Books Received
July 2018

Listed below are books received for review over the last two months. Entries include publishing information as well as a description of the book. Unless otherwise stated, the book description is taken from the publisher’s website or the book jacket. Selected titles from this list will be chosen for a full review in forthcoming issues of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books. Previous books received are available from the links below.

Al Capone and the 1933 World’s Fair: The End of the Gangster Era in Chicago, by William Elliott Hazelgrove. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2018. 280p.

Al Capone and the 1933 World’s Fair: The End of the Gangster Era in Chicago is a historical look at Chicago during the darkest days of the Great Depression. The story of Chicago fighting the hold that organized crime had on the city to be able to put on The 1933 World’s Fair.

William Hazelgrove provides the exciting and sprawling history behind the 1933 World’s Fair, the last of the golden age. He reveals the story of the six millionaire businessmen, dubbed The Secret Six, who beat Al Capone at his own game, ending the gangster era as prohibition was repealed. The story of an intriguing woman, Sally Rand, who embodied the World’s Fair with her own rags to riches story and brought sex into the open. The story of Rufus and Charles Dawes who gave the fair a theme and then found financing in the worst economic times the country had ever experienced. The story of the most corrupt mayor of Chicago, William Thompson, who owed his election to Al Capone; and the mayor who followed him, Anton Cermak, who was murdered months before the fair opened by an assassin many said was hired by Al Capone.

But most of all it’s the story about a city fighting for survival in the darkest of times; and a shining light of hope called A Century of Progress.” From Publisher’s Website.

The Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil, by Jaime Amparo Alves. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. 320p.

“While Black Lives Matter still resonates in the United States, the movement has also become a potent rallying call worldwide, with harsh police tactics and repressive state policies often breaking racial lines. In The Anti-Black City, Jaime Amparo Alves delves into the dynamics of racial violence in Brazil, where poverty, unemployment, residential segregation, and a biased criminal justice system create urban conditions of racial precarity.

The Anti-Black City provocatively offers race as a vital new lens through which to view violence and marginalization in the supposedly “raceless” São Paulo. Ironically, in a context in which racial ambiguity makes it difficult to identify who is black and who is white, racialized access to opportunities and violent police tactics establish hard racial boundaries through subjugation and death. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in prisons and neighborhoods on the periphery of this mega-city, Alves documents the brutality of police tactics and the complexity of responses deployed by black residents, including self-help initiatives, public campaigns against police violence, ruthless gangs, and self-policing of communities.

The Anti-Black City reveals the violent and racist ideologies that underlie state fantasies of order and urban peace in modern Brazil. Illustrating how “governing through death” has become the dominant means for managing and controlling ethnic populations in the neoliberal state, Alves shows that these tactics only lead to more marginalization, criminality, and violence. Ultimately, Alves’s work points to a need for a new approach to an intractable problem: how to govern populations and territories historically seen as “ungovernable.” “ From Publisher’s Website.

Becoming Strong: Impoverished Women and the Struggle to Overcome Violence, by Laura Huey and Ryan Broll. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. 160p.

“Drawing on more than 150 in-depth interviews, Becoming Strong: Impoverished Women and the Struggle to Overcome Violence explores the diverse effects of trauma in the lives of homeless female victims of violence.

Laura Huey and Ryan Broll closely examine the negative patterns common to cases of homeless female victims of violence and develop informed solutions for responding to issues that perpetuate cycles of female homelessness. Becoming Strong offers not only a comprehensive examination of trauma and the role it can play in shaping homeless women’s lives, but it also explores how women may recover and develop strategies for coping with traumatic experiences.” From Publisher’s Website.

Coming Back to Jail: Women, Trauma, and Criminalization, by Elizabeth Comack. Winnepeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2018. 272p.

“Published some two decades ago, Elizabeth Comack’s Women in Trouble explored the connections between the women’s abuse histories and their law violations as well as their experience of imprisonment in an aged facility. What has changed for incarcerated women in those twenty years? Are experiences of abuse continuing to have an impact on the lives of criminalized women? How do women find the experience of imprisonment in a new facility?

Drawing on the stories of forty-two incarcerated women, Coming Back to Jail broadens the focus to examine the role of trauma in the women’s lives. Resisting the popular move to understand trauma in psychiatric terms — as post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd) — the book frames trauma as “lived experience” and locates the women’s lives within the context of a settler-colonial, capitalist, patriarchal society. Doing so enables a better appreciation of the social conditions that produce trauma and the problems, conflicts and dilemmas that bring women into the criminal justice net.

In Coming Back to Jail, Comack shows how — despite recent moves to be more “gender responsive” — the prisoning of women is ultimately more punishing than empowering. What is more, because the sources of the women’s trauma reside in the systemic processes that have contoured their lives and their communities, true healing will require changing women’s social circumstances on the outside so they no longer keep coming back to jail.” From Publisher’s Website.

Contemporary Slavery: The Rhetoric of Global Human Rights Campaigns, edited by Annie Bunting and Joel Quirk. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 396p.

“This volume brings together a cast of leading experts to carefully explore how the history and iconography of slavery has been invoked to support a series of government interventions, activist projects, legal instruments, and rhetorical performances. However well-intentioned these interventions might be, they nonetheless remain subject to a host of limitations and complications. Recent efforts to combat contemporary slavery are too often sensationalist, self-serving, and superficial and, therefore, end up failing the crucial test of speaking truth to power.

The widely held notion that antislavery is one of those rare issues that “transcends” politics or ideology is only sustainable because the underlying issues at stake have been constructed and demarcated in a way that minimizes direct challenges to dominant political and economic interests. This must change. By providing an original approach to the underlying issues at stake, Contemporary Slavery will help readers understand the political practices that have been concealed beneath the popular rhetoric and establishes new conversations between scholars of slavery and trafficking and scholars of human rights and social movements.” From Publisher’s Website.

Criminology and Criminal Justice in Russia: Past Legacies and Present Challenges, edited by Anna Gurinskaya and Mahesh K. Nalla. London: Routledge, 2018. 180p.

“Though criminology took root in Russia in the early 1800s and has gone through various stages of maturation—paralleling developments of the discipline in Europe and North America over the last two centuries—its contributions and presence in the field is hardly noticeable in the English-speaking world. The objective of this book is by no means to fill that void, but rather to bring together the recent developments in Russia, keeping in context its rich history of criminological legacies, traditions, and its current experiences and growth since the restructuring of Soviet Union. This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice.” From Publisher’s Website.

Criminology and Public Policy: Putting Theory to Work, edited by Scott H. Decker and Kevin A. Wrights. 2d ed. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2018. 384p.

“In the field of criminal justice, public policy is designed to address the problems brought on by criminal behavior and the response to that behavior. However, too often, the theories carefully developed in the academy fail to make their way into programs and policy. The editors and contributors to this second edition of Criminology and Public Policy highlight the recent development of “translational criminology” to address the growing movement in criminology to use the results of criminological research and theory to better inform policy and practice.

The essays in Criminology and Public Policy propose an in-depth look at both theory and practice and how they are integrated across a number of key criminal justice problems—from racial and environmental concerns to gun control and recidivism rates as well as police use of force and mass incarceration. The end result is an essential volume that blends both theory and practice in an effort to address the critical problems in explaining, preventing, responding to, and correcting criminal behavior.” From Publisher’s Website.

Foreigners on America’s Death Rows, by John Quigley. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 300p.

“Capital cases involving foreigners as defendants are a serious source of contention between the United States and foreign governments. By treaty, foreigner defendants must be informed upon arrest that they may contact a consul of their home country for assistance, yet police and judges in the United States are lax in complying. Foreigners on America’s Death Row investigates the arbitrary way United States police departments, courts, and the Department of State implement well-established rights of foreigners arrested in the US. Foreign governments have taken the United States into international courts, which have ruled that the US must enforce the treaty. The United States has ignored these rulings. As a result, foreigners continue to be executed after a legal process that their home governments justifiably find to be flawed. When one country ignores the treaty rights of another as well as the decisions of international courts, the established order of international relations is threatened.” From Publisher’s Website.

From the Streets to the State: Changing the World by Taking Power, edited by Paul Christopher Gray. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018. 292p.

“For decades, emancipatory struggles have been deeply influenced by the slogan “Change the world without taking power.” Amid growing social inequalities and the return of right-wing authoritarianism, however, many now recognize the limits of disengaging from government and the state. From the Streets to the State chronicles many diverse and exciting projects to not only take state power but to fundamentally change it. A blend of scholars and activists explore issues like the nonsectarian relationships between new radical left parties, egalitarian social movements, and labor movements in Greece, Germany, Spain, Portugal, and Turkey. Contributors discuss municipal campaigns based in popular assemblies, solidarity economies, and independent political organizations fighting for racial, gender, and economic justice in cities such as Jackson, Vancouver, and Newcastle. This volume also studies the lessons learned from the Pink Tide in Latin America as well as the social movements of racialized and gendered workers transforming human rights across the United States. Finally, the book offers case studies from around the world surveying the role of state workers and public sector unions in radically democratizing public administration through coalitions between the providers and users of public services.” From Publisher’s Website.

The Great Uprising: Race Riots in Urban America during the 1960s, by Peter B. Levy. Cambridge, UK: New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 332p.

“Between 1963 and 1972 America experienced over 750 urban revolts. Considered collectively, they comprise what Peter Levy terms a ‘Great Uprising’. Levy examines these uprisings over the arc of the entire decade, in various cities across America. He challenges both conservative and liberal interpretations, emphasizing that these riots must be placed within historical context to be properly understood. By focusing on three specific cities as case studies – Cambridge and Baltimore, Maryland, and York, Pennsylvania – Levy demonstrates the impact which these uprisings had on millions of ordinary Americans. He shows how conservatives profited politically by constructing a misleading narrative of their causes, and also suggests that the riots did not represent a sharp break or rupture from the civil rights movement. Finally, Levy presents a cautionary tale by challenging us to consider if the conditions that produced this ‘Great Uprising’ are still predominant in American culture today.” From Publisher’s Website.

Green Crime in Mexico: A Collection of Case Studies, edited by Ines Arroyo-Quiroz and Tanya Wyatt. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave, 2018. 208p.

“This collection is the first exploration into green crime in Mexico, offering a unique critique of the environmental problems facing Mexico today. Written by a diverse range of Mexican academics and practitioners from different career stages and various different disciplines, this edited volume exposes the corruption, power, and disregard for the environment through highly detailed and engaging case studies. The chapters are grouped into four categories: Environmental Degradation, Social and Environmental Justice, Wildlife Trafficking, and Non-compliance with Environmental Obligations, and are illuminated by rigorous original research. This book fills a substantial gap in knowledge about concerns that are important not only to the Mexican people and the wider region, but to anyone with an interest in the environmental issues facing the world today. To this end, the contributors hope to inspire other Mexicans to study and research green crimes as well as to influence scholars and practitioners across Central and South America who are facing similar environmental crises and challenges.” From Publisher’s Website.

Green Crimes and Dirty Money, edited by Toine Spapens, Rob White, Daan van Uhm and Wim Huisman. London; New York: Routledge, 2018. 274p.

“Environmental crimes are primarily driven by financial motives. The combined financial value of illicit trade in protected wildlife, illegal logging and waste trafficking is estimated to come directly after counterfeiting, the narcotic drugs trade and illegal gambling. Logically, the proceeds of these crimes must also be laundered. Goods, however, are not the only money maker for environmental criminals. Corporations may also try to ‘save’ costs by not complying with environmental regulations and thus commit crimes of omission rather than commission. From an enforcement and compliance perspective focusing on the proceeds of crime may therefore be an effective strategy.

This book brings together different perspectives on the financial aspects of environmental crime and harm from a green criminological viewpoint. It addresses the role of economic systems, the value of environmental performance for corporations, money laundering in the context of environmental crime, financial investigation and questions of regulation and penalties.

Discussing these topics from the view of green criminology, sociology and governance, this book will be of great interest to all those concerned about the financial dimensions of crime and the environment.” From Publisher’s Website.

Handcuffs and Chain Links: Criminalizing the Undocumented in America, by Benjamin Gonzalez O’Brien. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018. 192p.

“Handcuffs and Chain Link enters the immigration debate by addressing one of its most controversial aspects: the criminalization both of extralegal immigration to the United States and of immigrants themselves in popular and political discourse. Looking at the factors that led up to criminalization, Benjamin Gonzalez O’Brien points to the alternative approach of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 and how its ultimate demise served to negatively reinforce the fictitious association of extralegal immigrants with criminality.

Crucial to Gonzalez O’Brien’s account thus is the concept of the critical policy failure—a piece of legislation that attempts a radically different approach to a major issue but has shortcomings that ultimately further entrench the approach it was designed to supplant. The IRCA was just such a piece of legislation. It highlighted the contributions of the undocumented and offered amnesty to some while attempting to stem the flow of extralegal immigration by holding employers accountable for hiring the undocumented. The failure of this effort at decriminalization prompted a return to criminalization with a vengeance, leading to the stalemate on immigration policy that persists to this day.” From Publisher’s Website.

Journeys: Resilience and Growth for Survivors of Intimate Partner Abuse, by Susan L. Miller. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018. 304p.

“More than one in three women in the United States has experienced rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime. Luckily, many are able to escape this life—but what happens to them after? Journeys focuses on the desperately understudied topic of the resiliency of long-term (over 5 years) survivors of intimate partner violence and abuse. Drawing on participant observation research and interviews with women years after the end of their abusive relationships, author Susan L. Miller shares these women’s trials and tribulations, and expounds on the factors that facilitated these women’s success in gaining inner strength, personal efficacy, and transformation.

Written for researchers, practitioners, students, and policy makers in criminal justice, sociology, and social services, Journeys shares stories that hope to inspire other victims and survivors while illuminating the different paths to resiliency and growth.” From Publisher’s Website.

Just Interests: Victims, Citizens and the Potential for Justice, by Robyn Holder. Cheltenham, UK: Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2018. 288p.

“The idea of justice and the reality of justice are two very different things. Just Interests examines both concepts, offering accounts from lay people and legal officials to explore how the goals and interests of victims of crimes can be accommodated within the criminal justice process.

Robyn Holder challenges the typical classification of ‘victim’ for those who have been victimized by violence, and re-positions them as members of a political community with diverse interests – both private and public. Departing from conventional approaches that see victims as a problem for law to contain, Holder draws on democratic principles of inclusion and deliberation to posit a criminal justice approach that mobilizes citizens to produce justice in their ordinary lives.

This book will be of fundamental importance for analysts and advocates in governmental and non-governmental organizations to understand victims as citizens first and their engagements with criminal justice as citizenship practices. It will also be a valuable read for socio-legal scholars and researchers examining the constitutive nature of peoples and their public criminal law.” From Publisher’s Website

Killing African Americans: Police and Vigilante Violence as a Racial Control Mechanism, by Noel A. Cazenave. London: Routledge, 2018. 316p.

“Killing African Americans examines the pervasive, disproportionate, and persistent police and vigilante killings of African Americans in the United States as a racial control mechanism that sustains the racial control system of systemic racism. Noel A. Cazenave’s well-researched and conceptualized historical sociological study is one of the first books to focus exclusively on those killings and to treat them as political violence. Few issues have received as much conventional and social media attention in the United States over the past few years or have, for decades now, sparked so many protests and so often strained race relations to a near breaking point. Because of both its timely and its enduring relevance, Killing African Americans can reach a large audience composed not only of students and scholars, but also of Movement for Black Lives activists, politicians, public policy analysts, concerned police officers and other criminal justice professionals, and anyone else eager to better understand this American nightmare and its solutions from a progressive and informed African American perspective.” From Publisher’s Website.

Militarised Responses to Transnational Organised Crime: The War on Crime, edited by Tuesday Reitano, Lucia Bird Ruiz-Benitez De Lugo; Sasha Jesperso. Cham, Switzerland; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 359p.

“This edited volume examines the use of militarised responses to different forms of criminal activity, discussing the outcomes and unintended consequences. Politicians and policymakers frequently use militarised responses to look tough on crime. The deployment of armies, navies, military assets and militarised approaches can send a powerful message, but have produced mixed results. While they generate the perception that governments are actively engaged on issues of concern to the public, and in some cases have resulted in notable successes, on the downside they have frequently also increased the loss of life, exacerbated the humanitarian consequences of a particular crime and entrenched divides between security and state institutions and the criminal proponents, narrowing the possibilities for future negotiated solutions. By focusing on four different areas of criminality – wildlife crime, piracy, migration and drug trafficking – the book allows context and evidence-based conclusions to be drawn on the strategic value and commonality of responses and their outcomes.” From Publisher’s Website.

Miscarriages of Justice: Causes, Consequences and Remedies, by Sam Poyser, Angus Nurse and Rebecca Milne. Bristol, UK: Policy Press, 2018. 176p.

“Miscarriages of justice occur far more frequently than we realise and have the power to ruin people’s lives. It is crucial for criminal justice practitioners to understand them, given significant developments in recent years in law and police codes of practice.

This text, part of the Key themes in policing textbook series, is written by three highly experienced authors with expertise in the fields of criminal investigation, forensic psychology and law and provides an up-to-date and comprehensive analysis of miscarriages of justice. They highlight difficulties in defining miscarriages of justice, examine their dimensions, forms, scale and impact and explore key cases and their causes. Discussing informal and formal remedies against miscarriages of justice, such as campaigns and the role of the media and the Court of Appeal and the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), they highlight criticism of the activities and decision-making of the latter and examine changes to police investigation in this area.

Designed to incorporate ‘evidence-based policing’, each chapter provides questions reflecting on the issues raised in the text and suggestions for further reading.” From Publisher’s Website

Organized Crime and Illicit Trade, edited by Virginia Comolli. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Pivot, 2018. 143p.

“Unlike much of the existing literature on organised crime, this book is less focused on the problem per se as it is on understanding its implications. The latter, especially in fragile and conflict regions, amount to strategic challenges for the state. Whereas most commentators would agree that criminal activities are harmful, this volume addresses the questions of ‘how?’, ‘for whom?’ and, controversially, ‘are they always harmful?’

The volume is authored by experts with multi-year experience analysing criminal and other non-state activities. They do so through different lenses – conflict and security, development, and technology – engaging academics, practitioners and policy makers.

They offer a comprehensive integrated response to the challenges of transnational organised crime beyond traditional law-enforcement driven recommendations.” From Publisher’s Website.

Policing Indigenous Movements: Dissent and the Security State, by Andrew Crosby and Jeffrey Monaghan. Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2018. 192p.

“The book blends discussions of settler colonialism, policing and surveillance, with a detailed exposé of current security practices that targets Indigenous movements. Using the Access to Information Act, the book offers a unique view into the extensive networks of policing and security agencies. While some light has been shed on the surveillance of social movements in Canada, the book shows how policing agencies have been cataloguing Indigenous land defenders and other opponents of extractive capitalism, while also demonstrating how the norms of settler colonialism structure the ways in which police regard Indigenous movements as national security threats. The book examines four prominent case studies: the long-standing conflict involving the Algonquins of Barriere Lake; the struggle against the Northern Gateway Pipeline; the Idle No More movement; and the anti-fracking protests surrounding the Elsipogtog First Nation. Through these case studies, we offer a vivid demonstration of how policing agencies and the criminal justice system are central actors in maintaining settler colonialism. The book raises critical questions regarding the expansion of the security apparatus, the normalization of police surveillance targeting social movements, the relationship between police and energy corporations, and threats to civil liberties and collective action in an era of extractive capitalism and hyper surveillance.” From Publisher’s Website.

Prison Pedagogies: Learning and Teaching with Imprisoned Writers, edited by Joe Lockard and Sherry Rankins-Robertson. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2018. 296p.

“In a time of increasing mass incarceration, US prisons and jails are becoming a major source of literary production. Prisoners write for themselves, fellow prisoners, family members, and teachers. However, too few write for college credit. In the dearth of well-organized higher education in US prisons, noncredit programs established by colleges and universities have served as a leading means of informal learning in these settings. Thousands of teachers have entered prisons, many teaching writing or relying on writing practices when teaching other subjects. Yet these teachers have few pedagogical resources. This groundbreaking collection of essays provides such a resource and establishes a framework upon which to develop prison writing programs.

Prison Pedagogies does not champion any one prescriptive approach to writing education but instead recognizes a wide range of possibilities. Essay subjects include working-class consciousness and prison education; community and literature writing at different security levels in prisons; organized writing classes in jails and juvenile halls; cultural resistance through writing education; prison newspapers and writing archives as pedagogical resources; dialogical approaches to teaching prison writing classes; and more. The contributors within this volume share a belief that writing represents a form of intellectual and expressive self-development in prison, one whose pursuit has transformative potential.” From Publisher’s Website.

Reimagining Equality: A New Deal for Children of Color, by Nancy E. Dowd. New York: New York University Press, 2018. 256p.

“Developmental equality–whether every child has an equal opportunity to reach their fullest potential–is essential for children’s future growth and access to opportunity. In the United States, however, children of color are disproportionately affected by poverty, poor educational outcomes, and structural discrimination, limiting their potential. In Reimagining Equality, Nancy E. Dowd sets out to examine the roots of these inequalities by tracing the life course of black boys from birth to age 18 in an effort to create an affirmative system of rights and support for all children.

Drawing on interdisciplinary research, the book demonstrates that black boys encounter challenges and barriers that funnel them toward failure rather than developmental success. Their example exposes a broader reality of hierarchies among children, linked to government policies, practices, structures, and institutions. Dowd argues for a new legal model of developmental equality, grounded in the real challenges that children face on the basis of race, gender, and class.

Concluding with a “New Deal” for all children, Reimagining Equality provides a comprehensive set of policies that enables our political and legal systems to dismantle what harms and discriminates children, and maximize their development.” From Publisher’s Website.

Research Handbook on Corporate Crime and Financial Misdealing, edited by Jennifer Arlen. E. Cheltenham, UK; Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018. 392p.

“This highly topical Research Handbook examines how to deter corporate misconduct through public enforcement and private interventions. Contributors present theoretical and empirical analyses of individual and organizational liability for corporate misconduct, securities, fraud and corruption. Other chapters evaluate private interventions, such as whistleblowing and compliance.

Chapters cover individual and organizational liability evaluate issues such as individual liability for corporate crime, deferred and non-prosecution agreements, supervisory liability, the cost to organizations of reputational damage from corporate settlements, corporate and individual liability for securities fraud, the SEC’s revolving door, multi-jurisdictional enforcement of anti-corruption laws, the scope of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and countries’ efforts to deter corruption by state actors. Chapters on private interventions examine optimal compliance, behavioral compliance, the role of the General Counsel, internal investigations, and whistleblowing. This Research Handbook also highlights promising avenues for future research.

The Research Handbook on Corporate Crime and Financial Misdealing is designed to provide a broad introduction to the literature in each area covered, as well as in-depth original analysis on important issues of concern to legal researchers, policy-makers, and practitioners.” From Publisher’s Website.

Retail Crime: International Evidence and Prevention, edited by Vania Ceccato and Rachel Armitage. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing: Imprint: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 435p.

“This edited collection provides an original and comprehensive take on retail crime and its prevention, by combining international data and multidisciplinary perspectives from criminologists, economists, geographers, police officers and other experts. Drawing on environmental criminology theory and situational crime prevention, it focusses on crime and safety in retail environments but also the interplay between individuals, products and settings such as stores, commercial streets and shopping malls, as well as the wider context of situational conditions of the supply chain in which crime occurs. Chapters offer state-of-the-art research on retail crime from a range of countries such as Australia, Brazil, Israel, Italy, Sweden, the UK and the USA. This methodological and well-researched study is devoted to both academics and practitioners from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds whose common interest is to prevent retail crime and overall retail loss.” From Publisher’s Website.

Slavery and the Death Penalty: A Study in Abolition, by Bharat Malkani. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY : Routledge, 2018. 242p.

“It has long been acknowledged that the death penalty in the United States of America has been shaped by the country’s history of slavery and racial violence, but this book considers the lesser-explored relationship between the two practices’ respective abolitionist movements. The book explains how the historical and conceptual links between slavery and capital punishment have both helped and hindered efforts to end capital punishment. The comparative study also sheds light on the nature of such efforts, and offers lessons for how death penalty abolitionism should proceed in future. Using the history of slavery and abolition, it is argued that anti-death penalty efforts should be premised on the ideologies of the radical slavery abolitionists.” From Publisher’s Website.

Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us about Policing and Race, by Frank R. Baumgartner, Derek A. Epp, and Kelsey Shoub. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 302p.

Suspect Citizens offers the most comprehensive look to date at the most common form of police-citizen interactions, the routine traffic stop. Throughout the war on crime, police agencies have used traffic stops to search drivers suspected of carrying contraband. From the beginning, police agencies made it clear that very large numbers of police stops would have to occur before an officer might interdict a significant drug shipment. Unstated in that calculation was that many Americans would be subjected to police investigations so that a small number of high-level offenders might be found. The key element in this strategy, which kept it hidden from widespread public scrutiny, was that middle-class white Americans were largely exempt from its consequences. Tracking these police practices down to the officer level, Suspect Citizens documents the extreme rarity of drug busts and reveals sustained and troubling disparities in how racial groups are treated.” From Publisher’s Website.

Wildlife Crime: From Theory to Practice, edited by William D. Moreto. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2018. 306p.

“The editors and contributors to this comprehensive volume examine topical issues from extinction to trafficking in order to understand the ecological, economic, political, and social costs and consequences of these crimes. Drawing from diverse theoretical perspectives, empirical and methodological developments, and on-the-ground experiences of practitioners, Wildlife Crime looks at how conservationists and law enforcement grapple with and combat environmental crimes and the profitable market for illegal trade.

Chapters cover criminological perspectives on species poaching, unregulated fishing, the trading of ivory and rhino horns, the adoption of conservation technologies, and ranger workplaces and conditions. The book includes firsthand experiences and research from China, Indonesia, Kenya, Madagascar, Morocco, Peru, Russia, South Africa, Tanzania, and the United States. The result is a significant book about the causes of and response to wildlife crime. “From Publisher’s Website.

Youth Who Trade Sex in the U.S.: Intersectionality, Agency, and Vulnerability, by Carisa R. Showden and Samantha Majic. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2018. 244p.

“When cases of domestic minor sex trafficking (DMST) by predatory men are reported in the media, it is often presented that a young, innocent girl has been abused by bad men with their demand for sex and profit. This narrative has shaped popular understandings of young people in the commercialized sex trades, sparking new policy responses. However, the authors of Youth Who Trade Sex in the U.S. challenge this dominant narrative as incomplete. Carisa Showden and Samantha Majic investigate young people’s engagement in the sex trades through an intersectional lens.

The authors examine the dominant policy narrative’s history and the political circumstances generating its emergence and current form. With this background, Showden and Majic review and analyze research published since 2000 about young people who trade sex to develop an intersectional “matrix of agency and vulnerability” designed to improve research, policy, and community interventions that center the needs of these young people. Ultimately, they derive an understanding of the complex reality for most young people who sell or trade sex, and are committed to ending such exploitation.” From Publisher’s Website.

Start typing and press Enter to search