Human Rights
Showing all 11 results
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Decarcerating America
From Mass Punishment to Public Health$27.95“A powerful call for reform.”
—NPRAn all-star team of criminal justice experts present timely, innovative, and humane ways to end mass incarceration
Mass incarceration will end—there is an emerging consensus that we’ve been locking up too many people for too long. But with more than 2.2 million Americans behind bars right now, how do we go about bringing people home? Decarcerating America collects some of the leading thinkers in the criminal justice reform movement to strategize about how to cure America of its epidemic of mass punishment.
With sections on front-end approaches, as well as improving prison conditions and re-entry, the book includes pieces by leaders across the criminal justice reform movement: Danielle Sered of Common Justice describes successful programs for youth with violent offenses; Robin Steinberg of the Bronx Defenders argues for more resources for defense attorneys to diminish plea bargains; Kathy Boudin suggests changes to the parole model; Jeannie Little offers an alternative for mental health and drug addiction issues; and Eric Lotke offers models of new industries to replace the prison economy. Editor Ernest Drucker applies the tools of epidemiology to help us cure what he calls “a plague of prisons.”
Decarcerating America will be an indispensable roadmap as the movement to challenge incarceration in America gains critical mass—it shows us how to get people out of prisons, and the more appropriate responses to crime. The ideas presented in this volume are what we are fighting for when we fight against the New Jim Crow. -
Crimes Against Humanity
The Struggle for Global Justice$44.99 – $45.00When it was first published in 1999, Crimes Against Humanity called for a radical shift from diplomacy to justice in international affairs. In vivid, non-legalese prose, leading human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson made a riveting case for holding political and military leaders accountable in international courts for genocide, torture, and mass murder.
Since then, fearsome figures such as Charles Taylor, Laurent Gbagbo, and Ratko Mladic have been tried in international criminal court, and a global movement has rallied around the human rights framework of justice. Any such legal framework requires constant evolution in order to stay relevant, and this newly revised and expanded volume brings the conversation up to date. In substantial new chapters, Robertson covers the protection of war correspondents, the problem of piracy, crimes against humanity in Syria, nuclear armament in Iran, and other challenges we are grappling with today. He criticizes the Obama administration’s policies around “targeted killing” and the trials of Khalid Sheik Mohammed and other “high value” detainees. By rendering a complex debate accessible, Robertson once again provides an essential guide for anyone looking to understand human rights and how to work toward a more complete blueprint for justice. -
Enemy Combatant
$18.95 – $26.95This is the searing story of one man s years inside the notorious American prisons at Guantnamo, Bagram, and Kandahar, and his Kafkaesque struggle to clear his name.
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Challenging China
Struggle and Hope in an Era of Change$17.95 – $29.95Interest in China has never been greater, but the voices of the Chinese themselves often escape notice. Here, finally, is a book that reverses the trend by giving us a rare and important portrait of contemporary life within China—”written with style, honesty, and expertise born of intimate and often painful experience” (Ian Buruma). Mixing powerful personal stories with sobering analysis, this revealing book encompasses a broad range of social issues, from underage prostitution to the crackdown on religion. Featuring some of the first-ever eyewitness accounts from Chinese dissidents and their families—including testimony by the relatives of the imprisoned and the executed and descriptions of life in exile—Challenging China offers rare glimpses of the country’s ongoing political turmoil, as well as hope in the rising collective resistance. By turns moving, illuminating, and outraged, Challenging China is a revealing portrait of a country whose internal politics we can no longer afford to ignore.
Human Rights in China (HRIC) is an international nongovernmental organization founded by Chinese scientists and scholars to promote universally recognized human rights in the People’s Republic of China.
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Torture
Does It Make Us Safer? Is It Ever OK?: A Human Rights Perspective$25.95Of all the issues on the human rights agenda, torture offered Americans the moral high ground . . . until this year. With the abuses at Abu Ghraib that led to accusations of torture within the domestic criminal justice system, the question of cruel and unusual treatment has taken on new urgency in the United States and elsewhere.
In Torture, twelve newly written essays by leading thinkers and experts range over history and continents, offering a nuanced, up-to-the-minute exploration of this wrenching but timely topic, including, among others, Reed Brody on the road to Abu Ghraib and “ghost detainees”; Eitan Felner on the Israeli experience; Tom Malinowski on violations of State Department “forbidden practices” at Abu Ghraib and in Afghanistan; Kenneth Roth on the U.S. government’s shift from cover-up to justification; and Minky Worden on a global survey of torturing countries.
Intended for a general audience, some of the key questions addressed include how to define torture, whether torture is ever effective, and whether it is ever acceptable.
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Confessions Of An Argentine Dirty Warrior
A Firsthand Account Of Atrocity$17.99Retired navy officer Adolfo Scilingo was the first man ever to break the Argentine military’s pact of silence, stunning his compatriots and the world by openly confessing his participation in the hideous practice of pushing live political dissidents out of airplanes during Argentina’s dirty war.
Available for the first time in paperback, with a new introduction by Judge Gabriel Cavallo on the upcoming military trials and a new epilogue by the author, Confessions of an Argentine Dirty Warrior includes the complete text of Scilingo’s confession in the form of interviews given to Argentina’s best-known investigative journalist, Horacio Verbitsky, along with an afterword by Juan Méndez, putting these events in the context of the dirty war. -
The Condor Years
How Pinochet And His Allies Brought Terrorism To Three Continents$18.99 – $25.95A “compelling and shocking account” of a brutal campaign of repression in Latin America, based on interviews and previously secret documents (The Miami Herald).
Throughout the 1970s, six Latin American governments, led by Chile, formed a military alliance called Operation Condor to carry out kidnappings, torture, and political assassinations across three continents. It was an early “war on terror” initially encouraged by the CIA—which later backfired on the United States.
Hailed by Foreign Affairs as “remarkable” and “a major contribution to the historical record,” The Condor Years uncovers the unsettling facts about the secret US relationship with the dictators who created this terrorist organization. Written by award-winning journalist John Dinges and updated to include later developments in the prosecution of Pinochet, the book is a chilling yet dispassionately told history of one of Latin America’s darkest eras. Dinges, himself interrogated in a Chilean torture camp, interviewed participants on both sides and examined thousands of previously secret documents to take the reader inside this underground world of military operatives and diplomats, right-wing spies and left-wing revolutionaries.
“Scrupulous, well-documented.” —The Washington Post
“Nobody knows what went wrong inside Chile like John Dinges.” —Seymour Hersh -
Guantanamo
$14.95 – $21.95 -
Enemy Aliens
Double Standards And Constitutional Freedoms In The War On Terrorism$16.95 – $24.95When David Cole was first writing Enemy Aliens, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the anti-immigrant brand of American patriotism was at a fever pitch. Now, as the pendulum swings back, and court after court finds the Bush administration’s tactics of secrecy and assumption of guilt unconstitutional, Cole’s book stands as a prescient and critical indictment of the double standards we have applied in the war on terror.
Called “brilliantly argued” by Edward Said and “the essential book in the field” by former CIA director James Woolsey, Enemy Aliens shows why it is a moral, constitutional, and practical imperative to afford every person in the United States the protections from government excesses that we expect for ourselves.
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Crimes of War
Guilt and Denial in the Twentieth Century$19.95Including original contributions from distinguished European and American historians such as Saul Friedländer, Omer Bartov, John Dower, Christopher Browning, and Marilyn Young, Crimes of War surveys wartime atrocities committed by the United States, Germany, and Japan across the twentieth century. The book presents startling new evidence of the killing of unarmed Koreans by American troops at No Gun Ri, of atrocities committed by Nazi soldiers on the Russian front, and of Japanese barbarity in China during World War II. Emerging from these accounts is a distinctive, repeated pattern, which typically includes a half-century of denial before the truth is confronted.
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Legal Lynching
The Death Penalty and America's Future$22.95With public opinion polls showing opposition to the death penalty at its highest level in twenty years, this timely book by two of America’s most important civil rights leaders and the Nation’s criminal justice reporter makes a passionate and persuasive case against capital punishment. Combining a powerful moral argument with recent, overwhelming evidence of systematic legal error and widespread racial bias in death penalty cases, Legal Lynching directly attacks the basic claims of those—including our new president—who continue to insist on execution as a punitive solution for an increasing number of crimes. With the abolition of the death penalty in South Africa, the United States has become the last industrialized democracy to persist in state-sponsored execution.
Grounded in stories of those who were unjustly convicted and left to languish on death row, Legal Lynching is a moving, human book by America’s leading death penalty abolitionists.
Showing all 11 results
