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Youth violence has become one of the most contentious and perplexing issues in current debates on crime policy, not the least because of the sharp increase in violence among young minority males since the mid-1980s.

Featuring articles by leading American and European scholars from many fields, Youth Violence provides a reliable, up-to-date, authoritative and comprehensive overview of policy issues and research developments concerning crime and violence among the young.

Exceptional Violence is a sophisticated examination of postcolonial state formation in the Caribbean, considered across time and space, from the period of imperial New World expansion to the contemporary neoliberal era, and from neighborhood dynamics in Kingston to transnational socioeconomic and political fields. Deborah A. Thomas takes as her immediate focus violence in Jamaica and representations of that violence as they circulate within the country and abroad. Through an analysis encompassing Kingston communities, Jamaica’s national media, works of popular culture, notions of respectability, practices of punishment and discipline during slavery, the effects of intensified migration, and Jamaica’s national cultural policy, Thomas develops several arguments. Violence in Jamaica is the complicated result of a structural history of colonialism and underdevelopment, not a cultural characteristic passed from one generation to the next. Citizenship is embodied; scholars must be attentive to how race, gender, and sexuality have been made to matter over time. Suggesting that anthropologists in the United States should engage more deeply with history and political economy, Thomas mobilizes a concept of reparations as a framework for thinking, a rubric useful in its emphasis on structural and historical lineages.

In Refiguring Race and Risk, Roberta Wolfson turns to novels, memoirs, and other cultural works to debunk the false sense of national security rooted in positioning people of color as embodiments of risk. Considering output by Miné Okubo, Sanyika Shakur, Abraham Verghese, Khaled Hosseini, Helena María Viramontes, and others, Wolfson demonstrates how these authors disrupt racist security regimes and model alternative strategies for managing risk by crafting stories of collective care and community building. Chapters discuss, among other examples, how gang members defy the mass incarceration of Black and Latinx Americans by committing to self-education and self-advocacy; how an Asian immigrant doctor offers a corrective to the pandemic-era trend of allowing xenophobia to inform public health decisions by providing human-centered medical services to HIV-positive patients; and how Latinx migrant farmworkers battle ongoing precarity amid the increasing militarization of the US-Mexico border by bartering life-sustaining resources. In revealing how these works cultivate love as a mode of political resistance, Wolfson relabels people of color not as a source of risk but as critical actors in the push to improve national security.

In 1989, the rape and beating of a white female jogger in Central Park made international headlines. Many accounts reported the incident as an example of “wilding”—episodes of poor, minority youths roaming the streets looking for trouble. Police intent on immediate justice for the victim coerced five African-American and Latino boys to plead guilty. The teenage boys were quickly convicted and imprisoned. Natalie Byfield, who covered the case for the New York Daily News, now revisits the story of the Central Park Five from her perspective as a black female reporter in Savage Portrayals.

 

Byfield illuminates the race, class, and gender bias in the massive media coverage of the crime and the prosecution of the now-exonerated defendants. Her sociological analysis and first-person account persuasively argue that the racialized reportage of the case buttressed efforts to try juveniles as adults across the nation.

 

Savage Portrayals casts new light on this famous crime and its far-reaching consequences for the wrongly accused and the justice system. 

Along with most of the rest
        of Western culture, has crime itself become more "civilized"?
        This book exposes as myths the beliefs that society has become more violent
        than it has been in the past and that violence is more likely to occur
        in cities than in rural areas.
      The product of years of study
        by scholars from North America and Europe, The Civilization of Crime
        shows that, however violent some large cities may be now, both rural and
        urban communities in Sweden, Holland, England, and other countries were
        far more violent during the late Middle Ages than any cities are today.
      Contributors show that the
        dramatic change is due, in part, to the fact that violence was often tolerated
        or even accepted as a form of dispute settlement in village-dominated
        premodern society. Interpersonal violence declined in the seventeenth
        and eighteenth centuries, as dispute resolution was taken over by courts
        and other state institutions and the church became increasingly intolerant
        of it.
      The book also challenges a
        number of other historical-sociological theories, among them that contemporary
        organized crime is new, and addresses continuing debate about the meaning
        and usefulness of crime statistics.
      CONTRIBUTORS: Esther Cohen,
        Herman Diederiks, Florike Egmond, Eric A. Johnson, Michele Mancino, Eric
        H. Monkkonen, Eva Österberg, James A. Sharpe, Pieter Spierenburg,
        Jan Sundin, Barbara Weinberger
 

Sociologist Norman K. Denzin characterized Lonnie Athens's earlier work
as "the most far-reaching, provocative, and profound analysis of violent conduct" available in criminological literature. In Violent Criminal Acts and Actors Revisited, Athens returns to his pioneering work and finds that his premises are just as relevant and original as in their earlier version--and that they have been curiously, and to society's detriment, overlooked.
Rather than finding the causes of criminal behavior in external forces
or personality disorders, as conventional wisdom often does, Athens renews his fundamental argument that a violent situation comes into being when defined by an individual as a situation that calls for violence--that an actor responds to the circumstance as he or she defines it. Based on the author's many firsthand interviews with offenders and on his personal experience, Violent Criminal Acts and Actors Revisited augments Athens’s call to reexamine the source and locus of violent criminal behavior.
 

2014 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Criminologists are primarily concerned with the analysis of actions that violate existing laws. But a growing number have begun analyzing crimes as actions that inflict harm, regardless of the applicability of legal sanctions. Even as they question standard definitions of crime as law-breaking, scholars of crime have few theoretical frameworks with which to understand the etiology of harmful action.

In Why We Harm, Lois Presser scrutinizes accounts of acts as diverse as genocide, environmental degradation, war, torture, terrorism, homicide, rape, and meat-eating in order to develop an original theoretical framework with which to consider harmful actions and their causes. In doing so, this timely book presents a general theory of harm, revealing the commonalities between actions that impose suffering and cause destruction.

Harm is built on stories in which the targets of harm are reduced to one-dimensional characters—sometimes a dangerous foe, sometimes much more benign, but still a projection of our own concerns and interests. In our stories of harm, we are licensed to do the harmful deed and, at the same time, are powerless to act differently. Chapter by chapter, Presser examines statements made by perpetrators of a wide variety of harmful actions. Appearing vastly different from one another at first glance, Presser identifies the logics they share that motivate, legitimize, and sustain them. From that point, she maps out strategies for reducing harm.