Atlas
A trail is a short, ordered route through the atlas. Each stop says why it comes next, so a journey reads as an argument rather than a list. Start one, leave, and come back: your place is kept in this browser, and you do not need an account for that.
A path through forensic disciplines whose courtroom claims once exceeded what the underlying research actually supported, and the wrongful convictions that followed: fingerprint identification's own black-box error...
6 stops
A path through this wave's new pages: how Erving Goffman's total institution and Donald Clemmer's prisonization describe the closed world of a prison, how Stanley Cohen's moral panic explains a society's own...
6 stops
Why does anyone commit a crime? Six stops trace one line of answers across more than a century: from Durkheim's account of a society without shared norms, through Merton's and then Agnew's accounts of blocked goals and...
6 stops
A tour through the pioneers and institutions that turned physical evidence into forensic science, from a poison treatise and a fingerprint bureau to a national database built from one detective's decades of advocacy.
6 stops
For most of history a prison sentence meant confinement and little else. This trail follows the reformers who argued punishment should be proportionate, humane and aimed at something more than confinement itself, from...
9 stops
Trails are curated by the atlas. Where you have got to in one is remembered by your own browser and is never sent to us.