Overview

A timeless work by one of the UK's leading commentators and now with pointers to key developments in penal politics of the last 20 years. This first paperback version contains a wide-ranging analysis of the topic from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day, including: the impact on punishments of power struggles, wealth, superstition, class distinctions, populist ideas, the centrality for many years of the death penalty, modern-day ideas of rehabilitation but above all the underlying threads of social control, law and order and political signals about crime.

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9781909976337

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Reviews

(From the reviews of the first edition).'This splendid book...reveals in all its starkness the close connexion between the inhumanities of punishment and the political interests of the State'-Justice of the Peace; 'Starts with a delightful description of Anglo-Saxon criminal law and punishment, and travels fast forwards...A colourful entertainment'-Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health; 'Well researched, knowledgeable...a good read'-Litigation; 'First class reading'-Police Journal; 'Takes us on a breathless tour d'horizon of the history of judicial punishment, a thousand years in a hundred pages, before slowing down to examine more closely the reforms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries'-The Magistrate.

Author Information

John Hostettler has written various legal and historical works. He was a solicitor for 35 years including re political and civil liberties cases. His other books include: Dissenters, Radicals and Blasphemers: The Flame of Revolt that Shines Through English History (2012); Champions of the Rule of Law (2011); Sir William Garrow: His Life Times and Fight for Justice (2010) (with Richard Braby) and Twenty Famous Lawyers (2013).

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