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

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.