This book brings together the most recent advances in theory and research on the relationship between social inequality and the control of criminal behavior.

Georgia embraced the concept of the penitentiary as a form of social control earlier than most of its southern neighbors. Its penal code of 1816 replaced or curtailed such traditional punishments as whipping, the pillory, fines, or death. Georgia's control over felony convicts effectively began in 1817, when the state prison at Milledgeville accepted its first convict. Martha A. Myers finds that Georgia also led the region in embracing the convict lease system as an alternative to incarceration. In "Race, Labor, and Punishment in the New South, " she examines the social, political, and...

Historically, the announcement and invocation of criminal penalties were public spectacles. Today, fear of crime and disaffection with the criminal justice system guarantee that this public fascination with punishment continues. In the past decade, virtually every legislature in the country has undertaken sentencing reform, in the hope that public concern with crime would be allayed and dispari ties in criminal sentences would be reduced if not eliminated. Scholars have intensified their longstanding preoccupation with discrimination and the sources of disparate treatment during sentencing -...