Prison Courtyard, by Vincent van Gogh, 1890. The Pushkin Museum of Fine Art, Moscow, Russia.

Prison Courtyard, by Vincent van Gogh, 1890. The Pushkin Museum of Fine Art, Moscow, Russia.

Crimes & Punishments

Volume II, Number 2 | spring 2009

Purchase

Soldiers and police establishing line at door of the Morgan Bank after anti-capitalist Wall Street bombing, September 16, 1920.

Preamble

Crime Scenes

By Lewis H. Lapham

The American fondness for the dressing up of crime in the costumes of romance is an amusement priced at too high a cost.

More

Original death chamber at the Red Hat Cell Block, West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, 2010. Photograph by Lee Honeycutt.

Staking a Life

By Christopher Hitchens

Why is the United States so wedded to the infliction of the death penalty?

More

Map

Spider Men

The world’s most-wanted criminals.

View

c. 228 | Naukratis

Something Is Rotten in the Agora

Athenaeus prefers a fish out of water.More

1870 | San Francisco

Giving the Devil His Due

We have contemplated with considerable satisfaction the various attempts to take human life during the present week.More

1597 | London

Enemy of the State

Drawing a confession. More

Charts & Graphs

“No, Mr. Bond. I Expect You to Die!”

Villains in James Bond films.

View

Russian author Yevgenia Semyonova Ginzburg.

Black and white photograph of Italian writer and chemist Primo Levi.

British scholar and military officer T.E. Lawrence.

Black and white photograph of political scientist and philosopher Hannah Arendt holding a cigarette.

Black and white photograph of Russian author Leo Tolstoy.

After all, crime is only a left-handed form of human endeavor.

—John Huston, 1950

Black and white photograph of Friedrich Nietzsche with a huge mustache.

American lawyer Clarence Darrow.

Friedrich Nietzsche & Clarence Darrow

Purchase