Schools should be safe—but they are not always safe for everybody. Authors Pamela Wilcox, Graham Ousey, and Marie Skubak Tillyer studied crime among students located across diverse middle- and high-school settings to investigate why some students engage in delinquency—but others do not—and why some students are more prone to victimization. School Zone focuses on the three key interactional elements—context, victims, and offenders—to understand and explain the impact of common crimes such as theft, weapon carrying, drug possession and the verbal, physical, and sexual harassment of classmates. 

The authors also consider how individual students and schools respond to crime and threats. They analyze the variables that schools can control in planning and practice that explain why some schools have higher crime rates. School Zone uses empirical studies to provide a comprehensive understanding of the patterns and causes of variation in individual- and aggregate-level school-based offending and victimization experiences while also addressing the adequacy of wide-ranging criminological explanations and crime prevention policies. 

In their conclusion, the authors assess the extent to which currently popular strategies of school crime prevention align with what they have discovered through their problem-analysis framework and scientific understandings of student offending and victimization.

This report synthesizes the available scientific evidence on the effects of various firearm policies on firearm deaths, violent crime, the gun industry, participation in hunting and sport shooting, and other outcomes. Based on this synthesis, the authors highlight policies whose effects are better supported by evidence and areas where more and better information could contribute to establishing fair and effective gun policies.

The exposure of undercover policeman Mark Kennedy in the eco-activist movement revealed how the state monitors and undermines political activism. This book shows the other grave threat to our political freedoms - undercover activities by corporations.

Secret Manoeuvres in the Dark documents how corporations are halting legitimate action and investigation by activists. Using exclusive access to previously confidential sources, Eveline Lubbers shows how companies such as Nestlé, Shell and McDonalds use covert methods to evade accountability. She argues that corporate intelligence gathering has shifted from being reactive to pro-active, with important implications for democracy itself.

Secret Manoeuvres in the Dark will be vital reading for activists, investigative and citizen journalists, and all who care about freedom and democracy in the 21st century.

The perception of rising insecurity has plagued Paraguay over the past decade as the country has continued its transition from authoritarian to democratic rule. At the same time, reforms of the penal code and the code of criminal procedure have been implemented, leading many to attribute the rising sense of insecurity to the new, rights-based approach to criminal justice. In Security in Paraguay: Analysis and Responses in Comparative Perspective, the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School assesses the disparity between the sensation of insecurity and actual levels of urban crime. The book further analyzes the impact of political actors and the media in heightening public fear of crime. Security in Paraguay draws upon comparative case studies and the latest research on criminal justice policy in Latin America to situate Paraguay’s experience in a broader regional context and to offer recommendations to guide future policymaking.

Sentencing matters. Reform initiatives hope to impart more uniformity and fairness in sentencing. Tough-on-crime laws like “three strikes” and mandatory minimum provisions deprive judges of sentencing discretion. While sentencing guidelines have been adopted by approximately 20 states since the early 1980s, many judges operate without guidelines.

Sentencing without Guidelines is Rhys Hester’s deep dive into how South Carolina, which never passed sentencing guideline legislation, nonetheless created meaningful punishment reform. It achieved uniformity in sentencing with a traveling circuit of judges, informal norms among judges, and the unique phenomenon of the “Plea Judge” to manage cases.

Hester examines how prior convictions, race, and geographical differences impact sentences to explain why individuals get the criminal sentences they do. He also explores how legal reform mechanisms can influence punishment goals and policy. Sentencing without Guidelines shows the benefits and drawbacks South Carolina experienced as it met sentencing reform goals. These lessons can be translated into policy for other jurisdictions.

On July 31, 1997, a six-man Emergency Service team from the NYPD raided a terrorist cell in Brooklyn and narrowly prevented a suicide bombing of the New York subway that would have cost hundreds, possibly thousands of lives.

Seven Shots tells the dramatic story of that raid, the painstaking police work involved, and its paradoxical aftermath, which drew the officers into a conflict with other rank-and-file police and publicity-hungry top brass. Jennifer C. Hunt draws on her personal knowledge of the NYPD and a network of police contacts extending from cop to four-star chief, to trace the experience of three officers on the Emergency Service entry team and the two bomb squad detectives who dismantled the live device. She follows their lives for five years, from that near-fatal day in 1997, through their encounters inside the brutal world of departmental politics, and on to 9/11, when they once again put their lives at risk in the fight against terrorism, racing inside the burning towers and sorting through the ash, debris, and body parts. Throughout this fast paced narrative, Hunt maintains a strikingly fine-grained, street-level view, allowing us to understand the cops on their own terms—and often in their own words. The result is a compelling insider’s picture of the human beings who work in two elite units in the NYPD and the moral and physical danger and courage involved.

As gripping as an Ed McBain novel—and just as steeped in New York cop culture and personalities—Seven Shots takes readers on an unforgettable journey behind the shield and into the hearts of New York City police.

Sexual blackmail first reached public notice in the late eighteenth century when laws against sodomy were exploited by the unscrupulous to extort money from those they could entrap. Angus McLaren chronicles this parasitic crime, tracing its expansion in England and the United States through the Victorian era and into the first half of the twentieth century. The labeling of certain sexual acts as disreputable, if not actually criminal--abortion, infidelity, prostitution, and homosexuality--armed would-be blackmailers and led to a crescendo of court cases and public scandals in the 1920s and 1930s. As the importance of sexual respectability was inflated, so too was the spectacle of its loss.

Charting the rise and fall of sexual taboos and the shifting tides of shame, McLaren enables us to survey evolving sexual practices and discussions. He has mined the archives to tell his story through a host of fascinating characters and cases, from male bounders to designing women, from badger games to gold diggers, from victimless crimes to homosexual outing. He shows how these stories shocked, educated, entertained, and destroyed the lives of their victims. He also demonstrates how muckraking journalists, con men, and vengeful women determined the boundaries of sexual respectability and damned those considered deviant. Ultimately, the sexual revolution of the 1960s blurred the long-rigid lines of respectability, leading to a rapid decline of blackmail fears. This fascinating view of the impact of regulating sexuality from the late Victorian Age to our own time demonstrates the centrality of blackmail to sexual practices, deviance, and the law.

Shadows of Doubt reveals how deeply stereotypes distort our interactions, shape crime, and deform the criminal justice system.

If you’re a robber, how do you choose your victims? As a police officer, how afraid are you of the young man you’re about to arrest? As a judge, do you think the suspect in front of you will show up in court if released from pretrial detention? As a juror, does the defendant seem guilty to you? Your answers may depend on the stereotypes you hold, and the stereotypes you believe others hold. In this provocative, pioneering book, economists Brendan O’Flaherty and Rajiv Sethi explore how stereotypes can shape the ways crimes unfold and how they contaminate the justice system through far more insidious, pervasive, and surprising paths than we have previously imagined.

Crime and punishment occur under extreme uncertainty. Offenders, victims, police officers, judges, and jurors make high-stakes decisions with limited information, under severe time pressure. With compelling stories and extensive data on how people act as they try to commit, prevent, or punish crimes, O’Flaherty and Sethi reveal the extent to which we rely on stereotypes as shortcuts in our decision making. Sometimes it’s simple: Robbers tend to target those they stereotype as being more compliant. Other interactions display a complex and sometimes tragic interplay of assumptions: “If he thinks I’m dangerous, he might shoot. I’ll shoot first.”

Shadows of Doubt shows how deeply stereotypes are implicated in the most controversial criminal justice issues of our time, and how a clearer understanding of their effects can guide us toward a more just society.

This book analyzes newly collected data on crime and social development up to age 70 for 500 men who were remanded to reform school in the 1940s. Born in Boston in the late 1920s and early 1930s, these men were the subjects of the classic study Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency by Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck (1950). Updating their lives at the close of the twentieth century, and connecting their adult experiences to childhood, this book is arguably the longest longitudinal study of age, crime, and the life course to date.

John Laub and Robert Sampson's long-term data, combined with in-depth interviews, defy the conventional wisdom that links individual traits such as poor verbal skills, limited self-control, and difficult temperament to long-term trajectories of offending. The authors reject the idea of categorizing offenders to reveal etiologies of offending--rather, they connect variability in behavior to social context. They find that men who desisted from crime were rooted in structural routines and had strong social ties to family and community.

By uniting life-history narratives with rigorous data analysis, the authors shed new light on long-term trajectories of crime and current policies of crime control.

In a society where trust is in short supply and democracy weak, the Mafia sells protection, a guarantee of safe conduct for parties to commercial transactions. Drawing on the confessions of eight Mafiosi, Diego Gambetta develops an elegant analysis of the economic and political role of the Sicilian Mafia.

This first volume of a two-volume collection of essays provides a comprehensive examination of the idea of social control in the history of Europe. The uniqueness of these volumes lies in two main areas. First, the contributors compare methods of social control on many levels, from police to shaming, church to guilds. Second, they look at these formal and informal institutions as two-way processes. Unlike many studies of social control in the past, the scholars here examine how individuals and groups that are being controlled necessarily participate in and shape the manner in which they are regulated. Hardly passive victims of discipline and control, these folks instead claimed agency in that process, accepting and resisting—and thus molding—the controls under which they functioned. The essays in this volume focus on the interplay of ecclesiastical institutions and the emerging states, examining discipline from a bottom-up perspective.

This second volume of a two-volume collection of essays provides a comprehensive examination of the idea of social control in the history of Europe. The uniqueness of these volumes lies in two main areas. First, the contributors compare methods of social control on many levels, from police to shaming, church to guilds. Second, they look at these formal and informal institutions as two-way processes. Unlike many studies of social control in the past, the scholars here examine how individuals and groups that are being controlled necessarily participate in and shape the manner in which they are regulated. Hardly passive victims of discipline and control, these folks instead claimed agency in that process, accepting and resisting—and thus molding—the controls under which they functioned.

The essays in this volume explore the various means by which communities in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe were subjected to forms of discipline, noting how the communities themselves generated their own forms of internal control. In addition, the essays discuss various policing institutions, exploring in particular the question of how liberal and totalitarian regimes differed in their styles of control, repression, and surveillance.

This book offers a pioneering window into the elusive workings of state-corporate crime within the mining industry. It follows a campaign of resistance organised by indigenous activists on the island of Bougainville, who struggled to close a Rio Tinto owned copper mine, and investigates the subsequent state-corporate response, which led to the shocking loss of some 10,000 lives.

Drawing on internal records and interviews with senior officials, Kristian Lasslett examines how an articulation of capitalist growth mediated through patrimonial politics, imperial state-power, large-scale mining, and clan-based, rural society, prompted an ostensibly ‘responsible’ corporate citizen, and liberal state actors, to organise a counterinsurgency campaign punctuated with gross human rights abuses.

State Crime on the Margins of Empire represents a unique intervention rooted in a classical Marxist tradition that challenges positivist streams of criminological scholarship, in order to illuminate with greater detail the historical forces faced by communities in the global south caught in the increasingly violent dynamics of the extractive industries.

On the night of the presidential election in 1876, a gang of counterfeiters out of Chicago attempted to steal the entombed embalmed body of Abraham Lincoln and hold it for ransom. The custodian of the tomb was so shaken by the incident that he willingly dedicated the rest of his life to protecting the president’s corpse.

In a lively and dramatic narrative, Thomas J. Craughwell returns to this bizarre, and largely forgotten, event with the first book to place the grave robbery in historical context. He takes us through the planning and execution of the crime and the outcome of the investigation. He describes the reactions of Mary Todd Lincoln and Robert Todd Lincoln to the theft—and the peculiar silence of a nation. He follows the unlikely tale of what happened to Lincoln’s remains after the attempted robbery, and details the plan devised by the Lincoln Guard of Honor to prevent a similar abominable recurrence.

Along the way, Craughwell offers entertaining sidelights on the rise of counterfeiting in America and the establishment of the Secret Service to combat it; the prevalence of grave robberies; the art of nineteenth-century embalming; and the emergence among Irish immigrants of an ambitious middle class—and a criminal underclass.

This rousing story of hapless con men, intrepid federal agents, and ordinary Springfield citizens who honored their native son by keeping a valuable, burdensome secret for decades offers a riveting glimpse into late-nineteenth-century America, and underscores that truth really is sometimes stranger than fiction.

Detectives work the streets--an arena of action, vice, lust, greed, aggression, and violence--to gather shards of information about who did what to whom. They also work the cumbersome machinery of the justice system--semi-military police hierarchies with their endless jockeying for prestige, procedure-driven district attorney offices, and backlogged courts--transforming hard-won street knowledge into public narratives of responsibility for crime. Street Stories, based on years of fieldwork with the New York City Police Department and the District Attorney of New York, examines the moral ambiguities of the detectives' world as they shuttle between the streets and a bureaucratic behemoth.

In piecing together street stories to solve intriguing puzzles of agency and motive, detectives crisscross the checkerboard of urban life. Their interactions in social strata high and low foster cosmopolitan habits of mind and easy conversational skills. And they become incomparable storytellers. This book brims with the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction violence of the underworld and tells about a justice apparatus that splinters knowledge, reduces life-and-death issues to arcane hair-splitting, and makes rationality a bedfellow of absurdity.

Detectives' stories lay bare their occupational consciousness--the cunning and trickery of their investigative craft, their self-images, moral rules-in-use, and judgments about the players in their world--as well as their personal ambitions, sensibilities, resentments, hopes, and fears. When detectives do make cases, they take satisfaction in removing predators from the streets and helping to ensure public safety. But their stories also illuminate dark corners of a troubled social order.

Distinguished Scholar Award, American Sociological Association Criminology Section, 1987 "Miller's firsthand report of female offenders documents a picture of contemporary female criminality.... Street Woman is field research at its best. The reader will be angered and disturbed, enlightened and absorbed." --Darrell J. Steffenmeier In this rich, well-written study, Eleanor Miller analyzes the social organization of street hustling and the lives of the women involved in it. Miller views hustling as "illegal work": prostitution, fraud, forgery, embezzlement, and larceny. Using information garnered from life histories and interviews with 64 female street hustlers in Milwaukee, she vividly describes a female underclass recruited to the world of the street for a substantial period of their lives. Street Woman offers a challenging alternative to recent sociological studies that view the "women's movement" as directly linked to the increasing participation of women in property crime. Miller shows that this increase in crime is a response to sustained poverty. Thus, many sociologists are out of touch with the typical female criminal in this country on both a demographic and personal level. "Typical" female hustlers, as their own words poignantly reveal, are young, poor minority women who have limited education and skills and who also have several children of their own. They adopt characteristic interpersonal relationships and familial forms that insure their survival but which leave the youngsters at greater risk of being recruited to street life. Street Woman is a work of great importance to sociologists and criminologists alike, both in its ramifications for public policy and its explicit implications for further research. Most important, Miller's desire to render a more personal portrait, to enable us to "at least recognize the individual in the picture painted of the group," leaves the reader with haunting portrayals of the women who struggle to survive in the violent, desperate, drug-ridden world of the street. "This book deserves a large audience for it provides convincing detail on the recruitment of women to this kind of demi monde and spells out for us a far more persuasive social process than that anticipated in more abstract models. Like the best of our ethnographics research it provides both a refinement of existing theory and a descriptive document that can outlast existing theory." --Gerald D. Suttles, University of Chicago

“No two fingerprints are alike,” or so it goes. For nearly a hundred years fingerprints have represented definitive proof of individual identity in our society. We trust them to tell us who committed a crime, whether a criminal record exists, and how to resolve questions of disputed identity.

But in Suspect Identities, Simon Cole reveals that the history of criminal identification is far murkier than we have been led to believe. Cole traces the modern system of fingerprint identification to the nineteenth-century bureaucratic state, and its desire to track and control increasingly mobile, diverse populations whose race or ethnicity made them suspect in the eyes of authorities. In an intriguing history that traverses the globe, taking us to India, Argentina, France, England, and the United States, Cole excavates the forgotten history of criminal identification—from photography to exotic anthropometric systems based on measuring body parts, from fingerprinting to DNA typing. He reveals how fingerprinting ultimately won the trust of the public and the law only after a long battle against rival identification systems.

As we rush headlong into the era of genetic identification, and as fingerprint errors are being exposed, this history uncovers the fascinating interplay of our elusive individuality, police and state power, and the quest for scientific certainty. Suspect Identities offers a necessary corrective to blind faith in the infallibility of technology, and a compelling look at its role in defining each of us.