A01=Theodore Hamm
Author_Theodore Hamm
california
california politics
capital punishment
caryl chessman
Category=DNBM
Category=JKVP
Category=JMK
Category=NHK
criminal justice
criminality
death penalty
death row
death sentence
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
execution
history
kidnapping
legal system
little lindbergh law
los angeles
media
new left
new right
nonfiction
pat brown
penology
political parties
politics
prison reform
prisons
protest
psychology
punishment
rape
rape prosecution
red light bandit
rehabilitation
san quentin
sexual assault
social issues
social justice
three strikes law
Product details
- ISBN 9780520224285
- Weight: 318g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 20 Nov 2001
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Theodore Hamm uses the 1960 execution of Caryl Chessman as a lens for examining how politics and debates about criminal justice became a volatile mix that ignited postwar California. The effects of those years continue to be felt as the state's three-strikes law and expanding prison-construction program spark heated arguments over rehabilitation and punishment. Known as the Red Light Bandit, Chessman allegedly stalked lovers' lanes in Los Angeles. Eventually convicted of rape and kidnapping, he was sentenced to death in 1948. In prison he gained significant notoriety as a writer, beginning with his autobiographical Cell 2455 Death Row (1954). In the following years Chessman presented himself not only as an innocent man but also as one rehabilitated from his prior life of crime. He acquired an enthusiastic audience among leading criminologists, liberal intellectuals, and ordinary citizens, many of whom engaged in protests to halt Chessman's execution. Hamm analyzes how Chessman convinced thousands of Californians to support him, and why Governor Edmund G. (Pat) Brown, who opposed the death penalty, allowed the execution to go forward.
He also demonstrates the intrinsic limits of the popular commitment to the rehabilitative ideal. Rebel and a Cause places the Chessman case in a broad cultural and historical context, relating it to histories of prison reform, the anti-death penalty movement, the popularization of psychology, and the successive rise and decline of the New Left and the more enduring rise of the New Right.
Theodore Hamm has written about criminal justice for The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, American Quarterly, and Souls. He currently teaches in the Metropolitan Studies Program at New York University.
