There are 126 Poems about Crime & Punishment

“Do Not Embrace Your Mind’s New Negro Friend”
By William Meredith

1977: Poem for Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer
By June Jordan

2212 West Flower Street
By Michael Collier

A Fable
By Etheridge Knight

A Message from the Wanderer
By William E. Stafford

A Pedestrian
By Amit Majmudar

A Political Prisoner
By Dannie Abse

A Short Lexicon of Torture in the Eighties
By Edward Hirsch

A Wasp Woman Visits a Black Junkie in Prison
By Etheridge Knight

Afterimages
By Audre Lorde

American History
By Michael S. Harper

An Xmas Murder
By Alfred Corn

At the Executed Murderer’s Grave
By James Wright

Attempted Assassination of the Queen
By William McGonagall

“More Light! More Light!”
By Anthony Hecht

Baby Villon
By Philip Levine

Ballad of a Hanged Man
By George Elliott Clarke

Ballad of Birmingham
By Dudley Randall

Belief
By Josephine Miles

Boy Breaking Glass
By Gwendolyn Brooks

Brothers-American Drama
By James Weldon Johnson

Climbing Milestone Mountain, August 22, 1937
By Kenneth Rexroth

Clothes
By Edgar Bowers

Cloudy Day
By Jimmy Santiago Baca

Danny
By J. M. Synge

Danny Deever
By Rudyard Kipling

Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg
By Richard F. Hugo

Dejection
By David Baker

Detroit, Tomorrow
By Philip Levine

Doña Josefina Counsels Doña Concepción Before Entering Sears
By Maurice Kilwein Guevara

Elena
By Irving Feldman

For Freckle-Faced Gerald
By Etheridge Knight

For the Taking
By Linda Gregerson

From Violence to Peace
By Jimmy Santiago Baca

George & Rue: Pure, Virtuous Killers
By George Elliott Clarke

Government
By Carl Sandburg

Half Circle
By Ralph Angel

Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane
By Etheridge Knight

Herbert White
By Frank Bidart

Homage to Buck Cline
By David Bottoms

I Saw a Chapel
By William Blake

In Chandler Country
By Dana Gioia

In the Absence of Bliss
By Maxine W. Kumin

In The Summer After “Issue Year” Winter (1873)
By Roberta Hill Whiteman

Incident
By Amiri Baraka

Internal Migration: On Being on Tour
By Alan Dugan

jasper texas 1998
By Lucille Clifton

Letter to the Local Police
By June Jordan

Like an Animal
By Jimmy Santiago Baca

Lines on Locks (or Jail and the Erie Canal)
By John Logan

Litany for Dictatorships
By Stephen Vincent Benét

Marrying the Hangman
By Margaret Atwood

Meditation on Statistical Method
By J. V. Cunningham

Memories of West Street and Lepke
By Robert Lowell

Middle Passage
By Robert E. Hayden

Milton: But in the Wine-presses the Human Grapes Sing not nor Dance
By William Blake

Mugging (I)
By Allen Ginsberg

Nightmare Begins Responsibility
By Michael S. Harper

On the Yard
By Tom Sleigh

Original Pain
By George Elliott Clarke

Outbreak
By Donald Revell

Pentecost
By David Wojahn

Poem about My Rights
By June Jordan

Poem of Disconnected Parts
By Robert Pinsky

Poem to the Detroit River
By Terry Wolverton

Probation
By Averill Curdy

Pulp Fiction
By David Baker

rape
By Patti Smith

Searchers
By D. Nurkse

Skipper Ireson’s Ride
By John Greenleaf Whittier

Somehow They Got Three Stories Up
By W. S. Di Piero

Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle upon the Restoration of Lord Clifford, the Shepherd, to the Estates and Honours of his Ancestors
By William Wordsworth

St. Agnes' Eve
By Kenneth Fearing

State's Attorney Fallas
By Edgar Lee Masters

The Amenities
By Heather McHugh

The Ballad of Nat Turner
By Robert E. Hayden

The Ballad of Reading Gaol
By Oscar Wilde

The Blackstone Rangers
By Gwendolyn Brooks

The Circuit Judge
By Edgar Lee Masters

The Colonel
By Carolyn Forché

The Confession of St. Jim-Ralph
By Denis Johnson

The County Jail
By Jimmy Santiago Baca

The Day of Wrath / Dies Iræ
By Ambrose Bierce

The Debt
By Paul Laurence Dunbar

The Desk
By David Bottoms

The Doubt of Future Foes
By Elizabeth I

The Drowning of Immoral Women
By Herbert Morris

The Epitaph in Form of a Ballad which Villon Made for Himself and his Comrades, Expecting to be Hanged along with Them
By Algernon Charles Swinburne

The Flight
By Grace Schulman

The Hanging Man
By Sylvia Plath

The Haunted Oak
By Paul Laurence Dunbar

The Highwayman
By Alfred Noyes

The King and Queen of Hearts
By Charles Lamb

The Laboratory
By Robert Browning

The Lawyers' Ways
By Paul Laurence Dunbar

The Legend
By Garrett Hongo

The Line-Up
By Dudley Randall

The Little Mariner
By Odysseus Alepoudelis Elytis

The Militance of a Photograph in the Passbook of a Bantu under Detention
By Michael S. Harper

The Minneapolis Poem
By James Wright

The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants
By Paul Muldoon

The Murder of William Remington
By Howard Nemerov

The Nail
By C. K. Williams

The Pardoner's Introduction, Prologue, and Tale in the Hengwrt Manuscript of the Canterbury Tales
By Geoffrey Chaucer

The Prisoner
By R. S. Thomas

The Prisoner of Chillon
By Lord Byron (George Gordon)

The Prisoner. A Fragment
By Emily Jane Brontë

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (text of 1834)
By Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Search Party
By William Matthews

The Sign in My Father’s Hands
By Martín Espada

The Star-splitter
By Robert Frost

The Subculture of the Wrongfully Accused
By Thylias Moss

The Troubles That Women Start Are Men
By Rodney Jones

The Truth about Small Towns
By David Baker

The Use of Poetry
By Michael Ryan

There Are Black
By Jimmy Santiago Baca

Thoughtless Cruelty
By Charles Lamb

To Althea, from Prison
By Richard Lovelace

To the voice of the retired warden of Huntsville Prison (Texas death chamber)
By Averill Curdy

Two Tales of Clumsy
By Gjertrud Schnackenberg

Typhoid Mary
By Kevin Simmonds

Untitled [1. Now you are all here you might as well know ...]
By Thomas James Merton

Wall and Pine: The Rain
By Anne Winters

We were Two Rooms of One Timber, But I Left that Place Alone
By Camille T. Dungy

Wi’-gi-e
By Elise Paschen

Written on a Wall at Woodstock
By Elizabeth I