác Prison in Prague, where he was subsequently interrogated and tortured, before being sent to Germany to stand trial for high treason. It was during this time that Fucik’s Notes from the Gallows (Czech: Reportáž psaná na oprátce, literally Reports Written Under the Noose) arose—written on pieces of cigarette paper and smuggled out by two sympathetic prison warders named Kolinsky and Hora. The notes were treated as great literary works after his death in 1943 and translated into many languages worldwide, resulting in this book, which was first published in English in 1948. It describes events in the prison since Fucik’s arrest and is filled with hope for a better, Communist future.

Why, in the recent campaigns for universal health care, did organized labor maintain its support of employer-mandated insurance? Did labor's weakened condition prevent it from endorsing national health insurance? Marie Gottschalk demonstrates here that the unions' surprising stance was a consequence of the peculiarly private nature of social policy in the United States. Her book combines a much-needed account of labor's important role in determining health care policy with a bold and incisive analysis of the American welfare state. Gottschalk stresses that, in the United States, the social welfare system is anchored in the private sector but backed by government policy. As a result, the private sector is a key political battlefield where business, labor, the state, and employees hotly contest matters such as health care. She maintains that the shadow welfare state of job-based benefits shaped the manner in which labor defined its policy interests and strategies. As evidence, Gottschalk examines the influence of the Taft-Hartley health and welfare funds, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (E.R.I.S.A.), and experience-rated health insurance, showing how they constrained labor from supporting universal health care. Labor, Gottschalk asserts, missed an important opportunity to develop a broader progressive agenda. She challenges the movement to establish a position on health care that addresses the growing ranks of Americans without insurance, the restructuring of the U.S. economy, and the political travails of the unions themselves.

George Orwell set out 'to make political writing into an art', and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels of all time, this new series of his essays seeks to bring his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. A Hanging, the ninth in the Orwell's Essays series, tells the story of the execution of an unnamed convict in Burma. With the veracity of the story unknown, but thought to be loosely based on Orwell's own experiences in Burma, the haunting tale leaves the reader contemplating the heavy topic of colonialism, and the right of one to take the life of another.