Sentenced to death

The criminal justice system in America is as powerful a shaper of history and society as its better-known counterparts - the military, politics, government, and technology. In a country that lacks a mandatory death sentence for specific crimes, the American strategy for execution proves to be based more upon distinctions between offenders than upon distinctions between offenses.

Five important novels - McTeague, An American Tragedy, Native Son, In Cold Blood and the Executioner's Song - bring readers a vivid awareness of America's punitive codes. Fach details the story of a life that leads to the gallows.

Sentenced to Death places these works against the historical background of crime and capital punishment in America, a nation where public discourse on crime is dominated by images of the electric-chair and the gas chamber, by maximum security prisons, by hardened convicts out on parole. Such images, in turn, mirror and shape the exercise of punitive power.