Overview

America is fascinated with murder, as evidenced by the media's elaborate and often sensational coverage of homicides, the plethora of recreated television crime programs-such as America's Most Wanted and Unsolved Mysteries-and the number of high-grossing films and best-selling novels that revolve around murder plots. We love to be afraid and we love to hate offenders. Murderers, particularly those sentenced to death, we consider to be unusually heinous, often sub-human, and entirely different from the rest of us. In Hidden Victims, sociologist Susan F. Sharp challenges this culturally ingrained perspective by reminding us that those individuals facing a death sentence, in addition to being murderers, are brothers or sisters, mothers or fathers, daughters or sons, relatives or friends. Through a series of vivid and in-depth interviews with families of the accused, she demonstrates how the exceptionally severe way in which we view those on death row trickles down to those with whom they are closely connected. Sharp shows how family members and friends-in effect, the indirect victims of the initial crime-experience a profoundly complicated and socially isolating grief process. Departing from a humanist perspective from which most accounts of victims are told, Sharp makes her case from a sociological standpoint that draws out the parallel experiences and coping mechanisms of these individuals. Chapters focus on responses to sentencing, the particular structure of grieving faced by this population, execution, aftermath, wrongful conviction, family formation after conviction, and the complex situation of individuals related to both the killer and the victim. Powerful, poignant, and intelligently written, Hidden Victims challenges all of us-regardless of which side of the death penalty you are on-to understand the economic, social, and psychological repercussions that shape the lives of the often forgotten families of death row inmates.

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9780813535845

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Without denying the horror of the crimes that most death row inmates have committed or the need for confinement of those inmates, Sharp raises the question of whether Americans would still support the death penalty if they understood the full range of its consequences. It is a sobering question that readers of this book will be forced to ponder. -from the foreword by Michael L. Radelet, professor and chair, department of sociology, University of Colorado

Without denying the horror of the crimes that most death row inmates have committed or the need for confinement of those inmates, Sharp raises the question of whether Americans would still support the death penalty if they understood the full range of its consequences. It is a sobering question that readers of this book will be forced to ponder. -from the foreword by Michael L. Radelet, professor and chair, department of sociology, University of Colorado

Author Information

SUSAN F. SHARP is David Ross Boyd Professor of Sociology and is affiliate faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies. She is also a faculty fellow with the College of Liberal Studies, the Department of Human Relations, and the Organizational Leadership Program. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Texas-Austin in 1996. Her research focuses on female crime and deviance, the incarceration of women, and the impact of corrections policies on families of offenders. Her recent research has focused on theoretical explanations of female criminal behaviors from a life course perspective, exploring how multiple marginalities may steer women into criminal and/or deviant behaviors. She has served on the executive board of the American Society of Criminology and was the founding editor of Feminist Criminology, the official journal of the Division on Women and Crime of the American Society of Criminology.  Dr. Sharp’s current research focuses on jail diversionary programs for female offenders.

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