Books Received
March 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.

Assessing Police and other Public Safety Personnel Using the MMPI-2-RF: A Practical Guide, by David M. Corey and Yossef S. Ben-Porath. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. 552p.

“A practical and vital guide for using the MMPI-2-RF in both preemployment and fitness-for-duty evaluations for four public safety positions: law enforcement officer, corrections officer, emergency communications dispatcher, and firefighter/paramedic .

This guide assists clinicians in integrating MMPI-2-RF findings with other assessment information used in these evaluations, including findings from other tests, personal history, and clinical interviews. It includes a concise primer on the MMPI-2-RF, common procedural and legal requirements, and contextual factors affecting these evaluations, while case illustrations demonstrate the use of the integrative models in preemployment and fitness-for-duty evaluations. “ From Publisher’s Website

Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor, by Virginia Eubanks. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018. 272p.

“The State of Indiana denies one million applications for healthcare, foodstamps and cash benefits in three years—because a new computer system interprets any mistake as “failure to cooperate.” In Los Angeles, an algorithm calculates the comparative vulnerability of tens of thousands of homeless people in order to prioritize them for an inadequate pool of housing resources. In Pittsburgh, a child welfare agency uses a statistical model to try to predict which children might be future victims of abuse or neglect.

Since the dawn of the digital age, decision-making in finance, employment, politics, health and human services has undergone revolutionary change. Today, automated systems—rather than humans—control which neighborhoods get policed, which families attain needed resources, and who is investigated for fraud. While we all live under this new regime of data, the most invasive and punitive systems are aimed at the poor.

In Automating Inequality, Virginia Eubanks systematically investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America. The book is full of heart-wrenching and eye-opening stories, from a woman in Indiana whose benefits are literally cut off as she lays dying to a family in Pennsylvania in daily fear of losing their daughter because they fit a certain statistical profile.

The U.S. has always used its most cutting-edge science and technology to contain, investigate, discipline and punish the destitute. Like the county poorhouse and scientific charity before them, digital tracking and automated decision-making hide poverty from the middle-class public and give the nation the ethical distance it needs to make inhumane choices: which families get food and which starve, who has housing and who remains homeless, and which families are broken up by the state. In the process, they weaken democracy and betray our most cherished national values.” From Publisher’s Website.

Boats, Borders, and Bases: Race, the Cold War, and the Rise of Migration Detention in the United States, by Jenna M. Lloyd and Alison Mountz. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018. 320p.

“Discussions about U.S. migration policing have traditionally focused on enforcement along the highly charged U.S.-Mexico boundary. Enforcement practices such as detention policies designed to restrict access to asylum also transpire in the Caribbean. Boats, Borders, and Bases tells a missing, racialized history of the U.S. migration detention system that was developed and expanded to deter Haitian and Cuban migrants. Jenna M. Loyd and Alison Mountz argue that the U.S. response to Cold War Caribbean migrations established the legal and institutional basis for contemporary migration detention and border-deterrent practices in the United States. This book will make a significant contribution to a fuller understanding of the history and geography of the United States’s migration detention system.” From Publisher’s Website.

Containing Addiction: The Federal Bureau of Narcotics and the Origins of America’s Global Drug War, by Matthew R. Pembleton. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.

“The story of America’s “War on Drugs” usually begins with Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan. In Containing Addiction, Matthew R. Pembleton argues that its origins instead lie in the years following World War II, when the Federal Bureau of Narcotics—the country’s first drug control agency, established in 1930—began to depict drug control as a paramilitary conflict and sent agents abroad to disrupt the flow of drugs to American shores.

U.S. policymakers had long viewed addiction and organized crime as profound domestic and trans-national threats. Yet World War II presented new opportunities to implement drug control on a global scale. Skeptical of public health efforts to address demand, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics believed that reducing the global supply of drugs was the only way to contain the spread of addiction. In effect, America applied a foreign policy solution to a domestic social crisis, demonstrating how consistently policymakers have assumed that security at home can only be achieved through hegemony abroad. The result is a drug war that persists into the present day.” From Publisher’s Website.

Contemporary Issues in Victimology: Identifying Patterns and Trends, edited by Carly M. Hilinski-Rosick and Daniel R. Lee. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018. 290p.

“Contemporary Issues in Victimology: Identifying Patterns and Trends examines current topics in victimology and explores the main issues surrounding them. Key topics include: intimate partner violence and dating violence, rape and sexual assault on the college campus, Internet victimization, elder abuse, victimization of inmates, repeat and poly-victimization, fear of crime and perceived risk of crime, human trafficking, mass shootings, and child-to-parent violence. Each chapter includes information about the specific topic, including the nature of the issues, trends, current research, policy, current issues, and future challenges.” From Publisher’s Website.

Crime and Global Justice. The Dynamics of Criminal Punishment, by Daniele Archibugi and Alice Pease. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2018.

“International criminal justice is still sailing in uncharted waters. At the end of 2017, after 24 years of activity, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) closed its doors after handing Ratko Mladić a life sentence and the spectacular live suicide of Slobodan Praljak. In 2018 we will celebrate – with little enthusiasm – the twentieth anniversary of the International Criminal Court. Where are we at? Our book tries to outline the strengths and weaknesses of the new international criminal justice system which emerged at the end of the Cold War, to identify its connection with the post-World War II tribunals established at Nuremberg and Tokyo and to explore how it could further help to protect human rights in the changing political contours of the XXI century.

Is international criminal justice an effective tool to prevent atrocities and to hold powerful politicians accountable? An assessment of what has, so far, been delivered by international criminal justice is highly unsatisfactory. The indicted at the bar often appear to be mere scapegoats and seldom have the trials effectively contributed to reconciliation in areas devastated by civil wars. More seriously, some of these trials have been shows of power used by wars’ winners to discipline their opponents.

Is international criminal justice an effective tool to prevent atrocities and to hold powerful politicians accountable? An assessment of what has, so far, been delivered by international criminal justice is highly unsatisfactory. The indicted at the bar often appear to be mere scapegoats and seldom have the trials effectively contributed to reconciliation in areas devastated by civil wars. More seriously, some of these trials have been shows of power used by wars’ winners to discipline their opponents.

While much of the existing literature has addressed the issue by exploring the potentials of the judicial devices available, we have approached it from a different perspective, namely to look at a few spectacular trials with very different outcomes. We have tried to show that the incrimination of Augusto Pinochet by a Spanish judge helped Chilean society to face up to its own past. Judging Slobodan Milošević while ignoring the war crimes committed by NATO in its war versus Serbia showed instead how biased international justice could be. The conviction of Radovan Karadžić gave at least some solace to the victims of the civil war in the Balkans. The hanging of Saddam Hussein led to an explosion of sectarian violence in Iraq as well as in neighbouring countries and almost succeeded in transforming one of the most brutal dictators of the XX century into a martyr. The fact that Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, after two warrants of arrests were issued in 2009 and 2010, is still firmly in control of Sudan has seriously discredited international justice.

We argue that so long as international criminal tribunals continue to operate in an inter-governmental logic, it will hardly be able to deliver its promises. Governments are providing the budget, selecting the judges, even providing the prisons for the few convicted and this seriously hampers the independence of the judicial power. The hope of a genuinely impartial judiciary will therefore rest on the ability of civil society around the world to pressure the official institutions through opinion tribunals, independent investigations, and by carefully watching the proceedings of the International Criminal Court. The book makes ample reference to films and novels that have been inspired by controversies associated with the global criminal justice system. We hope very much that this wealth of non-academic sources will motivate students to engage with the question of global criminal accountability.” From Publisher’s Website.

Crime and Social Justice in Indian Country, edited By Marianne O. Nielsen and Karen Jarratt-Snider. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2018. 216p.

“In Indigenous America, human rights and justice take on added significance. The special legal status of Native Americans and the highly complex jurisdictional issues resulting from colonial ideologies have become deeply embedded into federal law and policy. Nevertheless, Indigenous people in the United States are often invisible in discussions of criminal and social justice.

Crime and Social Justice in Indian Country calls to attention the need for culturally appropriate research protocols and critical discussions of social and criminal justice in Indian Country. The contributors come from the growing wave of Native American as well as non-Indigenous scholars who employ these methods. They reflect on issues in three key areas: crime, social justice, and community responses to crime and justice issues. Topics include stalking, involuntary sterilization of Indigenous women, border-town violence, Indian gaming, child welfare, and juvenile justice. These issues are all rooted in colonization; however, the contributors demonstrate how Indigenous communities are finding their own solutions for social justice, sovereignty, and self-determination.

Thanks to its focus on community responses that exemplify Indigenous resilience, persistence, and innovation, this volume will be valuable to those on the ground working with Indigenous communities in public and legal arenas, as well as scholars and students. Crime and Social Justice in Indian Country shows the way forward for meaningful inclusions of Indigenous peoples in their own justice initiatives.” From Publisher’s Website.

Criminal Misconduct in Office: Law and Politics, by Jeremy Horder. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2018. 224p.

“Should the criminal law be used to deter and punish corruption in politics: from employing family members at public expense to improper spending on elections, lobbying, and cronyism? How did so many MPs avoid facing charges after the 2009 government expenses scandal?

In this book, Jeremy Horder tackles these questions and more. As well as offering the first treatment of the history, philosophy, and politics of the application of the offence of misconduct in office to Members of Parliament in England and Wales, Horder explains how political corruption might be dealt with in future, and how politicians could be held accountable for their actions so that they are deterred from betraying the public’s trust.

Use of the criminal law should not be the sole or even the main way to remedy all corruption in politics. Nevertheless, for too long the offence of misconduct in a public office has had an ambiguous status in the political realm. If we are to preserve the good health of government it must be seen as a constitutional fundamental. A charge of misconduct provides a way in which corrupt conduct on the part of legislators can be punished with an appropriate label, holding them to account for the misuse of power by reference to the standards of ordinary people. When other – civil law or regulatory – means prove insufficient, it should be possible for ordinary members of a jury, and not for Parliamentarians or other officials, to decide whether, for example, the expenditure of public money on legislators’ private income and benefits amounts to a criminal abuse of the public’s trust. This book offers an authoritative and accessible account of a ‘bottom-up’ (jury standards-led), as opposed to a ‘top-down’ (officials applying their own standards), approach to the role of the criminal law in constitutional contexts.” From Publisher’s Website.

Criminalizing Children: Welfare and the State in Australia, by David McCallum. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

“Incarceration of children is rising rapidly throughout of Australia, with indigenous children most at risk of imprisonment. Indigenous and non-indigenous children have been subject to detention in both welfare and justice systems in Australian states and territories since colonization. Countless governments and human rights enquiries have attempted to address the problem of the increasing criminalization of children, with little success. David McCallum traces the history of ‘problem children’ over several decades, demonstrating that the categories of neglected and offending children are both linked to similar kinds of governing. Institutions and encampments have historically played a significant role in contributing to the social problems of today. This book also takes a theoretical perspective, tracking parallel developments within the human sciences of childhood and theories of race. Applying a social theoretical analysis of these events and the changing rationalities of governing, McCallum challenges our assumptions about how law and governance of children leads to their criminalization and incarceration.” From Publisher’s Website.

Decarcerating America: From Mass Punishment to Public Health, edited by Ernest Drucker. New York: The New Press, 2018. 336p.

“Mass incarceration will end—there is an emerging consensus that we’ve been locking up too many people for too long. But with more than 2.2 million Americans behind bars right now, how do we go about bringing people home? Decarcerating America collects some of the leading thinkers in the criminal justice reform movement to strategize about how to cure America of its epidemic of mass punishment.

With sections on front-end approaches, improving prison conditions, and re-entry, the book includes pieces by leaders across the criminal justice reform movement: Danielle Sered of Common Justice describes successful programs for youth with violent offenses; Robin Steinberg of the Bronx Defenders argues for more resources for defense attorneys to diminish plea bargains; Kathy Boudin suggests changes to the parole model; Jeannie Little offers an alternative for mental health and drug addiction issues; Eric Lotke offers models of new industries to replace the prison economy; and editor Ernest Drucker applies the tools of epidemiology to help us cure what he calls “a plague of prisons.”

Decarcerating America will be an indispensable roadmap as the movement to challenge incarceration in America gains critical mass—it shows us how to get people out of prisons, and the more appropriate responses to crime. The ideas presented in this volume are what we are fighting for when we fight against the New Jim Crow.” From Publisher’s Website.

Doing Time, Writing Lives: Refiguring Literacy and Higher Education in Prison, by Patrick W. Berry. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017. 160p.

“Doing Time, Writing Lives offers a much-needed analysis of the teaching of college writing in U.S. prisons, a racialized space that—despite housing more than 2 million people—remains nearly invisible to the general public. Through the examination of a college-in-prison program that promotes the belief that higher education in prison can reduce recidivism and improve life prospects for the incarcerated and their families, author Patrick W. Berry exposes not only incarcerated students’ hopes and dreams for their futures but also their anxieties about whether education will help them.

Combining case studies and interviews with the author’s own personal experience of teaching writing in prison, this book chronicles the attempts of incarcerated students to write themselves back into a society that has erased their lived histories. It challenges polarizing rhetoric often used to describe what literacy can and cannot deliver, suggesting more nuanced and ethical ways of understanding literacy and possibility in an age of mass incarceration.” From Publisher’s Website.

Environmental Criminal Liability and Enforcement in European and International Law, by Ricardo Pereira.  Leiden, NETH; Boston: Brill Niijhoff, 2015.

“The drive for harmonisation of environmental criminal standards at both the international and European level emerges from the increasing recognition of the scale and seriousness of environmental crime, the need to strengthen mechanisms of police and judicial interstate cooperation to combat crossborder crime, and the objective to ensure fair competition in a global economy and an integrated EU common market. The harmonisation of environmental criminal law requires a competent institutional framework able to convey the need for criminalisation of environmental harm while not overriding national aspirations to sovereignty in criminal matters. The book Environmental Criminal Liability and Enforcement in European and International Law assesses legal, theoretical and practical questions of harmonisation of national environmental criminal law and the mechanisms for cooperation by sovereign states under European and International Law, with a particular emphasis on legislative developments in the European Union, the Council of Europe and other international institutions, assessing the case for an extension of the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court over international environmental crimes.” From Publisher’s Website.

Environmental Crime in Europe, edited by Andrew Farmer, Michael Faure and Grazia Maria Vagliasindi. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. 392p.’

“The aim of this important new collection is to explore how environmental crime is controlled and environmental criminal law is shaped and implemented within the European Union and its Member States. It examines the legal framework, looking in particular at Directive 2008/99/EC, and the specific competences of the EU in this domain. In addition, it provides a detailed analysis of environmental criminal law in seven Member States, focusing inter alia on the basic legislation, the way in which environmental pollution is criminalised and the main actors in place to enforce environmental criminal law. In so doing, it provides a much needed explanation of the evolution of environmental criminal law in Europe at Union level and how this is implemented in selected Member States.” From Publisher’s Website.

Getting Past “The Pimp”: Management in the Sex Industry, edited by Chris Bruckert and Colette Parent. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. 162p.

“The issue of third parties in the sex industry – individuals who are neither the client nor the service provider – has become especially urgent in our current socio-political context. Surprisingly, in spite of an emergence of critical scholarship on the sex industry, as well as recommendations by key governmental committees, little attention has been extended to examining the role of individuals labelled pimps, procurers, and traffickers.

Addressing the function of third parties on the street and indoors, Getting Past ‘the Pimp’ incorporates solid empirical evidence including documentary analysis, 75 interviews with third parties, and 52 interviews with sex workers to unpack the roles and relationships of third parties in three sectors of the sex industry‒ incall/outcall, stripping, and street-based prostitution. Contrary to prevailing stereotypes that portray third parties as inherently abusive and controlling, these workers fulfill important roles and provide vital services as associates, fee-for-service hires, and agency owners or managers responsible for scheduling and arranging transportation and security. The sex industry, like mainstream businesses, rarely depend exclusively on client and worker to operate efficiently, and safely.” From Publisher’s Website.

Hillbilly Hellraisers: Federal Power and Populist Defiance in the Ozarks, by J. Blake Perkins. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2017. 296p.

“Long a bastion of antigovernment feeling, the Ozark region today is home to fervent strains of conservative-influenced sentiment. Does rural heritage play an exceptional role in the perpetuation of these attitudes? Have such outlooks been continuous?

J. Blake Perkins searches for the roots of rural defiance in the Ozarks–and discovers how it changed over time. Eschewing generalities, Perkins focuses on the experiences and attitudes of rural people themselves as they interacted with government from the late nineteenth century through the twentieth century.He uncovers the reasons local disputes and uneven access to government power fostered markedly different reactions by hill people as time went by. Resistance in the earlier period sprang from upland small farmers’ conflicts with capitalist elites who held the local levers of federal power. But as industry and agribusiness displaced family farms after World War II, a conservative cohort of town business elites, local political officials, and midwestern immigrants arose from the region’s new low-wage, union-averse economy. As Perkins argues, this modern antigovernment conservatism bore little resemblance to the backcountry populism of an earlier age but had much in common with the movement elsewhere.” From Publisher’s Website.

Immigration and the Law: Race, Citizenship, and Social Control, edited by Sofia Espinoza Alvarez and Martin Guevara Urbina. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2018. 392p.

“In the era of globalization, shifting political landscapes, and transnational criminal organizations, discourse around immigration is reaching unprecedented levels. Immigration and the Law is a timely and significant volume of essays that addresses the social, political, and economic contexts of migration in the United States. The contributors analyze the historical and contemporary landscapes of immigration laws, their enforcement, and the discourse surrounding these events, as well as the mechanisms, beliefs, and ideologies that govern them.

In today’s highly charged atmosphere, Immigration and the Law gives readers a grounded and broad overview of U.S. immigration law in a single book. Encompassing issues such as shifting demographics, a changing criminal justice system, and volatile political climate, the book is critically significant for academic, political, legal, and social arenas.

The contributors offer sound evidence to expose the historical legacy of violence, brutality, manipulation, oppression, marginalization, prejudice, discrimination, power, and control. Demystifying the ways that current ideas of ethnicity, race, gender, and class govern immigration and uphold the functioning and legitimacy of the criminal justice system, Immigration and the Law presents a variety of studies and perspectives that offer a pathway toward addressing long-neglected but vital topics in the discourse on immigration and the law.” From Publisher’s Website.

Immigration Policy in the Age of Punishment: Detention, Deportation, and Border Control, edited by David C. Brotherton and Philip Kretsedemas. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. 344p.

“The events of 2016 catapulted immigration policy to the forefront of public debate, and Donald Trump’s administration has signaled a harsh turn in enforcement. Yet the deportation, detention, and border-control policies that North American and European countries have embraced are by no means new. In this book, sociologists David C. Brotherton and Philip Kretsedemas bring together an interdisciplinary group of contributors to reconsider the immigration policies of the Obama era and beyond in terms of a decades-long “age of punishment.”

Immigration Policy in the Age of Punishment takes a critical, interdisciplinary, and transnational look at current issues surrounding immigration in the U.S. and abroad. It examines key features of this age of punishment, connecting neoliberal governance, global labor markets, and the national obsession with securing borders to explain critical research and theory on immigration enforcement. Contributors document the continuities between presidential administrations and across countries from many perspectives, with chapters discussing Canada, Australia, France, the UK, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico in addition to the U.S. They offer macro-level analyses of deportations and border enforcement, analyses of national policy and jurisprudence, and ethnographic accounts of the daily life experience of the prison-to-deportation pipeline, the making of deportability, and post-deportation transitions for noncitizens. This book highlights new directions in critical immigration policy and enforcement and deportation studies with the aim of problematizing the age of punishment that currently reigns over borders and those who seek to cross them.” From Publisher’s Website.

Insane: America’s Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness, by Alisa Roth. New York: Basic Books, 2018. 320p.

“America has made mental illness a crime. Jails in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago each house more people with mental illnesses than any hospital. As many as half of all people in America’s jails and prisons have a psychiatric disorder. One in four fatal police shootings involves a person with such disorders.

In this revelatory book, journalist Alisa Roth goes deep inside the criminal justice system to show how and why it has become a warehouse where inmates are denied proper treatment, abused, and punished in ways that make them sicker.

Through intimate stories of people in the system and those trying to fix it, Roth reveals the hidden forces behind this crisis and suggests how a fairer and more humane approach might look. Insane is a galvanizing wake-up call for criminal justice reformers and anyone concerned about the plight of our most vulnerable.” From Publisher’s Website.

Mafia Life: Love, Death, and Money at the Heart of Organized Crime, by Federico Varese. Oxford, UK:; New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. 288p.

“We see mafias as vast, powerful organizations, harvesting billions of dollars across the globe and wrapping their tentacles around everything from governance to finance. But is this the truth?

Traveling from mafia initiation ceremonies in far-flung Russian cities to elite gambling clubs in downtown Macau, Federico Varese sets off in search of answers. Using wiretapped conversations, interviews, and previously unpublished police records, he builds up a picture of the real men and women caught up in mafia life, showing their loves and fears, ambitions and disappointments, as well as their crimes.

Mafia Life takes us into the real world of organized crime, where henchmen worry about bad managers and have high blood pressure, assassinations are bungled as often as they come off, and increasing pressure from law enforcement means that a life of crime is no longer lived in the lap of luxury.

As our world changes, so must mafias. Globalization, migration, and technology are disrupting their traditions and threatening their revenue streams, and the Mafiosi must evolve or die. Mafia Life is an intense and totally compelling look at these organizations and the daily life of their members, as they get to grips with the modern world.” From Publisher’s Website.

The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation, by Adam Malka. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. 352p.

“What if racialized mass incarceration is not a perversion of our criminal justice system’s liberal ideals, but rather a natural conclusion? Adam Malka raises this disturbing possibility through a gripping look at the origins of modern policing in the influential hub of Baltimore during and after slavery’s final decades. He argues that America’s new professional police forces and prisons were developed to expand, not curb, the reach of white vigilantes, and are best understood as a uniformed wing of the gangs that controlled free black people by branding them—and treating them—as criminals. The post–Civil War triumph of liberal ideals thus also marked a triumph of an institutionalized belief in black criminality.

Mass incarceration may be a recent phenomenon, but the problems that undergird the “new Jim Crow” are very, very old. As Malka makes clear, a real reckoning with this national calamity requires not easy reforms but a deeper, more radical effort to overcome the racial legacies encoded into the very DNA of our police institutions.” Publisher’s Website.

Miller’s Children: Why Giving Teenage Killers a Second Chance Matters for All of Us, by James Garbarino. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018. 216p.

“Miller’s Children is a passionate and comprehensive look at the human consequences of the US Supreme Court’s decision in the case of Miller v. Alabama, which outlaws mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juvenile murderers. The decision to apply the law retroactively to other cases has provided hope to those convicted of murders as teenagers and had been incarcerated with the expectation that they would never leave prison until their own death as incarcerated adults.

Psychological expert witness James Garbarino shares his fieldwork in more than forty resentencing cases of juveniles affected by the Miller decision. Providing a wide-ranging review of current research on human development in adolescence and early adulthood, he shows how studies reveal the adolescent mind’s keen ability for malleability, suggesting the true potential for rehabilitation.

Garbarino focuses on how and why some convicted teenage murderers have been able to accomplish dramatic rehabilitation and transformation, emphasizing the role of education, reflection, mentoring, and spiritual development. With a deft hand, he shows us the prisoners’ world that is filled, first and foremost, with stories of hope amid despair, and moral and psychological recovery in the face of developmental insult and damage.” From Publisher’s Website.

Misdemeanor Land: Criminal Courts and Social Control in an Age of Broken Windows Policing, by Issa Kohler-Hausmann. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. 328p.

“Felony conviction and mass incarceration attract considerable media attention these days, yet the most common criminal-justice encounters are for misdemeanors, not felonies, and the most common outcome is not prison. In the early 1990s, New York City launched an initiative under the banner of Broken Windows policing to dramatically expand enforcement against low-level offenses. Misdemeanorland is the first book to document the fates of the hundreds of thousands of people hauled into lower criminal courts as part of this policing experiment.

Drawing on three years of fieldwork inside and outside of the courtroom, in-depth interviews, and analysis of trends in arrests and dispositions of misdemeanors going back three decades, Issa Kohler-Hausmann argues that lower courts have largely abandoned the adjudicative model of criminal law administration in which questions of factual guilt and legal punishment drive case outcomes. Due to the sheer volume of arrests, lower courts have adopted a managerial model–and the implications are troubling. Kohler-Hausmann shows how significant volumes of people are marked, tested, and subjected to surveillance and control even though about half the cases result in some form of legal dismissal. She describes in harrowing detail how the reach of America’s penal state extends well beyond the shocking numbers of people incarcerated in prisons or stigmatized by a felony conviction.

Revealing and innovative, Misdemeanorland shows how the lower reaches of our criminal justice system operate as a form of social control and surveillance, often without adjudicating cases or imposing formal punishment.” From Publisher’s Website.

Mob Town: A History of Crime and Disorder in the East End, by John Bennett. New Haven, CT: London: Yale University Press, 2017. 352p.

“Even before Jack the Ripper haunted its streets for prey, London’s East End had earned a reputation for immorality, filth, and vice. John Bennett, a writer and tour guide who has walked and researched the area for more than thirty years, delves into four centuries of history to chronicle the crimes, their perpetrators, and the circumstances that made the East End an ideal breeding ground for illegal activity.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Britain’s industrial boom drew thousands of workers to the area, leading to overcrowding and squalor. But crime in the area flourished long past the Victorian period. Drawing on original archival history and featuring a fascinating cast of characters including the infamous Ripper, highwayman Dick Turpin, the Kray brothers, and a host of ordinary evildoers, this gripping and deliciously unsavory volume will fascinate Londonphiles and true crime lovers alike.” From Publisher’s Website.

Murder on Shades Mountain: The Legal Lynching of Willie Peterson and the Struggle for Justice in Jim Crow Birmingham, by Melanie S. Morrison. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. 288p.

“One August night in 1931, on a secluded mountain ridge overlooking Birmingham, Alabama, three young white women were brutally attacked. The sole survivor, Nell Williams, age eighteen, said a black man had held the women captive for four hours before shooting them and disappearing into the woods. That same night, a reign of terror was unleashed on Birmingham’s black community: black businesses were set ablaze, posses of armed white men roamed the streets, and dozens of black men were arrested in the largest manhunt in Jefferson County history. Weeks later, Nell identified Willie Peterson as the attacker who killed her sister Augusta and their friend Jennie Wood. With the exception of being black, Peterson bore little resemblance to the description Nell gave the police. An all-white jury convicted Peterson of murder and sentenced him to death.

In Murder on Shades Mountain Melanie S. Morrison tells the gripping and tragic story of the attack and its aftermath—events that shook Birmingham to its core. Having first heard the story from her father—who dated Nell’s youngest sister when he was a teenager—Morrison scoured the historical archives and documented the black-led campaigns that sought to overturn Peterson’s unjust conviction, spearheaded by the NAACP and the Communist Party. The travesty of justice suffered by Peterson reveals how the judicial system could function as a lynch mob in the Jim Crow South. Murder on Shades Mountain also sheds new light on the struggle for justice in Depression-era Birmingham. This riveting narrative is a testament to the courageous predecessors of present-day movements that demand an end to racial profiling, police brutality, and the criminalization of black men.” From Publisher’s Website.

Organizational Opportunity and Deviant Behavior: Convenience in White-Collar Crime, by Petter Gottschalk. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2017. 256p.

“Ever since Sutherland coined the term ‘white-collar crime’, researchers have struggled to understand and explain why some individuals abuse their privileged positions of trust and commit financial crime. This book makes a novel contribution to the development of convenience theory as a framework to understand and explain ‘white-collar crime’.

The framework integrates well-known theories from criminology, management and other fields to explain the occurrence of offenses. It is found that autobiographies indicate a strong presence of neutralization techniques in the behavioral dimension of convenience theory, while internal investigations indicate a strong presence of organizational opportunities to commit ‘white-collar crime’. Survey research, on the other hand, is found to indicate a strong belief that chief executives sometimes have the motive to commit financial crime in times of crisis, in times of great challenges, and in times of greed. The book concludes that the only feasible avenue to combat this type of crime is to make it less convenient.

This book will appeal to criminology and criminal justice students at both bachelor and master levels, as well as those studying business and law. Practitioners, including consultants in global auditing firms, attorneys and police academy students will also benefit from the overview of convenience theory research.” From Publisher’s Website.

Race, Criminal Justice, and Migration Control: Enforcing the Boundaries of Belonging, edited by Mary Bosworth, Alpa Parmar, and Yolanda Vazquez. Oxford, UK; New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. 288p.

“The criminalization of migration is heavily patterned by race. By placing race at the centre of its analysis, this volume examines, questions, and explains the growing intersection between criminal justice and migration control. Through the lens of race, we see how criminal justice and migration enmesh in order to exclude, stop, and excise racialized citizens and non-citizens from societies across the world within, beyond, and along borders.

Race and the meaning of race in relation to citizenship and belonging is excavated through the chapters presented in the book, and the book as a whole, thereby transforming the way we think about migration. Neatly organized in four sections, the book begins with chapters that present a conceptual analysis of race, borders, and social control, moving to the institutions that make up and shape the criminal justice and migration complex. The remaining chapters are convened around the key sites where criminal justice and migration control intersect: policing, courts, and punishment. Together the volume presents a critical and timely analysis of how race shapes and complicates mobility and how racism is enabled and reanimated when criminal justice and migration control coalesce.” From Publisher’s Website.

Redefining Organised Crime: A Challenge for the European Union? Edited by Stefania Carnevale, Serena Forlati and Orsetta Giolo. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. 408p.

“The definition of organised crime has long been the object of lively debate, at national and international level. Sociological and legal analysis has not yet led to one definitive answer to the question of what exactly ‘organised crime’ means. Nonetheless, many instruments adopted both at international and national levels set forth special legal regimes designed to target criminal groups featuring a stable organisation, which are perceived as particularly dangerous to society. Therefore, identifying the notion of organised crime is crucial to establishing the scope of any legal instrument specifically designed for combating it.

The aim of this book is to reassess the scope, the effectiveness and the overall coherence of existing definitions of organised crime, and to identify any need for a reconsideration of these definitions, specifically with reference to the EU legal order. It will be of interest to academics, practitioners and legislators working in the sphere of EU criminal law and of organised crime more generally.” From Publisher’s Website.

The Shadow of the Wall: Violence and Migration on the U.S.-Mexico Border, edited by Jeremy Slack, Daniel E. Martinez, and Scott Whiteford. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2018. 280p.

“Mass deportation is at the forefront of political discourse in the United States. The Shadow of the Wall shows in tangible ways the migration experiences of hundreds of people, including their encounters with U.S. Border Patrol, cartels, detention facilities, and the deportation process. Deportees reveal in their heartwrenching stories the power of family separation and reunification and the cost of criminalization, and they call into question assumptions about human rights and federal policies.

The authors analyze data from the Migrant Border Crossing Study (MBCS), a mixed-methods, binational research project that offers socially relevant, rigorous social science about migration, immigration enforcement, and violence on the border. Using information gathered from more than 1,600 post-deportation surveys, this volume examines the different faces of violence and migration along the Arizona-Sonora border and shows that deportees are highly connected to the United States and will stop at nothing to return to their families. The Shadow of the Wall underscores the unintended social consequences of increased border enforcement, immigrant criminalization, and deportation along the U.S.-Mexico border.” From Publisher’s Website.

Shadow Vigilantes: How Distrust in the Justice System Breeds a New Kind of Lawlessness, by Paul H. Robinson and Sarah M. Robinson. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2018. 344p.

“A pervasive and destructive problem is afflicting our current justice system, eroding community confidence in law enforcement. “Shadow vigilantism” is a vicious cycle in which ordinary people, as well as criminal justice officials, are so fed up with the system’s failures that they distort and subvert the system to force it to do the justice that it seems reluctant to do on its own. The effects of this lack of trust are pervasive and pernicious: citizens refuse to report a crime or help investigators; jurors refuse to indict or convict; and officials manipulate a system that is perceived to be unreliable. This downward spiral eventually undermines the moral authority of law enforcement and creates widening rifts in the community.

This book examines many examples of how the community has responded when the justice system is perceived to fail, including the infamous murder of Emmett Till, which became a cause that spurred on the NAACP and the civil rights movement; the Lavender Panthers, which formed in response to gay bashing during the 1980s; the Crown Heights Maccabees, a neighborhood watch group that successfully reduced neighborhood crime when the police failed to do so; the Animal Liberation Front, which struck back at institutions for perceived abuses to animals; Operation Perverted Justice, an organization that used online chat rooms to out pedophiles by publicizing their personal information; and many others.

Such examples highlight the importance of upholding a justice system that works to provide justice for all and is not perceived to condone legal technicalities that overturn just punishment, judicial rules that suppress evidence and let serious offenders go, and other actions that undermine public trust in the system.” From Publisher’s Website.

Start Here: A Road Map to Reducing Mass Incarceration, by Greg Berman and Julian Adler. New York: The New Press, 2018. 224p.

“Everyone knows that the United States leads the world in incarceration, and that our political process is gridlocked. But what can be done right now to reduce the number of people sent to jail and prison? This essential book offers a concrete road map for both professionals and general readers who want to move from analysis to action. In this forward-looking, next-generation criminal justice reform book, Greg Berman and Julian Adler of the Center for Court Innovation highlight the key lessons from successful programs across the country—engaging the public in preventing crime, treating all defendants with dignity and respect, and linking people to effective community-based interventions rather than locking them up. Along the way, they tell a series of gripping stories, highlighting gang members who have gotten their lives back on track, judges who are transforming their courtrooms, and reformers around the country who are rethinking what justice looks like.

While Start Here offers no silver bullets, it does put forth a suite of proven reforms—from alternatives to bail to diversion programs for mentally ill defendants—that will improve the lives of thousands of people right now. Start Here is a must-read for everyone who wants to start dismantling mass incarceration without waiting for a revolution or permission. Proceeds from the book will support the Center for Court Innovation’s reform efforts.” From Publisher’s Website.

Stick Together and Come Back Home: Racial Sorting and Spillover of Carceral Identity, by Patrick Lopez-Aguado. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018. 240p.

“In Stick Together and Come Back Home, Patrick Lopez-Aguado examines how what happens inside a prison affects what happens outside of it. Following the experiences of seventy youth and adults as they navigate juvenile justice and penal facilities before finally going back home, he outlines how institutional authorities structure a “carceral social order” that racially and geographically divides criminalized populations into gang-associated affiliations. These affiliations come to shape one’s exposure to both violence and criminal labeling, and as they spill over the institutional walls they establish how these unfold in high-incarceration neighborhoods as well, revealing the insidious set of consequences that mass incarceration holds for poor communities of color.” From Publisher’s Website.

Supermax Prison: Controlling the Most Dangerous Criminals, by Larry L. Franklin and Rakesh Chandra. Palisades, NY: History Publishing Global, 2017.

“This book provides the reader with a history of the burgeoning growth of supermax prisons within the United States and an insider’s knowledge regarding many of the problematic inmates housed in such prisons. The complex dynamics leading to the often bizarre self-injurious behaviors demonstrated by a small but significant number of supermax inmates is explored in this well-written book. The authors’ conclusion that the mental health treatment offered to inmates with a serious mental illness at Tamms was often better than the treatment available at other Illinois prisons, related to class action litigation, is ironic and concerning.

The authors attempt to provide a balanced review of the pros and cons of the supermax prison, which was largely successful. A chapter entitled “Silent Voices” includes success stories of inmates who benefitted from their stays at Tamms in contrast to many other inmates who did poorly in reaction to the “dark, blackness of isolation” that was inherent in the Tamms environment.” From Publisher’s Website.

The Third Degree: The Triple Murder That Shook Washington and Changed American Criminal Justice, by Scott D. Seligman. Lincoln, NE: Potomac Books, 2018. 224p.

“If you’ve ever seen an episode of Law and Order, you can probably recite your Miranda rights by heart. But you likely don’t know that these rights had their roots in the case of a young Chinese man accused of murdering three diplomats in Washington DC in 1919. A frantic search for clues and dogged interrogations by gumshoes erupted in sensational news and editorial coverage and intensified international pressure on the police to crack the case.

Part murder mystery, part courtroom drama, and part landmark legal case, The Third Degree is the true story of a young man’s abuse by the Washington police and an arduous, seven-year journey through the legal system that drew in Warren G. Harding, William Howard Taft, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John W. Davis, and J. Edgar Hoover. The ordeal culminated in a sweeping Supreme Court ruling penned by Justice Louis Brandeis that set the stage for the Miranda warning many years later. Scott D. Seligman argues that the importance of the case hinges not on the defendant’s guilt or innocence but on the imperative that a system that presumes one is innocent until proven guilty provides protections against coerced confessions.

Today, when the treatment of suspects between arrest and trial remains controversial, when bias against immigrants and minorities in law enforcement continues to deny them their rights, and when protecting individuals from compulsory self-incrimination is still an uphill battle, this century-old legal spellbinder is a cautionary tale that reminds us how we got where we are today and makes us wonder how far we have yet to go.” From Publisher’s Website.

Urban Rage: The Revolt of the Excluded, by Mustafa Dikec. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018. 264p.

“In the past few decades, urban riots have erupted in democracies across the world. While high profile politicians often react by condemning protestors’ actions and passing crackdown measures, urban studies professor Mustafa Dikeç shows how these revolts are in fact rooted in exclusions and genuine grievances which our democracies are failing to address. In this eye-opening study, he argues that global revolts may be sparked by a particular police or government action but nonetheless are expressions of much longer and deep seated rage accumulated through hardship and injustices that have become routine.

Increasingly recognized as an expert on urban unrest, Dikeç examines urban revolts in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Sweden, Greece, and Turkey and, in a sweeping and engaging account, makes it clear that change is only possible if we address the failures of democratic systems and rethink the established practices of policing and political decision-making.” From Publisher’s Website.

When Lawyers Screw Up: Improving Access to Justice for Legal Malpractice Victims, by Herbert M. Kritzer and Neil Vidmar. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2018. 240p.

“Unhappy clients bring thousands of legal malpractice claims every year, against mega law firms and solo practitioners, for simple errors or egregious misconduct, and for losses than can reach $100 million or more. This in an industry, legal services, generating nearly $300 billion a year in revenue and touching every facet of American society. Yet, scant if any scholarly attention has been paid to the questions and consequences of lawyers’ professional liability. This book is the first to fully explore the mistakes lawyers sometimes make, the nature of these mistakes, the harm they do, and the significant disparities in outcomes for corporate and individual victims of lawyers’ errors.

A systematic, empirical study of legal malpractice, When Lawyers Screw Up employs both quantitative and qualitative methods to examine the frequency and nature of claims, the area of practice producing them, the amounts at stake, and the resolutions. The authors also use a range of data sources to study the frequency and outcomes of legal malpractice trials, whether bench or jury. Their comparison of legal malpractice cases involving the corporate and personal service sectors reveal the difficulties confronting claims coming from the personal sector—difficulties that often deny victims redress, even when they have suffered significant harm.

When Lawyers Screw Up draws on a series of interviews to describe the practices of lawyers with expertise in handling legal malpractice claims, even as it notes how few such experts are available to prosecute these claims. In light of their findings, the authors suggest a range of reforms that would help victims of legal malpractice, particularly individuals and small businesses, in pursuing their claims.” From Publisher’s Website.

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