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

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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.

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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?

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Map

Spider Men

The world’s most-wanted criminals.

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1577 | London

Setting the Crooked Straight

What is a felon?More

1189 | England

Rules of the Road

Tarred and feathered. More

c. 1730 | London

Jenny Diver in Change Alley

Girls gone wild. More

Charts & Graphs

Medieval Torture

Horrible punishments from the Dark Ages.

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Thomas Nashe

Book critic Michael Dirda.

At the age of seventeen, Hawthorne mused to his mother about the possibility of “relying for support upon my pen.”

Black and white photograph of German-language writer Franz Kafka.

Portrait of Fyodor Dostoevsky

Black and white photograph of Mencken looking over his shoulder at the camera

Engraving of William Shakespeare from the first folio edition.

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

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