Contempt of Court: A Scholar's Battle for Free Speech from Behind Bars

by Rik Scarce, Patricia A. Adler (Foreword), Peter Adler (Foreword)

In 1993 Rik Scarce was imprisoned for contempt of court in Spokane, Washington. For five months he refused to testify to a federal grand jury about his interviews with animal rights activists after they had broken into a research laboratory, and his story made headlines in numerous newspapers. Now Scarce tells of his jailing and the rationale behind his ethical stance, bringing an ethnographer's trained sensibility and a journalist's storytelling skill to his tale. Viewed as an outsider even by his fellow inmates, Scarce gained from his imprisonment a painful, rare glimpse of the jail world. This text raises serious questions about the failures of the American justice system and protection of civil liberties, and is a valuable resource for criminologists, sociologists, and corrections professionals.

248 pages, Paperback

First published July 28, 2005