If prisons bring out the worst in people, why are we building more of them? Two new books, Philip Zimbardo's The Lucifer Effect and Sasha Abramsky's American Furies, answer that to understand prisons ...

It’s been said about Bernard Madoff that he wanted to be caught. That knowledge of the extent of his crimes was its own burden, one relieved by those same crimes being exposed. It was impossible not ...

These days most people don't remember psychiatrist Karl Menninger. But in his day, he was an important public intellectual. His 1966 book The Crime of Punishment argued that all punishment is cruel ...

Support trusted local news with a donation today. Give now for a chance to get your gift MATCHED. In The New York Times Book Review weekly feature, “By the Book,” an author is sometimes asked to ...

At the end of “Crime and Punishment,” which was completed in 1866, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s hero, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, has a dream that so closely reflects the roilings of our own pandemic one ...

Last month, the state of Arkansas, which had executed nobody since 2005, put to death Ledell Lee for the crime of murdering Debra Reese in 1993. Why now—11 years after the last execution, 24 years ...