Rough Justice
Subtitle: Lynching and American Society, 1874-1947
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: June 16, 2004
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 256
ISBN-13: 9780252029172
Subjects: Crime & criminology; Violence in society; 20th century; c 1800 to c 1900; Social Science; True Crime / Espionage; Sociology; USA; Criminology; Discrimination & Racism; Other Miscellaneous Crimes; History / United States / 19th Century; General; Culture conflict; History; Lynching; Social control; United States
First sentence: The era of the Civil War and Reconstruction marked a turning point in lynching violence across the United States.
Description: "Rough Justice is the first national cross-regional study of the history of lynching and criminal justice in the United States. Working from extensive research in newspapers, court records, coroner's inquests, and personal correspondence, the book ties lynching to understandings of criminal justice, strongly influenced by notions of race and gender, that varied across social classes and regions. It is dedicated to the victims of lynching and legal execution." "Eventually the rural and working-class rough justice enthusiasts who endorsed mob murder in the Midwest, West, and South compromised with the bourgeois advocates of due process law. In the early twentieth century, states in those regions, aping the punitive innovations of northeastern states, revamped the death penalty into a comparatively efficient, technocratic, and highly racialized mechanism of retributive justice, and lynchings ceased. Yet today's death penalty, which is powerfully influenced by racial and gender prerogatives and which often fails to offer defendants meaningful due process, bears the legacy of the history of lunching and of the compromise that ended it."--BOOK JACKET.