The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Philip Zimbardo (Random House, 576 pages) Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil is a promise a long time coming. In 1971, when Zimbardo was a young psychology professor at Stanford University, he presided over a psychology experiment exploring what happened […]
Sasha Abramsky
Sasha Abramsky is a senior fellow at Demos and a writer on social-justice issues. His latest book is The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives.
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The Democracy of Evil
The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Philip Zimbardo (Random House, 576 pages) Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil is a promise a long time coming. In 1971, when Zimbardo was a young psychology professor at Stanford University, he presided over a psychology experiment exploring what happened […]
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Prison State
Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California by Ruth Gilmore (University of California Press, 412 pages) For those involved in studying critically the U.S. criminal justice system, Ruth Gilmore’s Golden Gulag has been a promise long-delayed. The book has been talked about, in often reverential tones, for many years now. […]
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Bashing Goliath
Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America by Andrei S. Markovits (Princeton University Press, 302 pages) I feel, having just read Andrei Markovits’s Uncouth Nation, a profound satisfaction. It’s not that Markovits is a great stylist; he’s assuredly not. His sentences are sometimes maddeningly convoluted, and the book itself is poorly organized, with many […]
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Notes From Underground
Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh (Harvard University Press, 448 pages) In Sudhir Venkatesh’s newly published Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor (Harvard University Press, 2006), readers are introduced to a cast-royale of rogues, some loveable, others little short of detestable, who inhabit […]
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Torture Heavy
David Rose, author of Guantanamo: The War on Human Rights (The New Press), talks with TAP about the brutality of American guards, legal doctrines that guide them, and the casual acceptance of torture carried out by interrogators. What led you to write about the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in the first place? […]
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One Nation, Under Siege
Eleven years ago, my first year living in New York, I sat on the roof of International House on the edge of Harlem, with hundreds of other students, raucously celebrating as elections in South Africa, half a world away, finished off the apartheid regime and brought Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress to power. Drinking beers […]
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Cruel and Unusable
On Tuesday, March 1, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an opinion in the much-watched Roper v. Simmons case on the permissibility of states’ use of the death penalty against juvenile offenders. Roper v. Simmons came out of Missouri and involved the vicious saga of Christopher Simmons, a man who, at the age of 17, boasted […]
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Trials in Error
Originally a strong supporter of the death penalty, Bill Kurtis, the front man on A&E’s Investigative Reports, Cold Case Files, and American Justice, has recently become an outspoken opponent of the practice. Kurtis, whose new book is titled The Death Penalty on Trial: Crisis in American Justice, talks with journalist Sasha Abramsky about serial killers, […]
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Taking Juveniles Off Death Row
Despite a judiciary increasingly dominated by conservative appointees, the federal courts have shown a heartening willingness to rein in the death penalty. In recent years, they have limited who is eligible and have placed other restrictions on states’ arbitrary conduct. Two years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court, by a vote of 6 to 3, halted […]