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Prosecutors are powerful figures in any criminal justice system. They decide what crimes to prosecute, whom to pursue, what charges to file, whether to plea bargain, how aggressively to seek a conviction, and what sentence to demand. In the United States, citizens can challenge decisions by police, judges, and corrections officials, but courts keep their hands off the prosecutor. Curiously, in the United States and elsewhere, very little research is available that examines this powerful public role. And there is almost no work that critically compares how prosecutors function in different legal systems, from state to state or across countries. Prosecutors and Politics begins to fill that void.

Police, courts, and prisons are much the same in all developed countries, but prosecutors differ radically. The consequences of these differences are enormous: the United States suffers from low levels of public confidence in the criminal justice system and high levels of incarceration; in much of Western Europe, people report high confidence and support moderate crime control policies; in much of Eastern Europe, people’s perceptions of the law are marked by cynicism and despair. Prosecutors and Politics unpacks these national differences and provides insight into this key area of social control.

Since 1979 the Crime and Justice series has presented a review of the latest international research, providing expertise to enhance the work of sociologists, psychologists, criminal lawyers, justice scholars, and political scientists. The series explores a full range of issues concerning crime, its causes, and its cure.

Converges the fields of childhood studies and the histories of science, medicine, and technology, foregrounding and investigating the entangled histories of the "child" and childhood and science.

Building on the premise that neither childhood nor science are natural, essential, or universalizable entities, this Osiris volume examines the interrelation of these two categories, tracing back to the Middle Ages and up until the present. Organized around three major themes—theorizing and historicizing the category of childhood and child agency, the technologies and politics of child health, and the co-constitutive relationship between the concept of the child and childhood and the realm of science—the issue traverses time, space, cultures, bodies, and disciplines. The contributions explore the role that science, technology, and medicine played in constructing how the ideology of childhood shaped ideas about scientific thinking and practices, e.g., the psy-sciences, sexology, filmology, medicine, health technology; and how the entanglement between the “child” and science influenced the formation of national identity, selfhood, colonial rule, resistance, and the notions of “progress” and the “future.” Using the “child” as an analytical category and considering children as fully-fledged historical actors allows us to retell and re-present (the history of) science through a wide range of sources, and in turn, reimagine our understandings of agency, governance, subjectivity, human nature, and what science owes the “child” and children.