Please click on the titles of each book for more information or to purchase.

The Death Penalty

• James Allen et al., Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, (Twin Palms Publishers 2000) (photographs of lynchings with essays byCongressman John Lewis, James Allen, Hilton Als and Leon F. Litwack)

• David Baldus, George Woodworth & Charles A. Pulaski,Jr., Equal Justice and the Death Penalty: A Legal and Empirical Analysis (Northeastern U. Press 1990)

• Stuart Banner, The Death Penalty: An American History (Harvard University Press2002) (a comprehensive history of the death penalty in the American South)

• Hugo Adam Bedau, ed., The Death Penalty in America (Oxford U. Press 1997) (includes sections on law of capital punishment, deterrence and incapacitation, race and class issues)

• John Bessler, Legacy of Violence: Lynch Mobs and Executions in Minnesota.
  

• Malcolm Braly, False Starts: A Memoir of San Quintinand Other Prisons (Penguin 1976) 

• W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South (U. Illinois Press 1993) (a history of racial violence in Georgia and Virginia in the twentieth century)

• Fox Butterfield, All God's Children: The Boskey Familyand the American Tradition of Violence (Knopf 1995) (a history of violence from slavery to generation to generation in one family)

• Don Cabana, Death at Midnight: Confessions of an Executioner (the former warden of the Mississippi State Penitentiary discusses his experiences)

• Dan Carter, Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South (LSU Press, revised edition, 1991) (description of the famous "Scottsboro boys case" where nine African American youths were charged with rape of two white women)

• Ronald W. Conley, Ruth Luckasson & George N. Bouthilet, The Criminal Justice System and Mental Retardation (Paul H. Brookes Pub. Co. 1992)

• Nick Davies, White Lies: Rape, Murder and Justice Texas Style (Pantheon Books 1991) (death of teenage cheerleader leads to conviction and death sentencing of Clarence Brantley, a black school janitor; book describes the process of unraveling the lies, deceptions, and racism underlying that conviction)

• David R. Dow & Mark Dow, editors, Machinery of Death: The Reality of America's Death Penalty Regime (with aforeword by Christopher Hitchens) (Routledge, 2002, $17.95) (a collection of essays and interviews from lawyers, wardens, victims' families, executioners and inmates which show how America's death penalty system actually works, including an essay by Center director Stephen Bright that argues that the death penalty is a direct descendant of lynching, other forms of racial violence and racial oppression, a transcript of the execution of Ivon Ray Stanley, and a chapter by Bud Welch, the father of a victim of Timothy McVeigh, on how he came to oppose the death penalty).

• David Von Drehle, Among the Lowest of the Dead (Random House 1995) (a history of Florida's implementation of the capital punishment statute it adopted in 1973)

• Pete Earley, Circumstantial Evidence: Death, Life and Justice in a Southern Town (Bantam Books 1995) (a description of the case of Walter McMillian in Monroeville, Alabama, who was freed after six years on death row)

• Lawrence M. Friedman, Crime and Punishment in American History (BasicBooks1993)

• Thomas Frisbie and Randy Garrett, Victims of Justice Revisited (Northwestern University Press May,2005)

• Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying (Knopf1993) (novel about race, death and identity set in Louisiana in the 1940's)

• Mikal Gilmore, Shot in the Heart (Doubleday1993) (the brother of Gary Gilmore, executed in Utah in 1977, describes their family life and other forces that may have contributed to Gary Gilmore's antisocial behavior)

• James Goodman, Stories of Scottsboro (Pantheon Books 1994) (an excellent account of the case of the "Scottsboro boys")

• Katya Lezin, Finding Life on Death Row (Northeastern University Press 1999) (foreword by Center Director Stephen B. Bright) (descriptions of the cases of six death row inmates represented by the Southern Center for Human Rights).

• James Marquart, The Rope, the Chair, and the Needle: Capital Punishment in Texas, 1923-1990 (U Tex Press).

• William S. McFeely, Proximity to Death (Norton 1999) (a historian's personal account of his involvement in a capital case and his observations about capital punishment and the work of the Southern Center for Human Rights).

• James J. Megivern, The Death Penalty: An Historical and Theological Survey (Paulist Press 1997) (theological and historical discussion of the death penalty).

• Michael Meltsner, Cruel and Unusual: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment (1974) (an account of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund's efforts to have the Supreme Court declare the death penalty unconstitutional leading to the decision in Furman v. Georgia).

• Kent S. Miller and Michael L. Radelet, Executing the Mentally Ill: The Criminal Justice System and the Case of Alvin Ford (Sage Publications 1993) (an examination of the execution of the mentally ill and, in particular, the case of Alvin Ford, in whose case, Ford v. Wainwright, the Supreme Court held that it was unconstitutional to execute the "insane").

• Charles Ogletree Jr. and Austin Sarat, eds, From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State: Race and the Death Penalty in America (NYU Press 2006) (chapters by various authors, including Center director Stephen Bright, on race and the death penalty)
  

• David M. Oshinsky, Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (Free Press 1996) (an excellent history of how the criminal justice system was used in Mississippi and throughout the South after the Civil War to maintain white supremacy through convict leasing and huge plantation prisons such as Parchman Farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary)

• Helen Prejean, Dead Man Walking (Random House1993) (a nun describes what she learned about the death penalty while counseling people on death row in Louisiana)

• Michael L. Radelet, Hugo Adam Bedau & Constance E.Putnam, In Spite of Innocence: Erroneous Convictions in Capital Cases (Northeastern University Press 1992) (accounts of executions of people despite questions of innocence).

• David Rose, The Big Eddy Club: The Stocking Stranglings and Southern Justice (the pursuit of the "Silk Stocking Strangler" in Columbus, Georgia, and the prosecution of Carlton Gary, a black man, for the murders of elderly white women who were strangled to death in their homes).

• Austin Sarat, ed., The Killing State:Capital Punishment in Law, Politics and Culture (Oxford U. Press 1999) (chapters by various authors about aspects of capital punishment).

• Eliza Steelwater, The Hangman’s Knot: Lynching, Legal Execution, and America’s Struggle with the Death Penalty (Westview 2003) (a history of executions from colonial times until publication of the book in 2003).

• Schabas, William A., The Abolition of the Death Penalty inInternational Law (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997.

• Margaret Vandiver, Lethal Punishment: Lynchings and Legal Executions in the South (Rutgers U. Press 2006).
  

• George Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky, 1865-1940: Lynchings, Mob Rule, and "Legal Lynchings." (an account of lynchings and "legal lynchings" in Kentucky). 
  

• Richard Wright, Native Son (Harper & Brothers 1940) (paperback by HarperPerennial 1993) (classic novel about race, murder and capital punishment)

Prisons and Jails

• Todd R. Clear, Imrisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse   (Oxford U. Press 2007)

• Norval Morris & David J. Rothman, eds., The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society (Oxford University Press 1995)

• Tom Murton & Joe Hyams, Accomplices to the Crime: The Arkansas Prison Scandal (Grove Press 1969)

• David M. Oshinsky, Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (Free Press 1996) (an excellent history of how the criminal justice
  system was used in Mississippi and throughout the South after the Civil
  War to maintain white supremacy through convict leasing and huge
  plantation prisons such as Parchman Farm, the Mississippi State
  Penitentiary)

• Ira Robbins, Prisoners in the Law (Clark Boardman, 1986 & revised thereafter)

Indigent Defense

• Anthony Lewis, Gideon's Trumpet (Random House 1964) (about the indigent man in Florida who was convicted of burglary and sentenced to prison after a trial where he was not granted his request for an appointed lawyer who wrote his own cert petition and got the Supreme Court to recognize the right to appointed counsel)