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459 books match the query 'Criminology' and 88 start with c

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Elliot Studt

Russell Sage Foundation, 1968

One of the most detailed reports ever made on an effort to establish a therapeutic community within a California prison. This work describes how the program was launched, gives a number of examples of its operation, and outlines the new problems and prospects created for inmates, staff, and the broader prison administration by this attempt to redefine the roles within the prison.

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CERTAIN OTHER COUNTRIES

Homicide, Gender, and National Identity in Late Nineteenth-Century England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales

Carolyn A. Conley

The Ohio State University Press, 2007

Even though England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales were under a common Parliament in the nineteenth century, cultural, economic, and historical differences led to very different values and assumptions about crime and punishment. For example, though the Scots were the most likely to convict accused killers, English, Welsh, and Irish killers were two and a half times more likely to be executed for their crimes. In Certain Other Countries, Carolyn A. Conley explores how the concepts of national identity and criminal violence influenced each other in the Victorian-era United Kingdom. It also addresses the differences among the nations as well as the ways that homicide trials illuminate the issues of gender, ethnicity, family, privacy, property, and class. Homicides reflect assumptions about the proper balance of power in various relationships. For example, Englishmen were ten times more likely to kill women they were courting than were men in the Celtic nations.

By combining quantitative techniques in the analysis of over seven thousand cases, as well as careful and detailed readings of individual cases, the book exposes trends and patterns that might not have been evident in works using only one method. For instance, by examining all homicide trials rather than concentrating exclusively on a few highly celebrated ones, it becomes clear that most female killers were not viewed with particular horror, but were treated much like their male counterparts.

The conclusions offer challenges and correctives to existing scholarship on gender, ethnicity, class, and violence. The book also demonstrates that the Welsh, Scots, and English remained quite distinct long after their melding as Britons was announced and celebrated. By blending a study of trends in violent behavior with ideas about national identity, Conley brings together rich and hotly debated fields of modern history. This book will be valuable both for scholars of crime and violence as well as for those studying British history.

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CONTROLLING VICE

REGULATING BROTHEL PROSTITUTION IN ST. PAUL, 1865–1883

JOEL BEST

The Ohio State University Press, 1998

For eighteen years following the Civil War, the police in St. Paul, Minnesota, informally regulated brothel prostitution. Each month, the madams who ran the brothels were charged with keeping houses of ill fame and fined in the city’s municipal court. In effect, they were paying licensing fees in order to operate illegal enterprises. This arrangement was open; during this period, the city’s newspapers published hundreds of articles about vice and its regulation.

Joel Best claims that the sort of informal regulation in St. Paul was common in the late nineteenth century and was far more typical than the better known but brief experiment with legalization tried in St. Louis. With few exceptions, the usual approach to these issues of social control has been to treat informal regulation as a form of corruption, but Best’s view is that St. Paul’s arrangement exposes the assumption that the criminal justice system must seek to eradicate crime. He maintains that other policies are possible.

In a book that integrates history and sociology, the author has reconstructed the municipal court records for most of 1865–83, using newspaper articles, an arrest ledger kept by the St. Paul police, and municipal court dockets. He has been able to trace which madams operated brothels and the identities of many of the prostitutes who lived and worked in them.

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COPS AND KIDS

Policing Juvenile Delinquency in Urban America, 1890–1940

David B. Wolcott

The Ohio State University Press, 2005

Juvenile courts were established in the early twentieth century with the ideal of saving young offenders from “delinquency.” Many kids, however, never made it to juvenile court. Their cases were decided by a different agency—the police.

Cops and Kids analyzes how police regulated juvenile behavior in turn-of-the-century America. Focusing on Los Angeles, Chicago, and Detroit, it examines how police saw their mission, how they dealt with public demands, and how they coped daily with kids. Whereas most scholarship in the field of delinquency has focused on progressive-era reformers who created a separate juvenile justice system, David B. Wolcott’s study looks instead at the complicated, sometimes coercive, relationship between police officers and young offenders. Indeed, Wolcott argues, police officers used their authority in a variety of ways to influence boys’ and girls’ behavior. Prior to the creation of juvenile courts, police officers often disciplined kids by warning and releasing them, keeping them out of courts. Establishing separate juvenile courts, however, encouraged the police to cast a wider net, pulling more young offenders into the new system. While some departments embraced “child-friendly” approaches to policing, others clung to rough-and-tumble methods. By the 1920s and 1930s, many police departments developed new strategies that combined progressive initiatives with tougher law enforcement targeted specifically at growing minority populations.

Cops and Kids illuminates conflicts between reformers and police over the practice of juvenile justice and sheds new light on the origins of lasting tensions between America’s police and urban communities.

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CRIME, JUSTICE, HISTORY

ERIC MONKKONEN

The Ohio State University Press, 2002

Crime in the U.S. and the institutions for its control are deeply embedded in and shaped by history. The historical origins have often become invisible, and their recovery difficult, but any understanding of the contemporary situation requires historical context. For over twenty-five years Eric H. Monkkonen has worked on some of the puzzles and problems in recovering the history of crime and police.

Much of his work has appeared in articles, often in specialized journals or not in English, which this book collects for the first time. In addition to Monkkonen’s major published articles, this volume includes several new ones. The topics embrace violence, public disorder, policing, popular culture, and contrasts between the U.S. and Europe. Some articles illuminate special methodological and source issues that challenge historians of criminal justice. As well as dealing with serious crime, this book includes several articles on specifically urban problems and solutions associated with disorder, crime, and poverty.

In contrast to the more technical articles, several chapters, which originally appeared as op-ed pieces, show how historical understanding can help address current policy issues in crime and crime control. All too often, current policy debates occur without proper historical background. As a result, old ideas that have been tried and rejected are re-introduced, or new and sometimes simple ideas are ignored.

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Captivating Technology

Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life

Ruha Benjamin, editor

Duke University Press, 2019

The contributors to Captivating Technology examine how carceral technologies such as electronic ankle monitors and predictive-policing algorithms are being deployed to classify and coerce specific populations and whether these innovations can be appropriated and reimagined for more liberatory ends.

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Captive Revolution

Palestinian Women's Anti-Colonial Struggle within the Israeli Prison System

Nahla Abdo

Pluto Press, 2014

Women throughout the world have always played their part in struggles against colonialism, imperialism and other forms of oppression. However, there are few books on Arab political prisoners, fewer still on the Palestinians who have been detained in their thousands for their political activism and resistance.

Nahla Abdo's Captive Revolution seeks to break the silence on Palestinian women political detainees, providing a vital contribution to research on women, revolutions, national liberation and anti-colonial resistance. Based on stories of the women themselves, as well as her own experiences as a former political prisoner, Abdo draws on a wealth of oral history and primary research in order to analyse their anti-colonial struggle, their agency and their appalling treatment as political detainees.

Making crucial comparisons with the experiences of female political detainees in other conflicts, and emphasising the vital role Palestinian political culture and memorialisation of the 'Nakba' have had on their resilience and resistance, Captive Revolution is a rich and revealing addition to our knowledge of this little-studied phenomenon.

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Captivity Beyond Prisons

Criminalization Experiences of Latina (Im)migrants

By Martha D. Escobar

University of Texas Press, 2016

Today the United States leads the world in incarceration rates. The country increasingly relies on the prison system as a “fix” for the regulation of societal issues. Captivity Beyond Prisons is the first full-length book to explicitly link prisons and incarceration to the criminalization of Latina (im)migrants.

Starting in the 1990s, the United States saw tremendous expansion in the number of imprisoned (im)migrants, specifically Latinas/os. Consequently, there was also an increase in the number of deportations. In addition to regulating society, prisons also serve as a reproductive control strategy, both in preventing female inmates from having children and by separating them from their families. With an eye to racialized and gendered technologies of power, Escobar argues that incarcerated Latinas are especially depicted as socially irrecuperable because they are not considered useful within the neoliberal labor market. This perception impacts how they are criminalized, which is not limited to incarceration but also extends to and affects Latina (im)migrants’ everyday lives. Escobar also explores the relationship between the immigrant rights movement and the prison abolition movement, scrutinizing a variety of social institutions working on solutions to social problems that lead to imprisonment.

Accessible to both academics and those in the justice and social service sectors, Escobar’s book pushes readers to consider how, even in radical spaces, unequal power relations can be reproduced by the very entities that attempt to undo them.

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Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes

Ronald C. Kramer

Rutgers University Press, 2020

2020 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes analyzes the looming threats posed by climate change from a criminological perspective. It advances the field of green criminology through a examination of the criminal nature of catastrophic environmental harms resulting from the release of greenhouse gases. The book describes and explains what corporations in the fossil fuel industry, the U.S. government, and the international political community did, or failed to do, in relation to global warming. Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes integrates research and theory from a wide variety of disciplines, to analyze four specific state-corporate climate crimes: continued extraction of fossil fuels and rising carbon emissions; political omission (failure) related to the mitigation of these emissions; socially organized climate change denial; and climate crimes of empire, which include militaristic forms of adaptation to climate disruption. The final chapter reviews policies that could mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, adapt to a warming world, and achieve climate justice.

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Carceral Liberalism

Feminist Voices against State Violence

Edited by Shreerekha Pillai. Foreword by Demita Frazier

University of Illinois Press, 2023

One of Ms. Magazine's Most Anticipated Books of 2023

Carceral liberalism emerges from the confluence of neoliberalism, carcerality, and patriarchy to construct a powerful ruse disguised as freedom. It waves the feminist flag while keeping most women still at the margins. It speaks of a post-race society while one in three Black men remain incarcerated. It sings the praises of capital while the dispossessed remain mired in debt.

Shreerekha Pillai edits essays on carceral liberalism that continue the trajectory of the Combahee River Collective and the many people inspired by its vision of feminist solidarity and radical liberation. Academics, activists, writers, and a formerly incarcerated social worker look at feminist resurgence and resistance within, at the threshold of, and outside state violence; observe and record direct and indirect forms of carcerality sponsored by the state and shaped by state structures, traditions, and actors; and critique carcerality. Acclaimed poets like Honorée Fanonne Jeffers and Solmaz Sharif amplify the volume’s themes in works that bookend each section.

Cutting-edge yet historically grounded, Carceral Liberalism examines an American ideological creation that advances imperialism, anti-blackness, capitalism, and patriarchy.

Contributors: Maria F. Curtis, Joanna Eleftheriou, Autumn Elizabeth and Zarinah Agnew and D Coulombe, Jeremy Eugene, Demita Frazier, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Alka Kurian, Cassandra D. Little, Beth Matusoff Merfish, Francisco Argüelles Paz y Puente, Shreerekha Pillai, Marta Romero-Delgado, Ravi Shankar, Solmaz Sharif, Shailza Sharma, Tria Blu Wakpa and Jennifer Musial, Javier Zamora

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Challenging Perspectives on Street-Based Sex Work

Katie Hail-Jares

Temple University Press, 2017

Are sex workers victims, criminals, or just trying to make a living? Over the last five years, public policy and academic discourse have moved from criminalization of sex workers to victim-based understanding, shaped by human trafficking. While most research focuses on macro-level policies and theories, less is known about the on-the-ground perspectives of people whose lives are impacted by sex work, including attorneys, social workers, police officers, probation officers, and sex workers themselves.

Challenging Perspectives on Street-Based Sex Work brings the voices of lower-echelon sex workers and those individuals charged with policy development and enforcement into conversation with one another. Chapters highlight some of the current approaches to sex work, such as diversion courts, trafficking task forces, law enforcement assisted diversion and decriminalization. It also examines how sex workers navigate seldom-discussed social phenomenon like gentrification, pregnancy, imperialism, and being subjects of research. Through dialogue, our authors reveal the complex reality of engaging in and regulating sex work in the United States and through American aid abroad.

Contributors include: Aneesa A. Baboolal, Marie Bailey-Kloch, Mira Baylson, Nachale “Hua” Boonyapisomparn, Belinda Carter, Jennifer Cobbina, Ruby Corado, Eileen Corcoran, Kate D’Adamo, Edith Kinney, Margot Le Neveu, Martin A. Monto, Linda Muraresku, Erin O’Brien, Sharon Oselin. Catherine Paquette, Dan Steele, Chase Strangio, Signy Toquinto, and the editors.

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Challenging the Prison-Industrial Complex

Activism, Arts, and Educational Alternatives

Edited by Stephen John Hartnett

University of Illinois Press, 2011

Boldly and eloquently contributing to the argument against the prison system in the United States, these provocative essays offer an ideological and practical framework for empowering prisoners instead of incarcerating them. Experts and activists who have worked within and against the prison system join forces here to call attention to the debilitating effects of a punishment-driven society and offer clear-eyed alternatives that emphasize working directly with prisoners and their communities. Edited by Stephen John Hartnett, the volume offers rhetorical and political analyses of police culture, the so-called drug war, media coverage of crime stories, and the public-school-to-prison pipeline. The collection also includes case studies of successful prison arts and education programs in Michigan, California, Missouri, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania that provide creative and intellectual resources typically denied to citizens living behind bars. Writings and artwork created by prisoners in such programs richly enhance the volume. Contributors are Buzz Alexander, Rose Braz, Travis L. Dixon, Garrett Albert Duncan, Stephen John Hartnett, Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, Daniel Mark Larson, Erica R. Meiners, Janie Paul, Lori Pompa, Jonathan Shailor, Robin Sohnen, and Myesha Williams.

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Changing Lives

Delinquency Prevention as Crime-Control Policy

Peter W. Greenwood

University of Chicago Press, 2005

One of the most astonishing aspects of juvenile crime is how little is known about the impact of the policies and programs put in place to fight it. The most commonly used strategies and programs for combating juvenile delinquency problems primarily rely on intuition and fads. Fortunately, as a result of the promising new research documented in Changing Lives, these deficiencies in our juvenile justice system might quickly be remedied.

Peter W. Greenwood here demonstrates here that as crimes rates have fallen, researchers have identified more connections between specific risk factors and criminal behavior, while program developers have discovered a wide array of innovative interventions. The result of all this activity, he reveals, has been the revelation of a few prevention models that reduce crime much more cost-effectively than popular approaches such as tougher sentencing, D.A.R.E., boot camps, and "scared straight" programs. Changing Lives expertly presents the most promising of these prevention programs, their histories, the quality of evidence to support their effectiveness, the public policy programs involved in bringing them into wider use, and the potential for investments and developmental research to increase the range and quality of programs.

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Chasing Change in Camden

Police Reform in One of America's Most Violent Cities

John Shjarback

Temple University Press, 2025

In the 1990s and 2000s, Camden, NJ, across the river from Philadelphia, was perennially designated one of America’s most dangerous cities. The functionally bankrupt city dissolved the Camden Police Department (CPD) and created the Camden County Police Department (CCPD) in 2013, refocusing its priorities and officer performance standards to engage with the community and build trust. The change was significant, with notable drops in violent crime and murder. However, concerns about the use of force and other aggressive practices continued.

In Chasing Change in Camden, John Shjarback investigates how Camden’s police department re-formed and questions whether it can serve as a model for other cities. He analyzes successful policies—from innovative police training to advancements in technology—and evidence-based policing strategies.

Shjarback explains how the changes were implemented and then adjusted in response to community backlash. Chasing Change in Camden concludes with a discussion of threats to the reform and accountability efforts in both the CCPD and American policing more broadly. Ultimately, Camden’s case study offers valuable lessons for cities seeking effective police reform.

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Chronicles of a Radical Criminologist

Working the Margins of Law, Power, and Justice

Gregg Barak

Rutgers University Press, 2020

Over the past five decades, prominent criminologist Gregg Barak has worked as an author, editor, and book review editor; his large body of work has been grounded in traditional academic prose. His new book, Chronicles of a Radical Criminologist, while remaining scholarly in its intent, departs from the typical academic format. The book is a a first-person account that examines the linkages between one scholar's experiences as a criminologist from the late 1960s to the present and the emergence and evolution of radical criminology as a challenge to developments in mainstream criminology. Barak draws upon his own experiences over this half-century as a window into the various debates and issues among radical, critical, and technocratic criminologies. In doing so, he revisits his own seminal works, showing how they reflect those periods of criminological development.

What holds this book together is the story of how resisting the crimes of the powerful while struggling locally for social justice is the essence of critical criminology. His seven chapters are divided into three parts—academic freedom, academic activism, and academic praxis—and these connected stories link the author's own academic career in Berkeley, California; Las Vegas, Nevada; Chicago; Alabama; Ann Arbor, Michigan; and across the United States. Barak's eventful scholarly life involved efforts to overcome laws against abortion and homosexuality; to formalize protective practices for women from domestic violence and sexual assault; to oppose racism and classism in the criminal justice system; to challenge the wars on gangs, drugs, and immigrants; and to confront the policies of mass incarceration and the treatment of juvenile offenders.

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Citizens against Crime and Violence

Societal Responses in Mexico

Trevor Stack

Rutgers University Press, 2022

Mexico has become notorious for crime-related violence, and the efforts of governments and national and international NGOs to counter this violence have proven largely futile. Citizens against Crime and Violence studies societal responses to crime and violence within one of Mexico’s most affected regions, the state of Michoacán. Based on comparative ethnography conducted over twelve months by a team of anthropologists and sociologists across six localities of Michoacán, ranging from the most rural to the most urban, the contributors consider five varieties of societal responses: local citizen security councils that define security and attempt to influence its policing, including by self-defense groups; cultural activists looking to create safe 'cultural' fields from which to transform their social environment; organizations in the state capital that combine legal and political strategies against less visible violence (forced disappearance, gender violence, anti-LGBT); church-linked initiatives bringing to bear the church’s institutionality, including to denounce 'state capture'; and women’s organizations creating 'safe' networks allowing to influence violence prevention.

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Citizens, Cops, and Power

Recognizing the Limits of Community

Steve Herbert

University of Chicago Press, 2006

Politicians, citizens, and police agencies have long embraced community policing, hoping to reduce crime and disorder by strengthening the ties between urban residents and the officers entrusted with their protection.

That strategy seems to make sense, but in Citizens, Cops, and Power, Steve Herbert reveals the reasons why it rarely, if ever, works. Drawing on data he collected in diverse Seattle neighborhoods from interviews with residents, observation of police officers, and attendance at community-police meetings, Herbert identifies the many obstacles that make effective collaboration between city dwellers and the police so unlikely to succeed. At the same time, he shows that residents’ pragmatic ideas about the role of community differ dramatically from those held by social theorists.

Surprising and provocative, Citizens, Cops, and Power provides a critical perspective not only on the future of community policing, but on the nature of state-society relations as well.

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City of Suspects

Crime in Mexico City, 1900–1931

Pablo Piccato

Duke University Press, 2001

In City of Suspects Pablo Piccato explores the multiple dimensions of crime in early-twentieth-century Mexico City. Basing his research on previously untapped judicial sources, prisoners’ letters, criminological studies, quantitative data, newspapers, and political archives, Piccato examines the paradoxes of repressive policies toward crime, the impact of social rebellion on patterns of common crime, and the role of urban communities in dealing with transgression on the margins of the judical system.
By investigating postrevolutionary examples of corruption and organized crime, Piccato shines light on the historical foundations of a social problem that remains the main concern of Mexico City today. Emphasizing the social construction of crime and the way it was interpreted within the moral economy of the urban poor, he describes the capital city during the early twentieth century as a contested territory in which a growing population of urban poor had to negotiate the use of public spaces with more powerful citizens and the police. Probing official discourse on deviance, Piccato reveals how the nineteenth-century rise of positivist criminology—which asserted that criminals could be readily distinguished from the normal population based on psychological and physical traits—was used to lend scientific legitimacy to class stratifications and to criminalize working-class culture. Furthermore, he argues, the authorities’ emphasis on punishment, isolation, and stigmatization effectively created cadres of professional criminals, reshaping crime into a more dangerous problem for all inhabitants of the capital.
This unique investigation into crime in Mexico City will interest Latin Americanists, sociologists, and historians of twentieth-century Mexican history.

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Classifying Criminal Offenders with the MMPI-2

The Megargee System

Edwin I. Megargee

University of Minnesota Press, 2001

An essential resource for employing this widely used personality assessment test in correctional settings. Originally developed in the 1970s and now revised for the MMPI-2, the Megargee System provides a method for classifying criminal offenders into groups based on their MMPI-2 profiles. This empirically derived system has been investigated in a wide variety of criminal justice settings including corrections, probation, and parole. It has been tested in minimum, medium, and maximum federal, state, and military correctional institutions, in local jails, in halfway houses, and in forensic mental health units. Its use has been extended to female offenders, older men, and juvenile delinquents. Integrating thirty years of research, this new resource fully evaluates the reliability, validity, sources, and uses of the Megargee system. Classifying Criminal Offenders with the MMPI-2 describes how the system was originally derived and validated and gives instructions on how to classify the original MMPI and MMPI-2 profiles of male and female criminal offenders. It integrates the findings of more than one hundred independent studies with previously unpublished original research investigating the characteristics of each of the system's empirically derived male and female types. On the basis of these data, the authors recommend the optimal settings, change agents, and treatment programs for each type of offender. As the basic reference work on the MMPI-2 Megargee system, this volume will be an essential resource for criminal justice practitioners, psychologists interested in the MMPI-2, and researchers in criminal classification and personality assessment. Edwin I. Megargee is professor of psychology at Florida State University and recognized as the foremost expert on the use of the MMPI instruments in correctional settings. Joyce L. Carbonell is professor of psychology at Florida State University. Martin J. Bohn Jr. is chief psychologist at Florida State Hospital. Greta L. Sliger is a clinical psychologist in Tallahassee, Florida.

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Code of the Suburb

Inside the World of Young Middle-Class Drug Dealers

Scott Jacques and Richard Wright

University of Chicago Press, 2015

When we think about young people dealing drugs, we tend to picture it happening on urban streets, in disadvantaged, crime-ridden neighborhoods. But drugs are used everywhere—even in upscale suburbs and top-tier high schools—and teenage users in the suburbs tend to buy drugs from their peers, dealers who have their own culture and code, distinct from their urban counterparts.

In Code of the Suburb, Scott Jacques and Richard Wright offer a fascinating ethnography of the culture of suburban drug dealers. Drawing on fieldwork among teens in a wealthy suburb of Atlanta, they carefully parse the complicated code that governs relationships among buyers, sellers, police, and other suburbanites. That code differs from the one followed by urban drug dealers in one crucial respect: whereas urban drug dealers see violent vengeance as crucial to status and security, the opposite is true for their suburban counterparts. As Jacques and Wright show, suburban drug dealers accord status to deliberate avoidance of conflict, which helps keep their drug markets more peaceful—and, consequently, less likely to be noticed by law enforcement.

Offering new insight into both the little-studied area of suburban drug dealing, and, by extension, the more familiar urban variety, Code of the Suburb will be of interest to scholars and policy makers alike.

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College in Prison

Reading in an Age of Mass Incarceration

Karpowitz, Daniel

Rutgers University Press, 2017

Over the years, American colleges and universities have made various efforts to provide prisoners with access to education. However, few of these outreach programs presume that incarcerated men and women can rise to the challenge of a truly rigorous college curriculum. The Bard Prison Initiative is different.

College in Prison chronicles how, since 2001, Bard College has provided hundreds of incarcerated men and women across the country access to a high-quality liberal arts education. Earning degrees in subjects ranging from Mandarin to advanced mathematics, graduates have, upon release, gone on to rewarding careers and elite graduate and professional programs. Yet this is more than just a story of exceptional individuals triumphing against the odds. It is a study in how the liberal arts can alter the landscape of some of our most important public institutions giving people from all walks of life a chance to enrich their minds and expand their opportunities.

Drawing on fifteen years of experience as a director of and teacher within the Bard Prison Initiative, Daniel Karpowitz tells the story of BPI’s development from a small pilot project to a nationwide network. At the same time, he recounts dramatic scenes from in and around college-in-prison classrooms pinpointing the contested meanings that emerge in moments of highly-charged reading, writing, and public speaking. Through examining the transformative encounter between two characteristically American institutions—the undergraduate college and the modern penitentiary—College in Prison makes a powerful case for why liberal arts education is still vital to the future of democracy in the United States.

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Collision Course

Economic Change, Criminal Justice Reform, and Work in America

Kathleen Auerhahn

Rutgers University Press, 2022

This book is about the convergence of trends in two American institutions – the economy and the criminal justice system. The American economy has radically transformed in the past half-century, led by advances in automation technology that have permanently altered labor market dynamics. Over the same period, the U.S. criminal justice system experienced an unprecedented expansion at great cost. These costs include not only the $80 billion annually in direct expenditures on criminal justice, but also the devastating impacts experienced by justice-involved individuals, families, and communities.

Recently, a widespread consensus has emerged that the era of “mass incarceration” is at an end, reflected in a declining prison population. Criminal justice reforms such as diversion and problem-solving courts, a renewed focus on reentry, and drug policy reform have as their goal keeping more individuals with justice system involvement out of prisons, in the community and subsequently in the labor force, which lacks the capacity to accommodate these additional would-be workers. This poses significant problems for criminal justice practice, which relies heavily on employment as a signal of offenders’ intentions to live a law-abiding lifestyle. The diminished capacity of the economy to utilize the labor of all who have historically been expected to work presents significant challenges for American society. Work, in the American ethos is the marker of success, masculinity and how one “contributes to society.” What are the consequences of ignoring these converging structural trends? This book examines these potential consequences, the meaning of work in American society, and suggests alternative redistributive and policy solutions to avert the collision course of these economic and criminal justice policy trends.

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Colonialism Is Crime

Marianne Nielsen

Rutgers University Press, 2019

There is powerful evidence that the colonization of Indigenous people was and is a crime, and that that crime is on-going. Achieving historical colonial goals often meant committing acts that were criminal even at the time. The consequences of this oppression and criminal victimization is perhaps the critical factor explaining why Indigenous people today are overrepresented as victims and offenders in the settler colonist criminal justice systems. This book presents an analysis of the relationship between these colonial crimes and their continuing criminal and social consequences that exist today. The authors focus primarily on countries colonized by Britain, especially the United States. Social harm theory, human rights covenants, and law are used to explain the criminal aspects of the historical laws and their continued effects. The final chapter looks at the responsibilities of settler-colonists in ameliorating these harms and the actions currently being taken by Indigenous people themselves.

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Common Sense Police Review

Douglas Perez

Temple University Press, 1995

"This book provides knowledge that will be useful to city governments, civil rights organizations, community leaders, clergy, civilian review board advocates, as well as police chiefs and unions. It sheds considerable light on an important issue...[and] makes clear that there are wide ranging variations among departments in policies, accepted practices, management control of the use of force, and accountability of supervisors and officers who use excessive force." --Patrick V. Murphy, Director, Police Policy Board of the U.S. Conference of Mayors Common Sense about Police Review is the first comparative study to consider both civilian and internal police review processes. Using survey research of police attitudes and citizen complaints compiled over fifteen years from police departments across the nation, Douglas W. Perez analyzes past and current review systems as a way to develop criteria for comparing three archetypal systems of police review: internal, external (civilian), and hybrid forms of the two. High media visibility of several events--the 1988 police riot in New York City's Tompkins Square, the 1991 videotaped beating of Rodney King, and the 1992 beating death of Malice Green by Detroit police detectives--has brought police review back into the public arena; not since civil rights demonstrators clashed with police in the 1960s has officer accountability been so hotly debated. Crucial to any monitoring system are guidelines, which Perez stresses must insist on rigorous investigations of alleged police abuses, outline strict limitations of police action, strive to bridge gaps between police officers and citizens, and exonerate officers who are found to have acted properly and legally. With these standards, the author asserts, a balance between self-sanctioning and enforced regulation can be achieved. Examining fairness, objectivity, and thoroughness in review systems throughout the country, Perez offers a model for the "ideal" police review system. Included are valuable discussions of both the causes of police attitudes and behavior and the misconceptions and expectations that can contribute to a pervasive public image of police malpractice. Perez provides helpful reflections on the role of politicians and administrators in implementing and maintaining police accountability.

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Communities and Crime

An Enduring American Challenge

Pamela Wilcox

Temple University Press, 2017

Social scientists have long argued over the links between crime and place. The authors of Communities and Crime provide an intellectual history that traces how varying images of community have evolved over time and influenced criminological thinking and criminal justice policy.

The authors outline the major ideas that have shaped the development of theory, research, and policy in the area of communities and crime. Each chapter examines the problem of the community through a defining critical or theoretical lens: the community as social disorganization; as a system of associations; as a symptom of larger structural forces; as a result of criminal subcultures; as a broken window; as crime opportunity; and as a site of resilience.

Focusing on these changing images of community, the empirical adequacy of these images, and how they have resulted in concrete programs to reduce crime, Communities and Crime theorizes about and reflects upon why some neighborhoods produce so much crime. The result is a tour of the dominant theories of place in social science today.

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Compassionate Confinement

A Year in the Life of Unit C

Abrams, Laura S.

Rutgers University Press, 2013

Received an Honorable Mention for the 2015 Society for Social Work and Research Outstanding Social Work Book Award

To date, knowledge of the everyday world of the juvenile correction institution has been extremely sparse. Compassionate Confinement brings to light the challenges and complexities inherent in the U.S. system of juvenile corrections. Building on over a year of field work at a boys’ residential facility, Laura S. Abrams and Ben Anderson-Nathe provide a context for contemporary institutions and highlight some of the system’s most troubling tensions.

This ethnographic text utilizes narratives, observations, and case examples to illustrate the strain between treatment and correctional paradigms and the mixed messages regarding gender identity and masculinity that the youths are expected to navigate. Within this context, the authors use the boys’ stories to show various and unexpected pathways toward behavior change. While some residents clearly seized opportunities for self-transformation, others manipulated their way toward release, and faced substantial challenges when they returned home.

Compassionate Confinement concludes with recommendations for rehabilitating this notoriously troubled system in light of the experiences of its most vulnerable stakeholders.

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Competence and Character through Life

Edited by Anne Colby, Jacquelyn Boone James, and Daniel Hart

University of Chicago Press, 1998

Competence and character are at the heart of our notions of a mature and successful adult, yet many questions about their nature and development remain unanswered.

In this collection, leading psychologists, sociologists, and criminologists highlight the potential for positive development in different domains. By positing the possibility of multiple pathways of development rather than a single universal sequence, the contributors view the individual as potentially advancing in a wide range of interrelated and overlapping competencies. The nine essays in the book cover the years from youth to middle age, and they examine a range of social, political, and moral components of "competence and character" from teenage pregnancy and life-planning skills to voting records and educational attainment in low income households. Unlike comparable studies, this original and comprehensive volume frames issues, events, and longitudinal data through the lens of possibility rather than the pathology of defeat, stressing a positive approach to our conception of human potential.

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Complicated Lives

Girls, Parents, Drugs, and Juvenile Justice

Lopez, Vera

Rutgers University Press, 2017

Winner of the 2019 Intersectional Book Award from the American Society of Criminology's Division on Women & Crime

Complicated Lives focuses on the lives of sixty-five drug-using girls in the juvenile justice system (living in group homes, a residential treatment center, and a youth correctional facility) who grew up in families characterized by parental drug use, violence, and child maltreatment. Vera Lopez situates girls’ relationships with parents who fail to live up to idealized parenting norms and examines how these relationships change over time, and ultimately contribute to the girls’ future drug use and involvement in the justice system.

While Lopez’s subjects express concerns and doubt in their chances for success, Lopez provides an optimistic prescription for reform and improvement of the lives of these young women and presents a number of suggestions ranging from enhanced cultural competency training for all juvenile justice professionals to developing stronger collaborations between youth and adult serving systems and agencies.

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Comprehending Drug Use

Ethnographic Research at the Social Margins

Page, J. Bryan

Rutgers University Press, 2010

Comprehending Drug Use, the first full-length critical overview of the use of ethnographic methods in drug research, synthesizes more than one hundred years of study on the human encounter with psychotropic drugs. J. Bryan Page and Merrill Singer create a comprehensive examination of the whole field of drug ethnography-methodology that involves access to the hidden world of drug users, the social spaces they frequent, and the larger structural forces that help construct their worlds. They explore the important intersections of drug ethnography with globalization, criminalization, public health (including the HIV/AIDS epidemic, hepatitis, and other diseases), and gender, and also provide a practical guide of the methods and career paths of ethnographers.

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Contraband Cultures

Reframing Smuggling across Latin America and the Caribbean

Edited by Jennifer Cearns and Charles Beach

University College London, 2024

A fresh and non-stereotypical take on smuggling in Latin America.

Contraband Cultures reframes smuggling activities across Latin America (including the Caribbean) and its diasporas through the lenses of kinship, political movements, economic exchange, and resistance to capitalist state hegemony, countering the popular representations of smuggling in the region as chaotic, lawless, violent, and exotic.

This book includes a broad range of chapters from social science and humanities scholars, and it uses various methodologies, theoretical traditions, and analytic approaches to explore the efficacy and valence of smuggling as a lens to examine personhood, materiality, statehood, and political (dis)connection across Latin America. Its combination of historic documentation and contemporary ethnographic research highlights the development of these cultural practices while grounding them in the capitalist and colonial refashioning of the entire region since the sixteenth century.

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Controlling Crime

Strategies and Tradeoffs

Edited by Philip J. Cook, Jens Ludwig, and Justin McCrary

University of Chicago Press, 2011

Criminal justice expenditures have more than doubled since the 1980s, dramatically increasing costs to the public. With state and local revenue shortfalls resulting from the recent recession, the question of whether crime control can be accomplished either with fewer resources or by investing those resources in areas other than the criminal justice system is all the more relevant.

Controlling Crime considers alternative ways to reduce crime that do not sacrifice public safety. Among the topics considered here are criminal justice system reform, social policy, and government policies affecting alcohol abuse, drugs, and private crime prevention. Particular attention is paid to the respective roles of both the private sector and government agencies. Through a broad conceptual framework and a careful review of the relevant literature, this volume provides insight into the important trends and patterns of some of the interventions that may be effective in reducing crime.

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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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Counter-Colonial Criminology

A Critique of Imperialist Reason

Biko Agozino

Pluto Press, 2003

This book is about how the history of colonialism has shaped the definition of crime and justice systems not only in former colonies but also in colonialist countries. Biko Agozino argues that criminology in the West was originally tested in the colonies and then brought back to mother countries -- in this way, he claims, the colonial experience has been instrumental in shaping modern criminology in colonial powers.

He looks at how radical critiques of mainstream criminology by critical feminist and postmodernist thinkers contribute to an understanding of the relationship between colonial experience and criminology. But he also shows that even critical feminist and postmodernist assessments of conventional criminology do not go far enough as they remain virtually silent on colonial issues.

Biko Agozino considers African and other postcolonial literature and contributions to counter colonial criminology, their originality, relevance and limitations. Finally he advocates a “committed objectivity” approach to race-class-gender criminology investigations in order to come to terms with imperialistic and neo-colonialist criminology.

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Counterfeited in China

The Operations of Illicit Businesses

Ko-lin Chin

Temple University Press, 2025

Counterfeiting tops the list of organized crimes committed worldwide, raking in nearly half a trillion dollars in 2019. The impact of this illicit business is felt by consumers, brand owners, state authorities, and workers, and it impacts the economy. Moreover, its proliferation has fueled the advancement of organized crime groups.

In his illuminating study, Counterfeited in China, Ko-lin Chin investigates this lucrative industry and its emergence in China. His face-to-face interviews with counterfeiters — business owners, workers, facilitators, and key informants — in the hub of Guangzhou, China reveal how businesses that design, produce, and distribute fake and unauthorized luxury goods manage the risks inherent in their business.

Counterfeited in China examines the individual and group characteristics of counterfeiters and their relationships with organized crime; analyzes the economic aspects of counterfeiting; assesses the relationships among counterfeiting, violence, and corruption; and seeks to understand the demand for counterfeit goods. Chin also discusses the role of Chinese authorities and other parties in the war against counterfeiting.

Assessing the state of the industry and its future, Chin provides fascinating new insights into the modus operandi of counterfeiters.

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Courting the Community

Legitimacy and Punishment in a Community Court

Christine Zozula

Temple University Press, 2019

Community Courts are designed to handle a city’s low-level offenses and quality-of-life crimes, such as littering, loitering, or public drunkenness. Court advocates maintain that these largely victimless crimes jeopardize the well-being of residents, businesses, and visitors. Whereas traditional courts might dismiss such cases or administer a small fine, community courts aim to meaningfully punish offenders to avoid disorder escalating to apocalyptic decline.

Courting the Community is a fascinating ethnography that goes behind the scenes to explore how quality-of-life discourses are translated into court practices that marry therapeutic and rehabilitative ideas. Christine Zozula shows how residents and businesses participate in meting out justice—such as through community service, treatment, or other sanctions—making it more emotional, less detached, and more legitimate in the eyes of stakeholders. She also examines both “impact panels,” in which offenders, residents, and business owners meet to discuss how quality-of-life crimes negatively impact the neighborhood, as well as strategic neighborhood outreach efforts to update residents on cases and gauge their concerns.

Zozula’s nuanced investigation of community courts can lead us to a deeper understanding of punishment and rehabilitation and, by extension, the current state of the American court system.

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Covering Accident Costs

Insurance, Liability, and Tort Reforms

Mark C. Rahdert

Temple University Press, 1995

Over the past century, tort law and insurance have developed deeply intertwined legal and economic roots. Insurance usually determines whether tort cases are brought to trial, whom plaintiffs sue, how much they claim, who provides the defense, how the case gets litigated, the dynamics of the settlement, and how much plaintiffs ultimately recover. But to what extent should liability rules be influenced by insurance? In this study, Mark Rahdert identifies the leading arguments both in favor of and against what he terms the "insurance rationale"—the idea that tort law should be structured to facilitate victim access to assured compensation.

The insurance rationale has been a leading force in the development of product liability law and, as a component of accident compensation, has significantly influenced pro-plaintiff advances in principal areas of tort law. However, the insurance rationale is also the source of great controversy. Critics charge that liability rules deliberately set to maximize plaintiffs' access to insurance funds have corrupted the system, causing insurance costs to spiral upward uncontrollably. Considering the strengths and weaknesses of both sides of the current debate, Rahdert develops a modified version of the insurance rationale that can become a tool for evaluating future tort reform proposals.

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