Volume 27, Number 18 · November 20, 1980
Should Alfie Be Let Off?
By Graham Hughes
Criminals and Victims: A Trial Judge Reflects on Crime and Punishment
by Lois G. Forer
Norton, 333 pp., $14.95
Ever since imprisonment was enthusiastically accepted in the nineteenth century as a humanitarian alternative to the hanging rope and the whipping post we have been uncertain about just what it is supposed to do. The Quaker vision of moral regeneration through harsh solitude soon faded, but confinement has until recently remained the staple response to all but petty crime. Today the American prison population is not much less than 500,000.
Review, 2507 words
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