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HeinOnline’s Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture & Law

This HeinOnline collection brings together a multitude of essential legal materials on slavery in the United States and the English-speaking world. This includes every statute passed by every colony and state on slavery, every federal statute dealing with slavery, and all reported state and federal cases on slavery. Cases go into the 20th century, because long after slavery was ended, there were still court cases based on issues emanating from slavery. 

HeinOnline’s Criminal Justice & Criminology offers an historical overview of these ever-changing disciplines and their various expressions in American and English law over time. Collecting Bureau of Justice statistics, memoirs of retired Scotland Yard investigators, congressional hearings on drug control policies, accounts of prison life in days long past and much more, this collection explores how criminal justice has changed in America and the effect criminology has had on those changes. It collects government documents as well as rare or hard to find pamphlets, memoirs, and books written by ordinary law enforcement officers and not-so-famous criminals. To help users navigate the content spanning these two wide-reaching disciplines, all titles in this collection have been subject coded into 16 subject areas: Attorney General, Crimes and Criminals, Criminal Statistics, Criminology, Drug Enforcement, Government Law, Investigation and Forensics, Juvenile Justice, Law and Procedure, Law Enforcement, Organized Crime, Penology, Reform and Recidivism, Reminiscences, Sex Crimes, and Victimology.

While much progress has been made since the days of Beccaria and Peel, America’s modern criminal justice system is not perfect. Today, the United States incarcerates more people than any other nation in the world. More than 2 million Americans sit in jail and prison today, and although the United States makes up only 5% of the world’s population, it has 25% of the world’s incarcerated population. As prosecutorial methods have turned more to having offenders plead out their charges rather than take cases to trial, and policy changes mean more offenses warrant incarceration for longer periods of time, incarceration rates have skyrocketed. 1 in every 37 adults in the United States is under some form of correctional supervision, be it in jail, prison, or on parole. And the United States is still the only remaining Western nation that uses the death penalty as a means of punishment. Prisoners might no longer be whipped or held in the stocks, but there are more of them than ever. Changes in the criminal justice system have had both beneficial and detrimental consequences. As criminologists study the current landscape of America’s criminal justice system, policies once thought to be cutting edge are being reexamined. No doubt these two disciplines together will produce a criminal justice system that in forty years will operate under different principles than the one we live in today. Whatever changes may come about, they will share the same motivations that have characterized all changes in criminology and criminal justice systems throughout the centuries: to create the best response to crime that serves society’s needs. Methods of the past may have been superseded, but the spirits behind its various debates still resonates today.