front cover of Environmental Change
Environmental Change
Rosemary O'Leary
Temple University Press, 1995

Environmental Change examines the impact of hundreds of federal court decisions on the policies and administration of the EPA since its inception in 1970. Having surveyed over 2,000 federal court decisions, Rosemary O'Leary presents case studies of five important policy areas: water quality, pesticides, toxic substances, air quality, and hazardous wastes.

Compliance with court orders, O'Leary discovered, has become one of the EPA's top priorities, at times overshadowing congressional mandates and the authority of EPA administrators.

For an agency often caught between the White House and Congressional agendas, the competing interests of industry and environmental groups, and turf battles with other federal agencies, O'Leary argues, judicial decision making is crucial in the public policy process.

Environmental Change offers valuable information in the fields of public policy and environmental law.

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Erich Fromm and Critical Criminology
BEYOND THE PUNITIVE SOCIETY
Edited by Kevin Anderson and Richard Quinney
University of Illinois Press, 2000

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The Eternal Criminal Record
James B. Jacobs
Harvard University Press, 2015

For over sixty million Americans, possessing a criminal record overshadows everything else about their public identity. A rap sheet, or even a court appearance or background report that reveals a run-in with the law, can have fateful consequences for a person’s interactions with just about everyone else. The Eternal Criminal Record makes transparent a pervasive system of police databases and identity screening that has become a routine feature of American life.

The United States is unique in making criminal information easy to obtain by employers, landlords, neighbors, even cyberstalkers. Its nationally integrated rap-sheet system is second to none as an effective law enforcement tool, but it has also facilitated the transfer of ever more sensitive information into the public domain. While there are good reasons for a person’s criminal past to be public knowledge, records of arrests that fail to result in convictions are of questionable benefit. Simply by placing someone under arrest, a police officer has the power to tag a person with a legal history that effectively incriminates him or her for life.

In James Jacobs’s view, law-abiding citizens have a right to know when individuals in their community or workplace represent a potential threat. But convicted persons have rights, too. Jacobs closely examines the problems created by erroneous record keeping, critiques the way the records of individuals who go years without a new conviction are expunged, and proposes strategies for eliminating discrimination based on criminal history, such as certifying the records of those who have demonstrated their rehabilitation.

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Everyday Desistance
The Transition to Adulthood Among Formerly Incarcerated Youth
Abrams, Laura S.
Rutgers University Press, 2017
Winner of the 2020 Society for Social Work and Research Book Award

In Everyday Desistance, Laura Abrams and Diane J. Terry examine the lives of young people who spent considerable time in and out of correctional institutions as adolescents. These formerly incarcerated youth often struggle with the onset of adult responsibilities at a much earlier age than their more privileged counterparts. In the context of urban Los Angeles, with a large-scale gang culture and diminished employment prospects, further involvement in crime appears almost inevitable. Yet, as Abrams and Terry point out, these formerly imprisoned youth are often quite resilient and can be successful at creating lives for themselves after  months or even years of living in institutions run by the juvenile justice system.
 
This book narrates the day-to-day experiences of these young men and women, focusing on their attempts to surmount the challenges of adulthood, resisting a return to criminal activity, and formulating long-term goals for a secure adult future.
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The Ex-Prisoner's Dilemma
How Women Negotiate Competing Narratives of Reentry and Desistance
Leverentz, Andrea M
Rutgers University Press, 2014
2014 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

When a woman leaves prison, she enters a world of competing messages and conflicting advice.  Staff from prison, friends, family members, workers at halfway houses and treatment programs all have something to say about who she is, who she should be, and what she should do.  The Ex-Prisoner’s Dilemma offers an in-depth, firsthand look at how the former prisoner manages messages about returning to the community. 

Over the course of a year, Andrea Leverentz conducted repeated interviews with forty-nine women as they adjusted to life outside of prison and worked to construct new ideas of themselves as former prisoners and as mothers, daughters, sisters, romantic partners, friends, students, and workers.  Listening to these women, along with their family members, friends, and co-workers, Leverentz pieces together the narratives they have created to explain their past records and guide their future behavior.  She traces where these narratives came from and how they were shaped by factors such as gender, race, maternal status, age, and experiences in prison, halfway houses, and twelve-step programs—factors that in turn shaped the women’s expectations for themselves, and others’ expectations of them.  The women’s stories form a powerful picture of the complex, complicated human experience behind dry statistics and policy statements regarding prisoner reentry into society for women, how the experience is different for men and the influence society plays.

With its unique view of how society’s mixed messages play out in ex-prisoners’ lived realities, The Ex-Prisoner’s Dilemma shows the complexity of these women’s experiences within the broad context of the war on drugs and mass incarceration in America. It offers invaluable lessons for helping such women successfully rejoin society.
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front cover of Extradition Politics & Human Rights
Extradition Politics & Human Rights
Christopher Pyle
Temple University Press, 2001
Three hundred years ago, few people cared about the murky pasts of new arrivals to the United States, and the countries they had left made few efforts to pursue them to their new home. Today, with the growth of bureaucracy, telecommunications, and air travel, extradition has become a full-time business. But the public's knowledge of, and consequent concern about, extradition remains minimal, aroused from time to time by newspaper headlines, only to fade.

In this readable and compelling history of extradition in America, Christopher Pyle remedies that ignorance. Using  American constitutional law and drawing on a wealth of historical cases, he describes the collision of law and politics that occurs when a foreign country demands the surrender of individuals held to be terrorists by some and freedom fighters by others. He shows how U.S. policymakers have attempted to substitute deportation for extradition and turn the surrender of a foreign national (or even an American citizen) into a political rather than a judicial process.

Beginning with the  New England Puritans' refusal to surrender the "regicides" who had signed the death warrant of Charles I, he traces the attitudes and ideologies that have shaped American extradition practice, culminating in the efforts by the Reagan and Bush administrations to turn the legal extradition process into an executive tool of state policy. Along the way we meet such luminaries as James Madison and John Stuart Mill, William Rehnquist and Oliver North, as well as pirates and fugitive slaves, anarchists and refugees, drug lords and runaway sailors.

Woven throughout this story is the author's belief that current developments in extradition law ignore or actually violate the principles of individual liberty, due process, and humanity on which we claim our country was built. As he remarks in the Introduction, "Extradition involves the surrender of human beings -- persons under the protection of our Constitution -- to foreign regimes, many of which are unjust. This reality was well understood in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the United States was a refuge for the victims of European oppression, but it has  been disregarded frequently in the twentieth century as we have sought to stem the tide of immigration and develop advantageous economic and political relations with autocratic regimes of every stripe."
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