BiblioVault - Books about Criminality

Between Care and Criminality

Marriage, Citizenship, and Family in Australian Social Welfare

Helena Zeweri

Rutgers University Press, 2024

Between Care and Criminality examines social welfare’s encounter with migration and marriage in a period of intensified border control in Melbourne, Australia. It offers an in-depth ethnographic account of the effort to prevent forced marriage in the aftermath of a 2013 law that criminalized the practice. Disproportionately targeted toward Muslim migrant communities, prevention efforts were tasked with making the family relations and marital practices of migrants objects of policy knowledge in the name of care and community empowerment. Through tracing the everyday ways that direct service providers, police, and advocates learned to identify imminent marriages and at-risk individuals, this book reveals how the domain of social welfare becomes the new frontier where the settler colonial state judges good citizenship. In doing so, it invites social welfare to reflect on how migrant conceptions of familial care, personhood, and mutual obligation become structured by the violence of displacement, borders, and conditional citizenship.

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Corrupt Illinois

Patronage, Cronyism, and Criminality

Thomas J. Gradel and Dick Simpson

University of Illinois Press, 2015

Public funds spent on jets and horses. Shoeboxes stuffed with embezzled cash. Ghost payrolls and incarcerated ex-governors. Illinois' culture of "Where's mine?" and the public apathy it engenders has made our state and local politics a disgrace.

In Corrupt Illinois, veteran political observers Thomas J. Gradel and Dick Simpson take aim at business-as-usual. Naming names, the authors lead readers through a gallery of rogues and rotten apples to illustrate how generations of chicanery have undermined faith in, and hope for, honest government. From there, they lay out how to implement institutional reforms that provide accountability and eradicate the favoritism, sweetheart deals, and conflicts of interest corroding our civic life.

Corrupt Illinois lays out a blueprint to transform our politics from a pay-to-play–driven marketplace into what it should be: an instrument of public good.

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The Mark of Criminality

Rhetoric, Race, and Gangsta Rap in the War-on-Crime Era

Bryan J. McCann

University of Alabama Press, 2017

Illustrates the ways that the “war on crime” became conjoined—aesthetically, politically, and rhetorically—with the emergence of gangsta rap as a lucrative and deeply controversial subgenre of hip-hop

In The Mark of Criminality: Rhetoric, Race, and Gangsta Rap in the War-on-Crime Era, Bryan J. McCann argues that gangsta rap should be viewed as more than a damaging reinforcement of an era’s worst racial stereotypes. Rather, he positions the works of key gangsta rap artists, as well as the controversies their work produced, squarely within the law-and-order politics and popular culture of the 1980s and 1990s to reveal a profoundly complex period in American history when the meanings of crime and criminality were incredibly unstable.

At the center of this era—when politicians sought to prove their “tough-on-crime” credentials—was the mark of criminality, a set of discourses that labeled members of predominantly poor, urban, and minority communities as threats to the social order. Through their use of the mark of criminality, public figures implemented extremely harsh penal polices that have helped make the United States the world’s leading jailer of its adult population.

At the same time when politicians like Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton and television shows such as COPS and America’s Most Wanted perpetuated images of gang and drug-filled ghettos, gangsta rap burst out of the hip-hop nation, emanating mainly from the predominantly black neighborhoods of South Central Los Angeles. Groups like NWA and solo artists (including Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and Tupac Shakur) became millionaires by marketing the very discourses political and cultural leaders used to justify their war on crime. For these artists, the mark of criminality was a source of power, credibility, and revenue. By understanding gangsta rap as a potent, if deeply imperfect, enactment of the mark of criminality, we can better understand how crime is always a site of struggle over meaning. Furthermore, by underscoring the nimble rhetorical character of criminality, we can learn lessons that may inform efforts to challenge our nation’s failed policies of mass incarceration.

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