Crime, History, And Hollywood: Learning Criminal Justice History Through Major Motion Pictures

Crime, History, and Hollywood: Learning Criminal Justice History through Major Motion Pictures by Willard M.Oliver and Nancy E. Marion is one of two books in this edition of our journal dealing with studies of crime films and how such films have broadened the perspective of criminology. In his review of Oliver and Marion’s work, Carsten Andresen echoes the point that it is important to appreciate crime films, because as popular entertainment they have a much larger audience than even the most widely read criminological study. Read On »

Our second review of crime film books is Judith Ryder’s review of Criminology Goes to the Movies: Crime Theory and Popular Culture. The authors, Nicole Rafter and Michelle Brown, have written a “very readable book” concludes Ryder. It is, she writes, a serious look at the overlap between the academic and the popular through the relatively new field of what is being called popular criminology. Read On »

The Harm In Hate Speech
Author: Jeremy Waldron
Publisher: Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. 304p.
Reviewer: Mohamad Al-Hakim | May 2013

Why have most liberal democracies (with the United States a notable exception) tended to prohibit and criminalize hate speech and group libel, “rather than permitting and tolerating them in the name of free speech?” Jeremy Waldron, in his book, The Harm in Hate Speech, argues that hate speech undermines the public goods of dignity and assurance that constitutional democracies have a moral obligation to promote and protect. Although Waldron “writes in his usual convincing style" and includes some interesting historical detail, our reviewer Mohamad Al-Hakim was mostly unimpressed, finding the book lacking in “novelty” and derivative of other liberal theorists. Read On »

Shooting To Kill: Socio-Legal Perspectives On The Use Of Lethal Force
Editors:  Simon Bronitt, Miriam Gani, and Saskia Hufnagel
Publisher:  Oxford; Portland, OR: Hart Publishing, 2012. 342p. Reviewer: Jeremy Horder | May 2013

According to our reviewer, Jeremy Horder, the literature concerning the use of deadly force has traditionally “tended to focus quite narrowly on more or less spontaneous individual confrontations, and on dilemmas arising in certain rarified kinds of emergency.” A new collection of essays edited by Simon Bronitt, Miriam Gani, and Saskia Hufnagel, shows “how scholarly analysis of the subject has moved on.” Shooting to Kill: Socio-Legal Perspectives on the Use of Lethal Force offers a “fascinating” multi-disciplinary perspective to thinking about state policy regarding the use of lethal force under international law, by the military and police, and in political emergencies. Read On »

The Sparking Discipline Of Criminology: John Braithwaite And The Construction Of Critical Social Science And Social Justice
Editors: Stephan Parmentier, Lode Walgrave, Ivo Aertsen, Jeroen Maesschalck and Letizia Paoli.
Publisher: Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 2011. 164p
Reviewer: David Biles | May 2013

Festschrift books are often a mixed bag in terms of their intellectual contributions. And this book, a festschrift in honor of Australian criminologist John Braithwaite, is apparently no exception. Our reviewer, David Biles, who is himself a noted Australian criminologist, concludes his critical review of The Sparking Discipline of Criminology: John Braithwaite and the Construction of Critical Social Science and Social Justice by nevertheless recommending that both criminologists and aspiring criminologists have much to learn from the book, despite its shortcomings. Read On »

Oxford Handbook Of Philosophy Of Criminal Law

To our reviewer, Susan Dimock, the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Criminal Law, edited by John Deigh and David Dolinko, is a disappointment – uneven in style and quality, lacking in cohesion, and biased toward American law. Still, she does find some bright spots in what she regards as an otherwise weak collection, including worthwhile essays by Andrew Ashworth (on attempts), Michael Moore (on causation), Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Ken Levy (on insanity), Marcia Baron (on the feminist approach), Carol Steiker (on the death penalty), and Antony Duff (on mercy). Read On »

Crime-Terror Alliances And The State: Ethnonationalist And Islamist Challenges To Regional Security

The aim of Lyubov Grigorova Mincheva and Ted Robert Gurr’s Crime-Terror Alliances and the State: Ethnonationalist and Islamist Challenges to Regional Security is to explain the intersection of transnational organized crime and political insurgency. The authors do so by presenting six comparative case studies -- Algeria, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Kosovo, Serbia and Turkey. Our reviewer, Peter Grabosky, believes that the authors’ “cocktail of factors…transcends disciplinary boundaries, and so too should criminologists and political scientists.” Read On »

Cape Town After Apartheid: Crime And Governance In The Divided City
Author: Tony Roshan Samara
Publisher: Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. 272p.
Reviewer: Gail Super | May 2013

Cape Town after Apartheid: Crime and Governance in the divided city, by Tony Roshan Samara,is a case study of the difficulties faced in confronting crime and seeking justice while pursuing political reform in countries lacking traditions of liberal democracy. The country in this case is South Africa. Reviewer Gail Super reports the book’s description of the irony of shifting from apartheid to neoliberalism, while at the same time importing zero tolerance urban renewal strategies from the US. Read On »

Cyberthreats And International Law

Cyberthreats and International Law, says reviewer Anita Lavorgna, is a timely book that effectively presents and discusses the fundamental issues of whether current international and national norms, practices and institutions are in place and appropriate to meet the eventual threat of cyberwar. Read On »

Lush Life: Constructing Organized Crime In The UK
Author: Dick Hobbs
Publisher: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 344p.
Reviewer: Daniel Silverstone | May 2013

One of the perennial subtopics in studies of crime is the question of just what is "organized crime." This is the topic of Dick Hobbs' new book, Lush Life: Constructing Organized Crime in the UK. Our reviewer, Daniel Silverstone, calls the book "a sustained, mostly incisive, occasionally ribald, iconoclastic attack on the shibboleth of (transnational) organized crime." Read On »

Sex Work: Labour, Mobility, And Sexual Services
Authors:  JaneMaree Maher, Sharon Pickering, and Alison Gerard
Publisher: London; New York: Routledge, 2012.  166p.
Reviewer: Samantha Majic | May 2013

In Sex Work: Labour Mobility and Sexual Services, the authors offer the controversial arguments that “sex work” is an everyday practice, is in need of regulation as “work,” and is part of the global employment sector. Reviewer Samantha Majic says these authors “demonstrate that sex workers across the globe move for many of the same reasons as other workers—most notably for remuneration opportunities—and [that] understanding this helps promote broader conceptions of sex work as work.” Read On »

Offender Rehabilitation And Therapeutic Communities: Enabling Change The Tc Way

Anne Worrall concludes that Offender Rehabilitation and Therapeutic Communities by Alisa Stevens “is a beautifully written, detailed and sensitive ethnography of an unfashionable corner of the prison estate in England and Wales.” Because Worrall herself had several stints working in TCs, she is able to bring a particularly experienced eye to her review. Her conclusion is that Stevens’ book will [she hopes] bring new inspiration for TCs to a new generation of students and practitioners. Read On »

Animal Harm: Perspectives On Why People Harm And Kill Animals
Author: Angus Nurse
Publisher: Farnham, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013. 289p
Reviewer: Gary L. Francione | May 2013

Angus Nurse's book Animal Harm: Perspectives on Why People Harm and Kill Animals focuses on specifically illegal conduct involving animal cruelty, conservation, animal protection, and wildlife, rather than "any wider notion of harm caused to animals which constitutes a moral wrong." According to our reviewer, Gary Francione, in keeping to such a focus, Nurse misses out on most of the really interesting and morally significant questions about how the law should regulate our treatment of animals. While Nurse's book is obviously not the one Francione would have had him write, he nevertheless concedes that Nurse does as good a job at considering the criminal law that currently applies to animal harms "as one can do [at] this sort of thing," and suggests that the book "will be of interest to those who are involved in 'animal law,' as well as to at least some of those people who consider themselves as 'green criminologists,' who seek to locate certain environmental and animal welfare issues within the study of criminology." Read On »

Corrections: A Critical Approach. 3rd Ed.

Edward W. Sieh calls Michael Welch’s third edition of Corrections: A Critical Approach an interesting and valuable contribution to our understanding of corrections. That said, Sieh faults the book for its organization with respect to its priority ordering of subjects, and in particular for not highlighting and giving more emphasis to prisoner’s rights. Read On »