Books Received
May 2013

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.

An Ethnography of English Football Fans: Cans, Cops and Carnivals, by Geoff Pearson. Manchester, UK; New York: Manchester University Press, 2012. 201p.

“This book is an ethnographic account of English football fans, based upon sixteen years’ of participant observation. The author identifies a distinct sub-culture of supporter – the “carnival fan” – who dominated the traveling support of the three teams observed – Manchester United, Blackpool and the England National Team. This accessible account follows these groups home and abroad, describing their interpretations, motivations and behavior and challenging a number of the myths about “hooliganism” and crowd control. The text will be of value to anyone studying, researching or interested in ethnographic modes of enquiry or the behavior of football fans. In particular it will be of value to anyone involved in the academic disciplines of policing, criminal justice, sociology, criminology, sports studies, and research methods. It also makes recommendations for the management of football crowds that will be of use to practitioners involved in policing, crowd control, and event management.” From Publisher’s Website.

Animal Cruelty, Antisocial Behaviour and Aggression: More than a Link, by Eleonora Gullone. Basingstoke, UK; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 182p.

“Through comprehensive reviews of theory and research related to animal cruelty, antisocial behaviour, and aggression, Gullone clearly demonstrates that animal cruelty behaviours are another form of antisocial behaviour, that appear right alongside human aggression and violence, as well as other crimes including non-violent crimes. Almost without exception, the perpetrators of animal cruelty crimes are the same individuals who carry out a host of other antisocial crimes or misdemeanors including assault, partner and child abuse, and bullying. For those whose criminal careers begin in childhood (i.e. the early starters), without intervention, it is highly likely that their antisocial activities will continue into their adult years, in most cases increasing in severity. It is therefore time to begin treating animal cruelty crimes more seriously, to prevent further harm not only against the innocent animals who will otherwise become the victims of these individuals but also against potential human victims.” From Publisher’s Website.

Arrested Adolescent Offenders: A Study of Delayed Transitions to Adulthood, by Christopher Salvatore. El Paso, TX: LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC, 2013. 166p.

“Salvatore’s study is one of the first to incorporate emerging adulthood into life course criminology. He explores how a new stage of the life course, identified as emerging adulthood influenced offending in a cohort of young people, finding that many of the key indicators of emerging adulthood such as economic instability are related to criminal offending and drug use for today’s young adults. His findings support prior studies in life course criminology that social bonds and turning points are important factors in the offending patterns of youth.” From Publisher’s Website.

The Beast of Florida: A History of Anti-Black Violence, by Marvin Dunn. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2013. 243p.

“A symbolic embodiment of racial violence and hatred, “The Beast” openly prowled the nation between the Civil War and the civil rights movement. The reasons it appeared varied, with psychological, political, and economic dynamics all playing a part, but the outcome was always brutal–if not deadly.

From the bombing of Harriette and Harry T. Moore’s home on Christmas Day to Willie James Howard’s murder, from the Rosewood massacre to the Newberry Six lynchings, Marvin Dunn offers an encyclopedic catalogue of The Beast’s rampages in Florida. Instead of simply taking snapshots of incidents, Dunn provides context for a century’s worth of racial violence by examining communities over time. Crucial insights from interviews with descendants of both perpetrators and victims shape this study of Florida’s grim racial history. Rather than pointing fingers and placing blame, The Beast in Florida allows voices and facts to speak for themselves, facilitating a conversation on the ways in which racial violence changed both black and white lives forever.

 

With this comprehensive and balanced look at racially motivated events, Dunn reveals the Sunshine State’s too-often forgotten—or intentionally hidden—past. The result is a panorama of compelling human stories: its emergent dialogue challenges conceptions of what created and maintained The Beast.” From Publisher’s Website.

Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex: Crime and Incarceration in the 21st Century, by Kevin Wehr and Elyshia Aseltine. Abingdon, UK; New York: Routledge, 2013. 79p.

“This short text examines the American prison system, its conditions, and its impact on society. Wehr and Aseltine define the prison industrial complex and explain how the current prison system is a contemporary social problem. They conclude by using California as a case study, and propose alternatives and alterations to the prison system.” From Publisher’s Website.

Chasing Gideon: The Elusive Quest for Poor People’s Justice, by Karen Houppert. New York: The New Press, 2013. 275p.

“On March 18, 1963, in one of its most significant legal decisions, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Gideon v. Wainwright that all defendants facing significant jail time have the constitutional right to a free attorney if they cannot afford their own. Fifty years later, 80 percent of criminal defendants are served by public defenders. In a book that combines the sweep of history with the intimate details of individual lives and legal cases, veteran reporter Karen Houppert movingly chronicles the stories of people in all parts of the country who have relied on Gideon’s promise.

There is the harrowing saga of a young man who is charged with involuntary vehicular homicide in Washington State, where overextended public defenders juggle impossible caseloads, forcing his defender to go to court to protect her own right to provide an adequate defense. In Florida, Houppert describes a public defender’s office, loaded with upward of seven hundred cases per attorney, and discovers the degree to which Clarence Earl Gideon’s promise is still unrealized. In New Orleans, she follows the case of a man imprisoned for twenty-seven years for a crime he didn’t commit, finding a public defense system already near collapse before Katrina and chronicling the harrowing months after the storm, during which overworked volunteers and students struggled to get the system working again. In Georgia, Houppert finds a mentally disabled man who is to be executed for murder, despite the best efforts of a dedicated but severely overworked and underfunded capital defender.

Half a century after Anthony Lewis’s award-winning Gideon’s Trumpet brought us the story of the court case that changed the American justice system, Chasing Gideon is a crucial book that provides essential reckoning of our attempts to implement this fundamental constitutional right.” From Publisher’s Website.

Civil Disobedience: Protest, Justification, and the Law, by Tony Milligan. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. 179p.

“Civil disobedience is a form of protest with a special standing with regards to the law that sets it apart from political violence. Such principled law-breaking has been witnessed in recent years over climate change, economic strife, and the treatment of animals.

Civil disobedience is examined here in the context of contemporary political activism, in the light of classic accounts by Thoreau, Tolstoy, and Gandhi to call for a broader attitude towards what civil disobedience involves. The question of violence is discussed, arguing that civil disobedience need only be aspirationally non-violent and that although some protests do not clearly constitute law-breaking they may render people liable to arrest. For example, while there may not be violence against persons, there may be property damage, as seen in raids upon animal laboratories. Such forms of militancy raise ethical and legal questions.” From Publisher’s Website.

Community Policing in Indigenous Communities, ed. by Mahesh K. Nalla and Graeme R. Newman. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, 2013. 366p.

“Indigenous communities are typically those that challenge the laws of the nation states of which they have become—often very reluctantly—a part. Around the world, community policing has emerged in many of these regions as a product of their physical environments and cultures. Through a series of case studies, Community Policing in Indigenous Communities explores how these often deeply divided societies operate under the community policing paradigm.

Drawing on the local expertise of policing practitioners and researchers across the globe, the book explores several themes with regard to each region:

  • How community policing originated or evolved in the community and how it has changed over time
  • The type of policing style used—whether informal or formal and uniformed or non-uniformed, whether partnerships are developed with local community organizations or businesses, and the extent of covert operations, if any
  • The role played by community policing in the region, including the relative emphasis of calls for service, the extent to which advice and help is offered to citizens, whether local records are kept of citizen movement and locations, and investigation and arrest procedures
  • The community’s special cultural or indigenous attributes that set it apart from other models of community policing
  • Organizational attributes, including status in the “hierarchy of control” within the regional or national organization of policing
  • The positive and negative features of community policing as it is practiced in the community
  • Its effectiveness in reducing and or preventing crime and disorder

The book demonstrates that community policing cannot be imposed from above without grassroots input from local citizens. It is a strategy—not simply for policing with consent—but for policing in contexts where there is often little, if any, consent. It is an aspirational practice aimed to help police and communities within contested contexts to recognize that positive gains can be made, enabling communities to live in relative safety.” From Publisher’s Website.

Compassionate Confinement: A Year in the Life of Unit C, by Laura S. Abrams and Ben Anderson-Hathe. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012. 169p.

“To date, knowledge of the everyday world of the juvenile correction institution has been extremely sparse. Compassionate Confinement brings to light the challenges and complexities inherent in the U.S. system of juvenile corrections. Building on over a year of field work at a boys’ residential facility, Laura S. Abrams and Ben Anderson-Nathe provide a context for contemporary institutions and highlight some of the system’s most troubling tensions.

This ethnographic text utilizes narratives, observations, and case examples to illustrate the strain between treatment and correctional paradigms and the mixed messages regarding gender identity and masculinity that the youths are expected to navigate. Within this context, the authors use the boys’ stories to show various and unexpected pathways toward behavior change. While some residents clearly seized opportunities for self-transformation, others manipulated their way toward release, and faced substantial challenges when they returned home.

Compassionate Confinement concludes with recommendations for rehabilitating this notoriously troubled system in light of the experiences of its most vulnerable stakeholders.” From Publisher’s Website.

Contrasts in Punishment: An Explanation of Anglophone Excess and Nordic Exceptionalism, by John Pratt and Anna Eriksson. Abingdon, UK; New York: Routledge, 2013. 260p.

“Why do some modern societies punish their offenders differently to others? Why are some more punitive and others more tolerant in their approach to offending and how can these differences be explained? Based on extensive historical analysis and fieldwork in the penal systems of England, Australia, New Zealand on the one hand, and Finland, Norway and Sweden on the other, this book seeks to address these underlying questions.

The book argues that the penal differences that currently exist between these two clusters of societies emanate from their early nineteenth century social arrangements. The Anglophone societies were dominated by exclusionary value systems in contrast to the more inclusionary values of the Nordic. The development of their penal programmes over this two hundred year period, including the much earlier demise of the death penalty in the Nordic countries and significant differences between the respective prison rates and prison conditions of the two clusters, reflects the continuing influence of these values. Indeed, in the early 21st century these differences have become even more pronounced.

John Pratt and Anna Eriksson offer a unique contribution to the growing importance of comparative research in the history and sociology of punishment. This book will be of interest to those studying criminology, sociology, punishment, prison and penal policy as well as professionals working in prisons or in the area of penal policy across the six societies that feature in the book.” From Publisher’s Website.

Corporate Manslaughter and Regulatory Reform, by Paul Almond. Abingdon, UK; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 224p.

“Corporate Manslaughter and Regulatory Reform provides an innovative account of the emergence of new corporate manslaughter offences to criminalize deaths in the workplace during the last twenty years. This has occurred in many different national jurisdictions, but this book shows how these developments can be understood as a coherent phenomenon. It identifies the historical and legal origins of the instrumentalism that has limited the ability of health and safety regulation to respond effectively to work-related death cases, and explains how and why criminal law came to be used as a means of addressing these limitations by reinforcing the moral values underpinning regulation. The contemporary neo-liberal political context is shown to have posed fundamental challenges to systems of safety regulation, and created an environment in which the criminal law is seen as an effective and desirable means of delivering important moral and symbolic messages that regulation cannot communicate effectively itself.” From Publisher’s Website.

Cybercrime and Cybersecurity in the Global South, by Nir Kshetri. Abingdon, UK; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 249p.

“Global cybercrime is arguably the biggest underworld industry of our times. Global forces and technologies such as mobile phones, social media and cloud computing are shaping the structure of the global cybercrime industry estimated at US$1 trillion. Nir Kshetri documents and compares the patterns, characteristics and processes of cybercrime activities in major regions and economies in the Global South such as China, India, the former Second World economies, Latin America and the Caribbean, Sub-Saharan Africa and Middle East and North Africa. Integrating theories from a wide range of disciplines, he explains initiatives at the global, supranational, national, sub-national and local levels.” From Publisher’s Website.

Doing Harder Time? The Experiences of an Ageing Male Prison Population in England and Wales, by Natalie Mann. Farnham, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. 141p.

“In his seminal text “Society of Captives”, Gresham Sykes discusses the general pains of imprisonment to which all prisoners are subjected: the deprivation of liberty, the deprivation of heterosexual relationships, and the deprivation of autonomy. Sykes recognised that different prisoners experience these pains differently, and as a result, are affected to a greater or lesser degree by their time inside. In this groundbreaking book, Natalie Mann investigates the idea that apart from the general pains of imprisonment discussed by Sykes, certain characteristics which certain prisoners hold makes them more likely to suffer from what she terms term ‘added pains’, i.e. the extra difficulties, deprivations and frustrations which exist within certain subsections of the prison population. The ageing prison population is a key example of a group who experience added pains of imprisonment. Their weaker appearance, their old-fashioned views and their less able bodies are all factors which result in them experiencing extra problems within prison. It is these added pains and the ageing men’s experiences of them, which this book addresses. Framed within the theoretical perspective of structuration theory, but also drawing on aspects of Goffman’s interactionism and Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, this book offers a unique interpretation of research carried out with ageing prisoners and their prison officers and shows the reality of prison for those who are reaching the end of their life course.” From Publisher’s Website.

Doing Probation Work: Identity in a Criminal Justice Occupation, by Rob C. Mawby and Anne Worrall. Abingdon, UK; New York: Routledge, 2013. 182p.

“A great deal has been written about the political, policy and practice changes that have shaped probation work but little has been written on the changes to occupational cultures and the ways in which probation workers themselves view their role. This book fills that gap by exploring the meaning of ‘doing probation work’ from the perspective of probation workers themselves.

Based on 60 extensive interviews with probation workers who joined the probation service from the 1960s to the present day, this book reaches beyond criminological and policy analysis to an application of sociological and organizational theory to rich qualitative data. It explores the backgrounds and motivations of probation workers, their changing relationships with other criminal justice agencies, and the complex public perceptions and media representations of probation work. The book considers the relative influences of religion, the union, diversity and feminization and, while it acknowledges that probation work is stressful, it draws innovatively on sociological and organizational concepts to categorize how workers respond to turbulent times.

This book challenges the dominant narrative of probation’s decline in recent literature and constructs three ‘ideal types’ of probation worker – ‘lifers’, ‘second careerists’ and ‘offender managers.’ Each makes an essential contribution to probation cultures, which collectively contribute to, rather than undermine, the effectiveness of offender management and the future of probation work. This book will be important reading for researchers in the disciplines of criminology, criminal justice, sociology and management as well as probation workers of all grades and those in training.” From Publisher’s Website.

Estimating Crime Rates from Police Reports and Victim Surveys: Progressive Convergence in Time Series Analyses, by Sami Ansari. El Paso, TX: LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC, 2013. 272p.

“Ansari tests and explains the progressive convergence between the UCR and NCVS crime data series using multi method approach and time seriesanalysis. Graphic and correlational analyses support the convergence between the two series for all categories. However, the cointegration test indicates that the series are cointegrated for burglary and are in the process of converging for robbery and violent crime. The results of autoregressive models show that police productivity in terms of crime reporting and the methodological changes in the NCVS in 1992 are significant factors that reduce the divergence between the UCR and NCVS data sets.” From Publisher’s Website.

Estimating Drug Use: The Effect of Sampling Methods and Policy Implications, by Janine Kremling. El Paso, TX: LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC, 2013. 202p.

“Kremling uses data from the Drug Use Forecasting (DUF) and the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (ADAM) programs to explore whether the drug estimates of DUF, using a non-probability sample, and the drug use estimates of ADAM, using a probability sample, yield different results. She finds that the drug use information in DUF and ADAM is not substantially different for marijuana, cocaine, and opiates for all sites analyzed together. Her main conclusion is that a probability sample does not produce results that are substantially different from a convenience sample. While a researcher can attempt to draw a probability sample, it is still volunteers who agree to participate just as in a convenience sample.” From the Publisher’s Website.

European Criminal Justice and Policy, ed. by Marc Cool, et al. Maklu, 2012. 230p.

“Reviewing criminal justice policy with respect to different phases in the criminal justice chain, the contributions in this book range from looking into the extension of criminalization in the sphere of trafficking in human beings and labor exploitation, to the operability of cross-border execution of sentences involving deprivation of liberty. Most contributions look into the need to develop a conceptual framework to support future policy making, pointing to the lack thereof with respect to liability of legal persons, ne bis in idem as an EU principle, cross-border effect of disqualifications, and cooperation with private security actors. One essay looks into the public expenditure in different phases of the criminal justice chain, based on a case study on the public expenditure of Belgian drug policy. Additionally, from a historical and comparative perspective, the book analyzes specific European and Chinese interrogation rules to provide a solid context for the current situation and to support future legal reforms.” From Publisher’s Website.

Ideologically Motivated Murder: The Threat Posed by White Supremacist Groups, by David J. Caspi. El Paso, TX: LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC, 2013. 207p.

“Acts of terrorism committed by domestic extremists outnumber those committed by international actors. White supremacist groups are linked to a considerable number of these terrorist acts. Although part of the same movement, certain groups appear to pose a greater threat than others in that they are linked to a greater number of ideologically motivated homicides. Caspi investigated whether a group’s location within its network accounted for this phenomenon. Interestingly, this preliminary study suggests that an association between network location and threat of extreme violence does exist. This finding may have important implications for those tasked with fighting terrorism.” From Publisher’s Website.

Imprisoned Religion: Transformations of Religion During and After Imprisonment in Eastern Germany, by Irene Becci. Farnham, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. 199p.

“This book explores the profound transformations that prisons and offender rehabilitation programmes in Eastern Germany have undergone with respect to religion. Drawing on participant observation and interviews of inmates, ex-prisoners, chaplains and prison visitors, this book connects the institutional to individual: focusing on the religious changes individuals experience when they are imprisoned and released. Including comparative studies from Italy and Switzerland, Becci reveals that despite diverse local, historical, denominational, political and social contexts the transformation patterns of individuals’ relationship to religion, and their use of religious resources, are strongly shaped by the total character of prisons. Becci also explores the difficulties faced by released people in keeping their religious life alive under the harsh conditions of social stigma in a highly secular outside society.” From Publisher’s Website.

Intuitions of Justice and the Utility of Desert, by Paul H. Robinson. London; New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. 559p.

“Research suggests that people of all demographics have nuanced and sophisticated notions of justice. The core of those judgments is often intuition rather than reason. Should the criminal law heed what principles are embodied in those deep seated judgments?

In Intuitions of Justice and the Utility of Desert, Paul H. Robinson demonstrates that criminal law rules that deviate from public conceptions of justice and desert can seriously undermine the American criminal justice system’s integrity and credibility by failing to recognize or meet the needs of the communities it serves.

Professor Robinson sketches the contours of a wide range of lay conceptions of what criminals justly deserve, touching upon many issues that penal code drafters or policy makers must face, including normative crime control, culpability, grading, sentencing, justification and excuse defenses, principles of adjudication, and judicial discretion. He warns that compromising the American criminal justice system to satisfy other interests can uncover the hidden costs incurred when a community’s notions about justice are not reflected in its criminal laws.

Intuitions of Justice and the Utility of Desert shows that by ignoring the views of justice held by the communities they serve, legislators, policymakers, and judges undermine the relevance of the criminal justice system and reduce its strength and credibility, creating a gap between what justice a community needs and what justice a court or law prescribes.” From Publisher’s Website.

Juvenile Justice and Alternative Education: A Life Course Assessment of Best Practices, by Nicole Prior. El Paso, TX: LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC, 2013. 194p.

“Prior explores the connection between the quality of alternative education and juvenile delinquency using a life course perspective. Specifically, she determines that the implementation of quality assurance (QA) in alternative education disciplinary schools increased the likelihood that exiting students would return to their home school but had no effect on the students’ attendance. Additionally, improving the quality of the alternative education school showed mixed results on likelihood of arrest. The results indicate that students at alternative education schools should be allowed to remain in these schools until graduation from high school.” From Publisher’s Website.

The Law Relating to Financial Crime in the United Kingdom, by Karen Harrison and Nicholas Ryder. Farnham, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. 191p.

“Outlining the different types of financial crime and its impact, this book is a user-friendly, up-to-date guide to the regulatory processes, systems and legislation which exist in the UK. Each chapter has a similar structure and covers individual financial crimes such as money laundering, terrorist financing, fraud, insider dealing, market abuse and bribery and corruption. Offences are summarized and their extent is evaluated using national and international documents. Detailed assessments of financial institutions and regulatory bodies are made and the achievements of these institutions are analysed. Sentencing and policy options for different financial crimes are included and suggestions are made as to how criminal proceeds might be recovered.

Drawing the different themes of the book together, the final chapter makes recommendations for the future and will provoke further thought and discussion on this topical subject. Each chapter also has a section on Recommending Reading. It will be a valuable resource for students studying vocational courses and will be a key text for undergraduate and post-graduate students in law schools, departments of criminal justice and business schools.” From Publisher’s Website.

Lynching beyond Dixie: American Mob Violence Outside the South, ed. by Michael J. Pfeifer. Champaign, UK: University of Illinois Press, 2013. 336p.

“In recent decades, scholars have explored much of the history of mob violence in the American South, especially in the years after Reconstruction. However, the lynching violence that occurred in American regions outside the South, where hundreds of persons, including Hispanics, whites, African Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans died at the hands of lynch mobs, has received less attention. This collection of essays by prominent and rising scholars fills this gap by illuminating the factors that distinguished lynching in the West, the Midwest, and the Mid-Atlantic. Contributors compare the episodes and patterns of lynching in these regions with those that occurred in the South, placing the violence within a broader context of the development of American criminal justice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The volume adds to a more comprehensive history of American lynching and will appeal to all readers interested in the history of violence across the varied regions of the United States.” From Publisher’s Website.

Moving in the Shadows: Violence in the Lives of Minority Women and Children, ed. by Yasmin Rehman, Liz Kelly and Hannana Siddiqui. Farnham, UK; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013. 312p.

“In the UK the number of people who came from a minority ethnic group grew by 53 per cent between 1991 and 2001, from 3.0 million in 1991 to 4.6 million in 2001. Whilst much has been written about the impact of these demographic changes in relation to policy issues, black and minority women and children remain under-researched. Recent publications have tended to focus on South Asian women, forced marriage and ‘honour’ related violence.

Moving in the Shadows brings together for the first time in a single volume, an examination of violence against women and children within the diverse communities of the UK. Its strength lies in its gendered focus as well as its understanding of the need for an integrated approach to all forms of violence against women, whilst foregrounding the experiences of minority women, the communities they are part of, and the organizations which have advocated for their rights and given them voice.

The chapters contained within this volume explore a set of core themes: the forms and contexts of violence minority women experience; the continuum of violence; the role of culture and faith in the control of women and girls; the types of intervention within multi-cultural and social cohesion policies; the impacts of violence on British-born and migrant women and girls; and the intersection of race, class, gender and sexuality highlighting issues of similarity and difference. Taken together, they provide a valuable resource for scholars, students, activists, social workers and policy-makers working in the field.” From Publisher’s Website.

Organised Crime and the Law: A Comparative Analysis, by Liz Campbell. Oxford, UK; Portland, OR: HART Publishing, 2013. 316p.

“Organised Crime and the Law presents an overview of the laws and policies adopted to address the phenomenon of organised crime in the United Kingdom and Ireland, assessing the changes to these justice systems, in terms of the prevention, investigation, prosecution and punishment of such criminality. While the notion of organised crime is a contested one, States’ legal responses treat it and its constituent offences as unproblematic in a definitional sense. This book advances a systematic doctrinal critique of these domestic criminal laws,laws of evidence and civil processes.

Organised Crime and the Law focuses on the tension between due process and crime control, the demands of public protection and risk aversion, and other adaptations. In particular, it identifies parallels and points of divergence between the different jurisdictions in the UK and Ireland, bearing in mind the shared history of subversive threats and counter-terrorism policies. It also examines the extent to which policy transfer is evident in the UK and Ireland in terms of emulating the United States in reacting to organised crime.” From Publisher’s Website.

Other Dreams of Freedom: Religion, Sex, and Human Trafficking, by Yvonne C. Zimmerman. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. 214p.

“Human trafficking has captured worldwide attention as a crucial moral and political issue, but perhaps nowhere more than in the United States. Since they were signed into law in 2000, U.S. federal laws and policies on human trafficking have been understood as concrete expressions of the civic values of personal and political freedom. Yet these policies have also been characterized by a marked preoccupation with regulation, and especially sexual regulation.

Yvonne C. Zimmerman offers a groundbreaking exploration of the relationship between freedom and sexual regulation in American anti-human trafficking law and policies. She argues that the religious values of American Protestantism have indelibly shaped the federal government’s approach to engaging human trafficking, and that the trajectory of the U.S.’s anti-trafficking efforts cannot be fully grasped without understanding the unique ways in which sex, morality, and freedom are connected in Protestant Christian configurations of morality. Zimmerman shows that particularly under the George W. Bush administration, the U.S.’s anti-trafficking project expressed a vision of freedom whose structure and logic is thoroughly Protestant. Her analysis challenges the assumption that combating human trafficking necessarily entails sexual regulation, and reveals the extent to which the preoccupation with sexual regulation has functioned to discourage alternative understandings and practices of freedom, particularly for women.

Other Dreams of Freedom demonstrates that if opposition to human trafficking takes the promotion of freedom as the point of departure, then freedom must not be identified strictly with religiously and culturally Protestant understandings, but ought also permit other understandings of how freedom is constituted, practiced, and maintained.” From Publisher’s Website.

Prevention and the Limits of the Criminal Law, ed. by Andrew Ashworth, Lucia Zedner, and Patrick Tomlin. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. 320p.

“Exploring the principles and values that should guide and limit the state’s use of preventive techniques that involve coercion against the individual, this volume arises from a three-year study of Preventive Justice. The contributions examine whether and when preventive measures are justified, whether within or outwith the criminal law, and whether they signal a larger change in the architecture of security.

Preventive measures include controversial crime control approaches such as pre-inchoate offences, pre-trial detention, restraining orders, and prevention detention of the dangerous. There are good reasons to justify state use of coercion to protect the public from harm, but while the rationales and justifications for state punishment have been extensively explored, the scope, limits, and principles of preventive justice have not received the same attention. This volume, written by world renowned scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds and jurisdictions, redresses the balance, assessing the foundations for the range of coercive measures that states now take in the name of prevention and public protection.” From Publisher’s Website.

Principles and Values in Criminal Law and Criminal Justice: Essays in Honour of Andrew Ashworth, ed. by Lucia Zedner and Julian V. Roberts. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. 368p.

“Celebrating the scholarship of Andrew Ashworth, Vinerian Professor of English Law at the University of Oxford, this collection brings together leading international scholars to explore questions of principle and value in criminal law and criminal justice. Internationally renowned for elaborating a body of principles and values that should underpin criminalization, the criminal process, and sentencing, Ashworth’s contribution to the field over forty years of scholarship has been immense. Advancing his project of exploring normative issues at the heart of criminal law and criminal justice, the contributors examine the important and fascinating debates in which Ashworth’s influence has been greatest.

The essays fall into three distinct but related areas, reflecting Ashworth’s primary spheres of influence. Those in Part 1 address the import and role of principles in the development of a just criminal law, with contributions focusing upon core tenets such as the presumption of innocence, fairness, accountability, the principles of criminal liability, and the grounds for defences. Part 2 addresses questions of human rights and due process protections in both domestic and international law. In Part 3 the essays are addressed to core issues in sentencing and punishment: they explore questions of equality, proportionality, adherence to the rule of law, the totality principle (in respect of multiple offences), wrongful acquittals, and unduly lenient sentences. Together they demonstrate how important Ashworth’s work has been in shaping how we think about criminal law and criminal justice, and make their own invaluable contribution to contemporary discussions of criminalization and punishment.” From Publisher’s Website.

Prisoner Reentry Programs: Penetrating the Black Box for Better Theory and Practice, by Eric L. Grommon. El Paso, TX: LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC, 2013. 232p.

“Upon release from prison, individuals must manage a complex mix of interrelated challenges. Housing, employment, and substance abuse treatment have been identified as three of the most pressing dimensions of prisoner reentry. Grommon explores how these challenges interact and affect levels of relapse and recidivism. Housing and employment are important antecedents that shape participation in substance abuse treatment and relapse. In turn, these initial effects directly or indirectly influence recidivism. The findings highlight the need to further explore reentry challenges and lead to a number of theoretical, methodological, and policy implications.” From Publisher’s Website.

Properties of Violence: Law and Land Grant Struggle in Northern New Mexico, by David Correia. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2013. 220p.

“Through a compelling story about the conflict over a notorious Mexican-period land grant in northern New Mexico, David Correia examines how law and property are constituted through violence and social struggle.

Spain and Mexico populated what is today New Mexico through large common property land grants to sheepherders and agriculturalists. After the U.S.-Mexican War the area saw rampant land speculation and dubious property adjudication. Nearly all of the huge land grants scattered throughout New Mexico were rejected by U.S. courts or acquired by land speculators. Of all the land grant conflicts in New Mexico’s history, the struggle for the Tierra Amarilla land grant, the focus of Correia’s story, is one of the most sensational, with numerous nineteenth-century speculators ranking among the state’s political and economic elite and a remarkable pattern of resistance to land loss by heirs in the twentieth century.

Correia narrates a long and largely unknown history of property conflict in Tierra Amarilla characterized by nearly constant violence—night riding and fence cutting, pitched gun battles, and tanks rumbling along the rutted dirt roads of northern New Mexico. The legal geography he constructs is one that includes a surprising and remarkable cast of characters: millionaire sheep barons, Spanish anarchists, hooded Klansmen, Puerto Rican terrorists, and undercover FBI agents. By placing property and law at the center of his study, Properties of Violence provocatively suggests that violence is not the opposite of property but rather is essential to its operation.” From Publisher’s Website.

Public Events and Police Response: Understanding Public Order Policing in Democratic India, by T.K. Vinod Kumar. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013. 336p.

“Public events are at the heart of civic discourse in modern societies. The nature and number of public events and state response define the characteristics of the society and governance. Events and the police response to them are interactions that provide insight into the nature of social and democratic discourse in society.

Surveying the data of public events in cities and police response to them, detailed case studies of selected major events, and advanced statistical analyses, this book looks at the relationship between public events and police response. While different characteristics of events have varying effect on police response, the scale of violence in the event has the greatest impact on police response. The analyses indicate that the response of the police is largely circumscribed by democratic norms and rule of law. Revealing the tendency for police to be drawn into the ambit of political debate, which greatly impacts police organization and personnel, the study also points to the seeds of criminalization of politics and public discourse in selected public events.” From Publisher’s Website.

Racial Profiling: They Stopped Me Because I’m ……! By Michael L. Birzer.  Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, 2013. 241p.

“Many racial minority communities claim profiling occurs frequently in their neighborhoods. Police authorities, for the most part, deny that they engage in racially biased police tactics. A handful of books have been published on the topic, but they tend to offer only anecdotal reports offering little reliable insight. Few use a qualitative methodological lens to provide the context of how minority citizens experience racial profiling.

Racial Profiling: They Stopped Me Because I’m ———! places minority citizens who believe they have been racially profiled by police authorities at the center of the data. Using primary empirical studies and extensive, in-depth interviews, the book draws on nearly two years of field research into how minorities experience racial profiling by police authorities.

The author interviewed more than 100 racial and ethnic minority citizens. Citing 87 of these cases, the book examines each individual case and employs a rigorous qualitative phenomenological method to develop dominant themes and determine their associated meaning. Through an exploration of these themes, we can learn:

  • What racial profiling is, its historical context, and how formal legal codes and public policy generally define it
  • The best methods of data collection and the advantages of collecting racial profiling data
  • How certain challenges can prevent data collection from properly identifying racial profiling or bias-based policing practices
  • Data analysis and methods of determining the validity of the data
  • The impact of pretextual stops and the effect of Whren v. United States

A compelling account of how minority citizens experience racial profiling and how they ascribe and give meaning to these experiences, the book provides a candid discussion of what the findings of the research mean for the police, racial minority citizens, and future racial profiling research.” From Publisher’s Website.

Rape is Rape: How Denial, Distortion, and Victim Blaming are Fueling a Hidden Acquaintance Rape Crisis, by Jody Raphael. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2013. 272p.

“ “More than half of women and girls lie about rape . . .” “Feminists exaggerate rape prevalence to demonize men and raise money for their cause . . .” “Girls cry ‘rape’ when it’s nothing more than regret over bad sex . . .” Such emotionally charged false accusations have convinced much of the general public and the media that acquaintance rape is a figment of the imagination. As author Jody Raphael reveals in Rape Is Rape, the more acquaintance rape is reported and taken seriously by prosecutors, judges, and juries, the louder the clamor of rape denial becomes.

Through firsthand interviews with victims, medical and judicial records, social media analysis, and statistics from government agencies, Rape Is Rape exposes the tactics used by the deniers, a group that includes conservatives and right-wing Christians as well as some controversial feminists. The personal stories of young acquaintance rape victims whom Raphael interviewed demonstrate how assaults on their credibility, buttressed by claims of low prevalence, prevent many from holding their rapists accountable, enabling them to rape others with impunity. Rape Is Rape is an exposé of those using rape denial to further their political agendas, and it is a call to action to protect the rights of women and girls, making it safe for victims to come forward, and end the acquaintance rape crisis. A resources section is included for those seeking help, advice, or hoping to get involved.” From Publisher’s Website.

The Sanctity of Life and the Criminal Law: The Legacy of Glanville Williams, ed. by Dennis J. Baker and Jeremy Horder. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 369p.

“Described by The New York Times as ‘Britain’s foremost scholar of criminal law’, Professor Glanville Williams was one of the greatest academic lawyers of the twentieth century. To mark the centenary of his birth in 2011, leading criminal law theorists and medical law ethicists from around the world were invited to contribute essays discussing the sanctity of life and criminal law while engaging with Williams’ many contributions to these fields. In re-examining his work, the contributors have produced a provocative set of original essays that make a significant contribution to the current debate in these areas.” From Publisher’s Website.

The Scandal of White Complicity in US Hyper-Incarceration: A Nonviolent Spirituality of White Resistance, by Alex Mikulich, Laurie Cassidy, and Margaret Pfeil. London; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 220p.

“The Scandal of White Complicity and U.S. Hyper-incarceration is a groundbreaking exploration of the moral role of white people in the disproportionate incarceration of African-Americans and Latinos in the United States. Alex Mikulich, Laurie Cassidy, and Margaret Pfeil are white Catholic theologians developing understanding of how whiteness operates in the U.S. system of incarceration and witnessing to a Christian nonviolent way for whites to subvert our oppression of brothers and sisters of color.” From Publisher’s Website.

Selling Sex: Experience, Advocacy, and Research on Sex Work in Canada, ed. by Emily van der Meulen, Elya M. Durisin, and Victoria Love. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013. 364p.

“Despite being dubbed “the world’s oldest profession,” prostitution has rarely been viewed as a legitimate form of labour. Instead, it has been criminalized, sensationalized, and polemicized across the socio-political spectrum by everyone from politicians to journalists to women’s groups. Interest in and concern over sex work is not grounded in the lived realities of those who work in the industry, but rather in inflammatory ideas about who is participating, how they wound up in this line of work, and what form it takes.

In Selling Sex, Emily van der Meulen, Elya M. Durisin, and Victoria Love present a more nuanced, balanced, and realistic view of the sex industry. They bring together a vast collection of voices — including researchers, feminists, academics, and advocates, as well as sex workers of differing ages, genders, and sectors — to engage in a dialogue that challenges the dominant narratives surrounding the sex industry and advances the idea that sex work is in fact work. Presenting a variety of opinions and perspectives on such diverse topics as the social stigma of sex work, police violence, labour organizing, anti-prostitution feminism, human trafficking, and harm reduction, Selling Sex is an eye-opening, challenging, and necessary book.” From Publisher’s Website.

Social Analysis of Security: Financial, Economic and Ecological Crime: Crime, (In)security and (Dis)trust | Public and Private Policing, ed. by Paul Ponsaers. The Hague: Eleven International Publishing, 2012. 464p.

“The unequal division of power, income, social and cultural capital is reflected in the field of security. This results in an unequal distribution of security in our society. The research unit Social Analysis of Security (SVA) brings different contributions together on the theme of inequality and exclusion mechanisms in the field of security and describes, explains and observes its social effects, starting from an explicit empirical research attitude. From a methodological point of view, this book tries to find a balance between quantitative and qualitative research methods. It is about the PhD production of the Social Analysis of Security (SVA) research group, going beyond formal matters. This book brings recent doctoral empirical research findings together, looking at the field of insecurity from an angle of social inequalities and the consequences of this.” From Publisher’s Website.

Still Dying for a Living: Corporate Criminal Liability after the Westray Mine Disaster, by Steven Bittle. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2012. 268p.

“In 1992, an underground explosion at the Westray Mine in Plymouth, Nova Scotia, killed twenty-six miners. Although the owners of the mine were charged criminally, no one was convicted, largely because it was deemed too difficult to determine legal responsibility.

More than a decade after the Westray disaster, the federal government introduced revisions to the Criminal Code aimed at strengthening corporate criminal liability. Bill C-45, dubbed the Westray bill, requires employers to ensure a safe workplace and attributes criminal liability to organizations for seriously injuring or killing workers and/or the public. Yet, while the federal government declared the Westray bill an important step, the law has thus far failed to produce a crackdown on corporate crime.

In Still Dying for a Living, Steven Bittle turns a critical eye on Canada’s corporate criminal liability law. Drawing theoretical inspiration from Foucauldian and neo-Marxist literatures and interweaving in-depth interviews and parliamentary transcripts, Bittle reveals how legal, economic, and cultural discourses surrounding the Westray bill downplayed the seriousness of workplace injury and death, effectively characterizing these crimes as regrettable but largely unavoidable accidents. As long as the primary causes of workplace injury and death are not properly scrutinized, Bittle argues, workers will continue to die in the pursuit of earning a living.” From Publisher’s Website.

Trafficked Young People: Breaking the Wall of Silence, by Jenny J. Peace, Patricia Hynes and Silvie Bovarnick. Abingdon, UK; New York: Routledge, 2013. 190p.

“Human trafficking constitutes one of the most serious human rights violations of our time. However, many social work practitioners still have a poor and incomplete understanding of the experiences of children and young people who have been trafficked. In Trafficked Young People, the authors call for a more sophisticated, informed and better developed understanding of the range of issues facing trafficked young people.

In the first work of its kind to combine an up-to-date overview of the current policy context with related theoretical concerns and practitioner experiences, Pearce, Hynes & Bovarnick demonstrate how the trafficking of children and young people should be regarded as a child protection, rather than an immigration concern. Drawing on focus group and interview research with 72 practitioners and covering the cases of 37 individuals, Trafficked Young People explores the way child care practitioners identify, understand and work with the problems faced by people who have been trafficked. The book looks at how practitioners interpret and use definitions of trafficking in their day to day work; at their experiences of exposing the needs of trafficked children and young people and at their efforts to find appropriate resources to meet these needs.” From Publisher’s Website.

Victims of Environmental Harm: Rights, Recognition and Redress under National and International Law, by Matthew Hall. Abingdon, UK; New York: Routledge, 2013. 202p.

“In recent years, the increasing focus on climate change and environmental degradation has prompted unprecedented attention being paid towards the criminal liability of individuals, organisations and even states for polluting activities. These developments have given rise to a new area of criminological study, often called ‘green criminology’. Yet in all the theorising that has taken place in this area, there is still a marked absence of specific focus on those actually suffering harm as a result of environmental degradation. This book represents a unique attempt to substantively conceptualise and examine the place of such ‘environmental victims’ in criminal justice systems both nationally and internationally.

Grounded in a comparative approach and drawing on critical criminological arguments, this volume examines many of the areas traditionally considered by victimologists in relation to victims of environmental crime and, more widely, environmental harm. These include victims’ rights, compensation, treatment by criminal justice systems and participation in that process. The book approaches the issue of ‘environmental victimisation’ from a ‘social harms’ perspective (as opposed to a ‘criminal harms’ one) thus problematising the definitions of environmental crime found within most jurisdictions.

Victims of Environmental Harm concludes by mapping out the contours of further research into a developing green victimology and how this agenda might inform criminal justice reform and policy making at national and global levels.This book will be of interest to researchers across a number of disciplines including criminology, international law, victimology, socio-legal studies and physical sciences as well as professionals involved in policy making processes.” From Publisher’s Website.

White-Collar Criminals: Cases and Theories of Financial Crime, by Petter Gottschalk. Oslo: Unipub, 2012. 242p.

“White-collar crimes are financial crimes committed by upper class members of society for personal or organizational gain. This book provides a large sample and thorough analysis of the characteristics of white-collar criminals. The book’s research is based on a sample of 179 convicted white-collar criminals in Norway. The book emphasizes the need for internal and external actions in the detection, prevention, and strategic combat of white-collar crime. It presents a roadmap for combating financial crime, generally, and white-collar crime, specifically. The roadmap focuses on knowledge, since crime that is understood can be detected and prevented. The key principle is the creation of a knowledge base to comprehend guidelines, audit, control, and ethics.” From Publisher’s Website.

Wrongful Convictions and Miscarriages of Justice: Causes and Remedies in North American and European Criminal Justice Systems, ed. by C. Ronald Huff and Martin Killias. Abingdon, UK; New York: Routledge, 2013. 431p.

“This innovative work builds on Huff and Killias’ earlier publication (2008), but is broader and more thoroughly comparative in a number of important ways: (1) while focusing heavily on wrongful convictions, it places the subject of wrongful convictions in the broader contextual framework of miscarriages of justice and provides discussions of different types of miscarriages of justice that have not previously received much scholarly attention by criminologists; (2) it addresses, in much greater detail, the questions of how, and how often, wrongful convictions occur; (3) it provides more in-depth consideration of the role of forensic science in helping produce wrongful convictions and in helping free those who have been wrongfully convicted; (4) it offers new insights into the origins and current progress of the innocence movement, as well as the challenges that await the exonerated when they return to “free” society; (5) it assesses the impact of the use of alternatives to trials (especially plea bargains in the U.S. and summary proceedings and penal orders in Europe) in producing wrongful convictions; (6) it considers how the U.S. and Canada have responded to 9/11 and the increased threat of terrorism by enacting legislation and adopting policies that may exacerbate the problem of wrongful conviction; and (7) it provides in-depth considerations of two topics related to wrongful conviction: voluntary false confessions and convictions which, although technically not wrongful since they are based on law violations, represent another type of miscarriage of justice since they are due solely to unjust laws resulting from political repression.” From Publisher’s Website.

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