“When is killing an abusive partner an act of murder, and when is it self-defense? How does our criminal justice system deal with battered women who kill, and to what effect? Rachel Schneider traces the lives of women who sought clemency after being imprisoned for killing their abusers, drawing on a series of intimate interviews to explore the circumstances leading up to the killings, the women’s experiences in the courts and in prison, and the diverging paths of those whose sentences were commuted and those who will spend their lives behind bars.” From Publisher’s Website

“What explains the boom in private prisons—especially since the record of privatization for rehabilitating prisoners and saving taxpayer dollars is, at best, mixed? Karyl Kicenski examines the privatization of California state prisons to illuminate the forces that shape and distort our criminal justice policies.

Tracing the growth of private prisons from 1980 to the current day, Kicenski explores the role of political and economic factors, as well as the impact of changing public attitudes toward crime and governance. The result is a clear set of lessons for the uneasy partnership between public safety and for-profit enterprise.” From Publisher’s Website

“The Future of Criminal Justice in America brings together leading scholars from law, psychology, and criminology to address timely and important topics in U.S. criminal justice. The book tackles cutting-edge issues related to terrorism, immigration, and transnational crime, and to the increasingly important connections between criminal law and the fields of social science and neuroscience. It also provides critical new perspectives on intractable problems such as the right to counsel, race and policing, and the proper balance between security and privacy. By putting legal theory and doctrine into a concrete and accessible context, the book will advance public policy and scholarly debates alike. This collection of essays is appropriate for anyone interested in understanding the current state of criminal justice and its future challenges.” From Publisher’s Website

“The initial responses to 9/11 engaged categorical questions about ‘war’, ‘terrorism’, and ‘crime’. Now the implementation of counter-terrorism law is infused with dichotomies – typically depicted as the struggle between security and human rights, but explored more exactingly in this book as traversing boundaries around the roles of lawyers, courts, and crimes; the relationships between police, military, and security agencies; and the interplay of international and national enforcement. The contributors to this book explore how developments in counter-terrorism have resulted in pressures to cross important ethical, legal and organizational boundaries. They identify new tensions and critique the often unwanted outcomes within common law, civil law, and international legal systems.

This book explores counter-terrorism measures from an original and strongly comparative perspective and delivers an important resource for scholars of terrorism laws, strategies, and politics, as well as human rights and comparative lawyers.” From Publisher’s Website

“This book examines the role of criminal law in the enforcement of immigration controls over the last two decades in Britain. The criminalization of immigration status has historically served functions of exclusion and control against those who defy the state’s powers over its territory and population. In the last two decades, the powers to exclude and punish have been enhanced by the expansion of the catalogue of immigration offences and their more systematic enforcement.

This book is the first in-depth analysis on criminal offences in Britain, and presents original empirical material about the use of criminal powers against suspected immigration wrongdoers. Based on interviews with practitioners and staff at the UK Border Agency and data from court cases involving immigration defendants, it examines prosecution decision making and the proceedings before the criminal justice system. Crimes of Mobility critically analyses the criminalization of immigration status and, more generally, the functions of the criminal law in immigration enforcement, from a legal and normative perspective.

It will be of interest to academics and research students working on criminology, criminal law, criminal justice, socio-legal studies, migration and refugee studies, and human rights, as well as criminal law and immigration practitioners.” From Publisher’s Website

“Since the Nuremberg trial, the crime of aggression has been considered one of the gravest international crimes. However, since the 1940s no defendants have been charged with this crime, with some states actively opposing the notion of punishing aggression. The option of trying an individual for aggression is expressly included in the statute of the International Criminal Court. In 2010 the Assembly of States Parties adopted a definition of the crime of aggression and conditions of the exercise of jurisdiction over this crime by the Court. The Assembly also agreed that the decision on including the crime of aggression within the Court’s jurisdiction would be made in 2017 at the earliest. It is still internationally debatable whether the criminalisation of aggression is an outcome to strive for, or whether its abandonment is more preferable.

In Criminal Responsibility for the Crime of Aggression, Patrycja Grzebyk explores the scope of criminal responsibility of individuals for crimes of aggression and asks why those responsible for aggression are not brought to justice. The book first works to identify the legal norms that define and delegalise aggression, before moving to determine the basis and scope for the criminalisation of aggression. The book then goes on to identify the key risks and difficulties inherent in trials for aggression.” From Publisher’s Website

“Moving away from criminal behaviour can be fraught with difficulties. Often it can involve leaving behind old habits, customs, and even friends, while at the same time adopting a new way of life. How do individuals go about making a decision to give up crime? How do they plan to sustain this decision? And in what ways does probation help? This book explores these questions.

Based on in-depth interviews with a group of men under probation supervision, Sam King investigates the factors associated with making a decision to desist from crime. The book examines strategies for desistance, and explores the factors that individuals consider when they are thinking about how they will desist. In doing so, the book sheds new light on existing understandings of desistance from crime and helps to develop our understandings of the role that individuals play in constructing their own desistance journeys. This book also highlights the role of probation in this process, offering a timely and critical review of the nature of probation under the New Labour government in the UK between 1997-2010.

The findings indicate that we should allow Probation Officers greater autonomy and discretion within their roles, and that we should free them from the bureaucracy of risk assessment and targets. Moreover, the book warns against the potential fragmentation of community supervision. As such, the book will be of interest to criminology students, researchers, academics, policymakers and practitioners, particularly those who work with ex-offenders in the community.” From Publisher’s Website

“This book provides a unique insight into the way policing is performed. By embracing both organizational management issues as well as operational police business such as crime reduction and detection, firearms, disorder, organised crime and terrorism, it provides a comprehensive overview of contemporary police theory and practice. Focusing on the implementation of policing, this book discusses the themes that make police organisations effective (or otherwise) with particular emphasis on the complexity of implementing strategy and tactics in contemporary society. Considering how the police can differ between and within agencies, Kirby critically determines why effective policing takes place as well as explaining why unintended consequences can occur. Supported by interviews with senior police officers and academics in the UK, Australia, Netherlands and the US, this book provides a rich source of case studies exploring a wide range of issues including accountability, organisational culture, decision making and the policing of major incidents at both senior and practitioner level. This book will be relevant internationally to scholars of criminology and policing, police practitioners and policymakers.

This book provides a unique insight into the way policing is performed. By embracing both organizational management issues as well as operational police business such as crime reduction and detection, firearms, disorder, organised crime and terrorism, it provides a comprehensive overview of contemporary police theory and practice. Focusing on the implementation of policing, this book discusses the themes that make police organisations effective (or otherwise) with particular emphasis on the complexity of implementing strategy and tactics in contemporary society. Considering how the police can differ between and within agencies, Kirby critically determines why effective policing takes place as well as explaining why unintended consequences can occur. Supported by interviews with senior police officers and academics in the UK, Australia, Netherlands and the US, this book provides a rich source of case studies exploring a wide range of issues including accountability, organisational culture, decision making and the policing of major incidents at both senior and practitioner level. This book will be relevant internationally to scholars of criminology and policing, police practitioners and policymakers.” From Publisher’s Website

“This book brings together a diverse range of multidisciplinary studies on policing violent extremism and terrorism, written by experts in the field. These studies provide a detailed understanding of government policy and methods on tackling extremism from a policing and community level and explore the historical development, the present situation and future trends in this area. The book offers an important contribution to academic and policy debate surrounding extremism, its causes, and treatments and is of interest to policing professionals, policy-makers and academics.” From Publisher’s Website

“Sport plays a collective social, political and cultural role around the world. In recent years, however, it has become associated with stories of corruption including gambling, consumption of illegal substances and institutional vote rigging. This book examines the level, depth and range of fraud and corruption in sport and the methods used to counteract and prevent fraud and corruption which damages the integrity of sport.

Brooks, Aleem and Button argue that sport is often downplayed and defended as ‘different’ from other businesses. This book demonstrates that sport encounters the same types of fraud and corruption as business everywhere, and those specific to it such as match fixing, point shaving associated with vested gambling interests and tanking to secure better players in the future. Fraud, Corruption and Sport analyses a diverse range of cases internationally from across the sporting world including football, cricket, horse racing, basketball, baseball and boxing.

This book presents a new perspective on the security of sport appealing to students, academics, practitioners and sporting enthusiasts alike.” From Publisher’s Website

“The gang today is seen as Britain’s public enemy number one. This book tackles this gangland thesis head-on and refutes it, questioning how we think about and interpret violent street worlds and how and why we need to think about them in very different ways, pushing the boundaries of critical enquiry and providing a range of new ways of looking at disturbing realities.

Through the novel use of authoethnography, the book contests the widely held thesis that urban gangs today represent a serious, novel and developing threat. In this guise, they have been blamed for causing the riots of 2011, most gun related crime, the sexual violation of women, and outbreaks of dangerous dogs. Hallsworth argues that when subject to critical scrutiny, there is always an excess to the violence blamed on gangs that is not gang related and explanations for problems blamed on gangs can be advanced without needing to evoke the gang as an explanatory factor. In light of this, the book considers how best we might understand the nature of violent street worlds without falling into the pitfalls of the discourse of gang talk, exploring questions such as ‘How do we have a gang problem?’ and ‘How best do we avoid one?’

This book is provocative, polemical and theoretical and one that seeks to make a significant intervention into both gangs studies and studies of urban violence more generally, commanding significant social attention in the academy and beyond.” From Publisher’s Website

“Combining extensive interviews with his own experience as an inmate, John Irwin constructs a powerful and graphic description of the big-city jail. Unlike prisons, which incarcerate convicted felons, jails primarily confine arrested persons not yet charged or convicted of any serious crime. Irwin argues that jail disorients and degrades and instead of controlling the disreputable, actually increases their number of helping to indoctrinate new recruits to the rabble class. In a forceful conclusion, Irwin addresses the issue of jail reform and the matter of social control demanded by society.” From Publisher’s Website

“The novel The Godfather (1969) and the movie of the same name (1972) entrenched the myth of the Mafiosi as valiant knights, men of honor, and defenders of the traditional concept of family. As a result of this movie and other popular portrayals, the image of mobsters as “men of honor and tradition” has become iconic throughout America. Yet the truth of the matter belies this more noble image. The Mafia is a ruthless organization. Their concept of family is a twisted one. But viewed through the lens of popular culture, it is often difficult to separate the fiction from the reality. Made Men demystifies this image by dismantling the code of honor that Mafiosi live by, including its attendant symbols, rituals, and the lifestyle that it demands.

Since the end of World War II, the Mafia in Italy and America has undergone major changes, which are charted by the authors through the present day. Nicaso and Danesi also consider all kinds of related organizations, not only the Italian ones, including the Yakuza, the Triads, and the Russian Mafia. The authors look at organized criminal culture in general, attempting to explain why its symbols, rituals, and practices continue to draw people in, both as literal members, or as consumers of the pop culture that glorifies them. This story traces and decodes the origins, history and success of the mafia in the U.S., bringing a better, and more accurate understanding of this ultimately brutal, violent, and corrupting “family business.” It is a story that has rarely been told in this way, but which is believed, nonetheless, important to tell.” From Publisher’s Website

“This book employs actor-network theory in order to examine how representations of crime are produced for contemporary prime-time television dramas. As a unique examination of the production of contemporary crime television dramas, particularly their writing process, Making Crime Television: Producing Entertaining Representations of Crime for Television Broadcast examines not only the semiotic relations between ideas about crime, but the material conditions under which those meanings are formulated.

Using ethnographic and interview data, Anita Lam considers how textual representations of crime are assembled by various people (including writers, directors, technical consultants, and network executives), technologies (screenwriting software and whiteboards), and texts (newspaper articles and rival crime dramas). The emerging analysis does not project but instead concretely examines what and how television writers and producers know about crime, law and policing. An adequate understanding of the representation of crime, it is maintained, cannot be limited to a content analysis that treats the representation as a final product. Rather, a television representation of crime must be seen as the result of a particular assemblage of logics, people, creative ideas, commercial interests, legal requirements, and broadcasting networks. A fascinating investigation into the relationship between television production, crime, and the law, this book is an accessible and well-researched resource for students and scholars of Law, Media, and Criminology.” From Publisher’s Website

“When horrific acts of violence take place, events such as massacres in Boston, Newtown, CT, and Aurora, CO, people want answers. Who would commit such a thoughtless act of violence? What in their backgrounds could make them so inhumane, cruel, and evil? Often, people assume immediately that the perpetrator must have a mental disorder, and in some cases that does prove to be the case. But the assumption that most people with mental disorders are violent, prone to act out, and a threat to others and themselves, is clearly erroneous. Mental Disability, Violence, and Future Dangerousness thoroughly documents and explains how and why persons with mental disabilities who are perceived to be a future danger to others, the community, or themselves have become the most stigmatized, abused, and mistreated group in America, and what should be done to correct the resulting injustices.

Each year state and federal governments incarcerate, deny treatment to, and otherwise deprive hundreds of thousands of Americans with mental disabilities of their fundamental rights, liberties, and freedoms— including on occasion their lives—based on unreliable and misleading predictions that they are likely to be dangerous in the future. Yet, due to an exaggerated fear of violence in our society, almost no one seems concerned about these injustices, which exclusively affect Americans who have been impaired by mental disorders and the lack of treatment, especially after they have been abused as children or injured in combat. Instead, we appear to be oblivious to these injustices or comfortable in allowing them to become worse. Here, John Weston Parry carefully delineates the mishandling of persons with mental disabilities by the criminal and civil justice systems, and illustrates the ways in which we can identify and remedy those injustices.” From Publisher’s Website

“Piracy once again is posing serious threats to international trade, navigation and, of course, to the safety of seafarers. This collection of outstanding essays by outstanding scholars and practitioners examines the background to the re-emergence of piracy in South Asia, East and West Africa and explores the complex legal and practical challenges which crafting effective responses has presented. It is, quite simply, essential reading for anyone who is seriously interested in understanding and responding to one of the most pressing problems of our time.” From Publisher’s Website

“In The Modern Prison Paradox, Amy E. Lerman examines the shift from rehabilitation to punitivism that has taken place in the politics and practice of American corrections. She argues that this punitive turn has had profoundly negative consequences for both crime control and American community life. Professor Lerman’s research shows that spending time in America’s increasingly violent and castigatory prisons strengthens inmates’ criminal networks and fosters attitudes that increase the likelihood of criminal activity following parole. Additionally, Professor Lerman assesses whether America’s more punitive prisons similarly shape the social attitudes and behaviors of correctional staff. Her analysis reveals that working in more punitive prisons causes correctional officers to develop an “us against them” mentality while on the job, and that the stress and wariness officers acquire at work carries over into their personal lives, straining relationships with partners, children, and friends.” From Publisher’s Website

“A sustainable city enables the fulfillment of the mobility needs of their citizens via accessible, reliable, and safe transportation systems. Safety is one of many factors influencing the mobility of individuals in urban environment. Moving Safely: Crime and Perceived Safety in Stockholm’s Subway Stations is about safety at transportation nodes. More specially, safety at subway stations using Stockholm transportation system as a case study. If ones assess safety by the levels of crime events and perceived safety on these premises, how safe are they? This book searches for answers to this question in their environmental attributes, their physical features but particularly in the social interactions that take place in these transit-settings.

The aim of the book is to provide both theoretical and empirical perspectives on safety conditions at subway stations. The book adopts an approach that is place-centered, looking upon those who travel through the network system, and may sometimes, become a victim of crime. The book offers suggestions on how to plan safety at subway stations with a variety of passenger preferences, needs and resources. Although these suggestions are not the first ones in the literature, certainly they are new in terms of relying on findings from hypothesis testing and spatial data from a Scandinavian city. The suggestions take into account the need for a whole journey approach to safety (door-to-door), both from the perspective of those who are responsible for the supply side of services delivery and from those who use the system.

Safety in transportation nodes is not a field for one science only; it demands integrated and cross-disciplinary theories, as well as methods that are capable of guiding (and dealing with) an ever-increasing volume of data. This constitutes the new frontier of research in urban safety as well as of planning practices. The book combines principles of traditional theories of urban criminology, crime science, architecture, geography, transportation, urban planning and gender. The book is relevant for experts in safety and transportation research, such as criminologists, planners, transportation engineers, architects as well as professionals dealing directly with safety interventions.” From Publisher’s Website

“What are the various forces influencing the role of the prison in late modern societies? What changes have there been in penality and use of the prison over the past 40 years that have led to the re-valorization of the prison? Using penal culture as a conceptual and theoretical vehicle, and Australia as a case study, this book analyses international developments in penality and imprisonment. Authored by some of Australia’s leading penal theorists, the book examines the historical and contemporary influences on the use of the prison, with analyses of colonialism, post colonialism, race, and what they term the ‘penal/colonial complex,’ in the construction of imprisonment rates and on the development of the phenomenon of hyperincarceration. They develop penal culture as an explanatory framework for continuity, change and difference in prisons and the nature of contested penal expansionism. The influence of transformative concepts such as ‘risk management’, ‘the therapeutic prison’, and ‘preventative detention’ are explored as aspects of penal culture. Processes of normalization, transmission and reproduction of penal culture are seen throughout the social realm. Comparative, contemporary and historical in its approach, the book provides a new analysis of penality in the 21st century.” From Publisher’s Website

“Cassia Spohn and Katharine Tellis assess the criminal justice system’s response to sexual assault, exploring the complex dynamics that shape the actions of police and prosecutors.

The authors draw on unparalleled access to Los Angeles detectives, prosecutors, and case files to make sense of the factors that affect the outcomes of sexual assault claims. Following cases from victim report, to police investigation, to the decision to charge—or not to charge—they provide new insights into why shockingly few sexual assault claims lead to an eventual criminal conviction.” From Publisher’s Website

“Policing Cities brings together international scholars from numerous disciplines to examine urban policing, securitization, and regulation in nine countries and the conceptual issues these practices raise. Chapters cover many of the world’s major cities, including New York, Beijing, Paris, London, Berlin, Mexico City, Johannesburg, Rio de Janeiro, Boston, Melbourne, and Toronto, as well as other urban areas in Britain, United States, South Africa, Germany, Australia and Georgia.

The collection examines the activities and reforms of the traditional public police, but also those of emerging public and private policing agents and spaces that fall outside the public police’s purview and which previously have received little attention. It explores dramatic changes in public policing arrangements and strategies, exclusion of urban homeless people, new forms of urban surveillance and legal regulation, and securitization and militarization of urban spaces. The core argument in the volume is that cities are more than mere background for policing, securitization and regulation. Policing and the city are intimately intertwined. This collection also reveals commonalities in the empirical interests, methodological preferences, and theoretical concerns of scholars working in these various disciplines and breaks down barriers among them. This is the first collection on urban policing, regulation, and securitization with such a multi-disciplinary and international character.

This collection will have a wide readership among upper level undergraduate and graduate level students in several disciplines and countries and can be used in geography/urban studies, legal and socio-legal studies, sociology, anthropology, political science, and criminology courses.” From Publisher’s Website

“Criminologists are increasingly turning their attention to the many points of intersection between immigration and crime control. This book discusses the detection of unlawful non-citizens as a distinct form of policing which is impacting on a growing range of agencies and sections of society. It constitutes an important contribution not only to the literature on policing but also to the field of border control studies within criminology. Drawing on the work of Clifford Shearing, Ian Loader and P.A.J. Waddington, it offers new theoretical approaches to the study of police powers and practice.” From Publisher’s Website

“This book offers a unique insight into the moral politics behind the making of human trafficking policy in Australia and the United States of America. As governments around the world rush to meet their international obligations to combat human trafficking, a heated debate has emerged over the rights, wrongs, and harms of prostitution, and its relationship to sex trafficking.

The Politics of Sex Trafficking identifies and challenges intrinsic notions of moral harm that have pervaded trafficking discourse and resulted in a distinctly anti-prostitution agenda in trafficking policy in recent decades. Including rare interviews with key political actors, this book charts the competing perspectives of feminist, faith-based, and sex-worker activists, and their efforts to influence policy-makers. This critical account of the creation of anti-trafficking policy challenges the sex trafficking narrative dominant in US Congressional and Australian Parliamentary hearings, and demonstrates the power of a moral politics in shaping policy.

This book will appeal to academics across the fields of criminology, criminal justice, law, human rights and gender studies, as well as policy-makers.” From Publisher’s Website

“There is great interest internationally in the development of prostitution policies in the Nordic countries after Sweden, Norway and Iceland have introduced general bans against buying sex whilst selling sex remains legal. In addition, there is a partial ban against buying sex in Finland. This is a different approach from that of several other European countries, where we have seen a decriminalization of third-party involvement in prostitution as well as to that of the USA which criminalizes both the buying and selling of sexual services.

Thus the Nordic countries are often treated as representatives of a ‘Nordic model’ of prostitution policies.

In this book – the first on the subject – Skilbrei and Holmström argue that these models of policies or policy regimes tend to ignore the trajectories, contexts and consequences of the full range of approaches to prostitution, thus they are too simplistic and static. Prostitution policies in the Nordic countries are multifaceted and dynamic, and cannot be represented as following a straight path and detached from empirical contexts.

Their analysis treats Nordic prostitution policies both as a product of history, of current national and Nordic debates, and of international obligations and changes in the international and national prostitution markets. Furthermore they argue that a broad understanding of the relevant context is necessary so as to place Nordic prostitution policies within broader policy concerns related to gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality, social welfare, immigration and organized crime, as well as to neoliberal forms of governance.” From Publisher’s Website

“Backed up by the best science, Todd Clear and Natasha Frost make a compelling case for why the nation’s forty-year embrace of the punitive spirit has been morally bankrupt and endangered public safety. But this is far more than an exposé of correctional failure. Recognizing that a policy turning point is at hand, Clear and Frost provide a practical blueprint for choosing a different correctional future—counsel that is wise and should be widely followed.”—Francis T. Cullen, Distinguished Research Professor of Criminal Justice, University of Cincinnati

Over the last 35 years, the US penal system has grown at a rate unprecedented in US history—five times larger than in the past and grossly out of scale with the rest of the world. This growth was part of a sustained and intentional effort to “get tough” on crime, and characterizes a time when no policy options were acceptable save for those that increased penalties. In The Punishment Imperative, eminent criminologists Todd R. Clear and Natasha A. Frost argue that America’s move to mass incarceration from the 1960s to the early 2000s was more than just a response to crime or a collection of policies adopted in isolation; it was a grand social experiment. Tracing a wide array of trends related to the criminal justice system, The Punishment Imperative charts the rise of penal severity in America and speculates that a variety of forces—fiscal, political, and evidentiary—have finally come together to bring this great social experiment to an end.

Clear and Frost stress that while the doubling of the crime rate in the late 1960s represented one of the most pressing social problems at the time, this is not what served as a foundation for the great punishment experiment. Rather, it was the way crime posed a political problem—and thereby offered a political opportunity—that became the basis for the great rise in punishment. The authors claim that the punishment imperative is a particularly insidious social experiment because the actual goal was never articulated, the full array of consequences was never considered, and the momentum built even as the forces driving the policy shifts diminished. Clear and Frost argue that the public’s growing realization that the severe policies themselves, not growing crime rates, were the main cause of increased incarceration eventually led to a surge of interest in taking a more rehabilitative, pragmatic, and cooperative approach to dealing with criminal offenders.

The Punishment Imperative cautions that the legacy of the grand experiment of the past forty years will be difficult to escape. However, the authors suggest that the United States now stands at the threshold of a new era in penal policy, and they offer several practical and pragmatic policy solutions to changing the criminal justice system’s approach to punishment. Part historical study, part forward-looking policy analysis, The Punishment Imperative is a compelling study of a generation of crime and punishment in America.” From Publisher’s Website

“Only recently has the international community recognized the seriousness of rape, as well as its nature as an international crime punishable by international criminal tribunals. During the Balkan conflict in the last decade of the 20th century, the atrocities committed have awakened the conscience of those who, until then, had preferred to consider rape as a side effect of wars, both international and internal. The discovery of camps where rape was conducted in a systematic way for the mere solace of armed forces, as well as the use of rape as a tool of genocide (the infamous “ethnic cleansing”), have led to the creation of the first true international criminal tribunal (the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia/ICTY), as well as to the inclusion, for the first time, of the crime of “rape” within the ratione materiae jurisdiction of international judges. Through the jurisprudence of the ICTY and of its twin tribunal (the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda/ICTR), the notion of rape and its different shades have been gradually outlined and finally incorporated almost entirely by the Statute of the International Criminal Court. The aim of this book is to follow this evolution, examining the historical reconstruction in order to provide an overview of how the crime of rape is currently considered in international criminal law. (Series: International Criminal Law – Vol. 7)” From Publisher’s Website

“Why do so many school antiviolence programs backfire? And why do policymakers keep making the same mistakes? The authors of Responding to School Violence examine the pervasive rise of school security measures since the Columbine shootings, highlighting the unintended consequences of policymaking too often shaped by fear and sensationalism.

Probing an array of now ubiquitous tactics and programs—metal detectors, police patrols, zero tolerance policies, and more—the authors show how increasingly punitive schoolhouse dynamics negatively affect student safety and even educational experiences. They also share lessons from past mistakes and identify workable, comprehensive approaches for addressing a recurrent social problem.” From Publisher’s Website

“Rural crime is a fast growing area of interest among scholars in criminology. From studies of agricultural crime in Australia, to violence against women in Appalachia America, to poaching in Uganda, to land theft in Brazil — the criminology community has come to recognize that crime manifests itself in rural localities in ways that both conform to and challenge conventional theory and research. For the first time, Rural Criminology brings together contemporary research and conceptual considerations to synthesize rural crime studies from a critical perspective.

This book dispels four rural crime myths, challenging conventional criminological theories about crime in general. It also examines both the historical development of rural crime scholarship, recent research and conceptual developments. The third chapter recreates the critical in the rural criminology literature through discussions of three important topics: community characteristics and rural crime, drug use, production and trafficking in the rural context, and agricultural crime.

Never before has rural crime been examined comprehensively, using any kind of theoretical approach, whether critical or otherwise. Rural Criminology does both, pulling together in one short volume the diverse array of empirical research under the theoretical umbrella of a critical perspective. This book will be of interest to those studying or researching in the fields of rural crime, critical criminology and sociology.” From Publisher’s Website

“Crime statistics are ubiquitous in modern society – but how accurate are they? This book investigates the science of crime measurement focussing on four main questions: how do we count crime? How do we calculate crime rates? Are there other measurements of crime? What are the issues surrounding crime statistics? All too often we take the measurement of crime at face value when there is, in fact, a science behind it.

This book specifically deals with issues related to spatially-referenced crime data that are used to analyse crime patterns across the urban environment. The first section of the book considers alternative crime rate calculations. The second section of the book contains a thorough discussion of a measure of crime specialisation. Finally, the third section of the book addresses a number of aggregation issues that are present with such data: crime type aggregations, temporal aggregations of crime data, the stability of crime patterns over time, and the importance of spatial scale.

This book builds on a growing body of literature on the science of crime measurement and offers a comprehensive account of this growing subfield of criminology. The book speaks to wider debates in the fields of crime analysis, environmental criminology and crime prevention and will be perfect reading for advanced level undergraduate and graduate students looking to find out more about the measurement of crime.” From Publisher’s Website

“Dealing with the complex and discomforting ‘grey ‘area where sex, love and money collide, this book highlights the general materiality of everyday sex that takes place in all relationships. In doing so, it draws attention to and destigmatizes the transactional elements within many ‘normative’ partnerships – be they transnational, inter-ethnic or otherwise.

Focusing on Cambodia, and on a subculture of young women employed in the tourist bar scene referred to as ‘professional girlfriends’, the book shows that the resulting transnational relationships between Cambodian women and their foreign partners are complex and multi-layered. It argues that the sex-for-cash prostitution framework is no longer an appropriate model of analysis. Instead, a new vocabulary of ‘professional girlfriends’ and ‘transactional sex’ is used, with which the nuanced complexities of these transnational partnerships are analysed.

Interdisciplinary in nature, the book inspires new understandings of gender, power, sex, love, desire, political economy and materiality within everyday relationships around the globe. It is a useful contribution for students and scholars of Anthropology, Sociology, Southeast Asian Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Cultural Studies.” From Publisher’s Website

“In the early twentieth century, abolitionists sought to stamp out sex work by penalizing all involved. In the generation that followed, neo-abolitionists looked at the sex industry from a feminist perspective, claiming that workers were victims caught in a patriarchal matrix. Yet both agreed that the industry was a destructive and corrupting force that should be eliminated. In this radical volume, five academics and activists convey their vision of prostitution as work, reclaiming the place of sex workers in the discussion of their lives and their work, and opposing discourses that position them as merely victims without agency.” From Publisher’s Website

“We are accustomed to thinking of torture as the purposeful infliction of cruelty by public officials, and we assume that lawyers and clinicians are best placed to speak about its causes and effects. However, it has not always been so. The category of torture is a very specific way of thinking about violence, and our current understandings of the term are rooted in recent twentieth-century history. In This Side of Silence, social anthropologist Tobias Kelly argues that the tensions between post-Cold War armed conflict, human rights activism, medical notions of suffering, and concerns over immigration have produced a distinctively new way of thinking about torture, which is saturated with notions of law and trauma.

This Side of Silence asks what forms of suffering and cruelty can be acknowledged when looking at the world through the narrow legal category of torture. The book focuses on the recent history of Britain but draws wider comparative conclusions, tracing attempts to recognize survivors and perpetrators across the fields of asylum, criminal law, international human rights, and military justice. In this thorough and eloquent ethnography, Kelly avoids treating the legal prohibition of torture as the inevitable product of progress and yet does not seek to dismiss the real differences it has made in concrete political struggles. Based on extensive archival research and ethnographic fieldwork, the book argues that the problem of recognition rests not in the inability of the survivor to communicate but in our inability to listen and take responsibility for the injustice before us.” From Publisher’s Website

“With the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, drying up New York City promised to be the greatest triumph of the proponents of Prohibition. Instead, the city remained the nation s greatest liquor market. Smugglers, Bootleggers, and Scofflaws focuses on liquor smuggling to tell the story of Prohibition in New York City. Using previously unstudied Coast Guard records from 1920 to 1933 for New York City and environs, Ellen NicKenzie Lawson examines the development of Rum Row and smuggling via the coasts of Long Island, the Long Island Sound, the Jersey shore, and along the Hudson and East Rivers. Lawson demonstrates how smuggling syndicates on the Lower East Side, the West Side, and Little Italy contributed to the emergence of the Broadway Mob. She also explores New York City s scofflaw population patrons of thirty thousand speakeasies and five hundred nightclubs as well as how politicians Fiorello La Guardia, James Jimmy Walker, Nicholas Murray Butler, Pauline Morton Sabin, and Al Smith articulated their views on Prohibition to the nation. Lawson argues that in their assertion of the freedom to drink alcohol for enjoyment, New York s smugglers, bootleggers, and scofflaws belong in the American tradition of defending liberty. The result was the historically unprecedented step of repeal of a constitutional amendment with passage of the Twenty-first Amendment in 1933.” From Publisher’s Website

“With the growth of surveillance technologies globally, Taylor focuses on the phenomenon of the Surveillance School and explores the impact that continual monitoring is having upon school children, education and society.

Surveillance Schools are characterised by routine practices that identify, verify, categorise and track pupils. With biometric technologies such as fingerprinting and iris scanning, CCTV, microchips in ID cards and ‘smart uniforms’, metal detectors and police officers patrolling the school corridors with sniffer dogs, it is clear that schools have become increasingly fortified.

Taylor outlines the phenomenon of the Surveillance School, mapping the driving forces behind them and analyses the impact. The evidence emerging from empirical studies suggests that often these technologies do little to safeguard young people, do not represent financial savings or increased efficiency, but serve to strip pupils of their privacy, undermine their trust in others and create an atmosphere of suspicion.

This insightful research ultimately questions whether the incessant use of omnipresent technological surveillance has the ability to displace the very building blocks of democratic society. Taylor presents the school as a microcosm of society and invites us to experience a prophetic glance into the future of the surveillance society.” From Publisher’s Website

“The 21st century has witnessed a marked increase in the prevalence of failed and failing States, and an equally significant increase in acts of domestic and international terrorism. The challenge at present is for the international community of nations to adopt a common approach to the treatment of terrorism as an international crime. With an international war on terrorism seemingly being sanctioned by the United Nations, it is time for the crime of terrorism, as the act of a non-governmental organization, to become a part of the universal responsibility of nations, with that responsibility further delegated to an international institution (such as the International Criminal Court) for prosecution and subsequent sanction. In this book, the current status of terrorism as an international crime is discussed. In this respect, a review of the existing treaties and conventions dealing with discrete elements of terrorism are examined, followed by the identification of the definitional problem of what exactly constitutes terrorism. The book concludes with a review of the current state of international criminal law, and it argues that the lack of a precise agreed-upon definition of terrorism in the international community does not detract from the criminality of the act, but, rather, it simply provides an excuse for States to not meet their obligations under the law. (Series: International Criminal Law – Vol. 8)” From Publisher’s Website

“Based on extensive empirical research, this ground-breaking book describes and analyses existing systems for enforcing sentences of imprisonment imposed by international criminal courts and makes recommendations for the strategic and structural development of the international penal system. In particular, it advocates a resocialisation-focused international penal policy delivered using restorative justice modalities post-conviction and the creation of an accountable international prison system. Singly or combined, these developments will contribute to the institutionalisation of the international penal system and enhance the international nature of the sanction, the international control over the way international punishment is enforced and the equal treatment of international prisoners. These developments will also help to ensure that international punishment is principled and progressive and implemented in a humane and effective system.” From Publisher’s Website

“Children are recruited to fight in conflicts around the world and violent cruelty characterizes many of the conflicts in which children participate. Some children are perpetrators of some of the worst acts of depraved murder, disfigurement, and terrorism imaginable. They then struggle to reintegrate into communities that were victims of the violence. Taking into account the interests of children and other victims of conflict, and considering the needs of post-conflict communities, this book examines and offers suggestions for how transitional justice practices should conceptualize and address the involvement of child soldiers in violent collective harm.

This book will appeal to a wide range of scholars from International Relations, Criminal Justice, Law, Philosophy, Sociology, Anthropology, Development and African Studies.” From Publisher’s Website

“Criminological and penological scholarship has in recent years explored how and why institutions and systems of punishment change – and how and why these changes differ in different contexts. Important though these analyses are, this book focuses not so much on the changing nature of institutions and systems, but rather the changing nature of penal practice and practitioners.

Bringing together leading researchers from around the world, this collection unites studies that aim to describe and critically analyze penal practice with studies that investigate its effectiveness and prescribe its future development. Reversing penology’s usual preoccupation with the prison, the book focuses mainly on penal practice in the community (i.e. on probation, parole, offender supervision and ‘community corrections’).

The first part of the book focuses on understanding practice and practitioners, exploring how changing social, cultural, political, and organizational contexts influence practice, and how training, development, professional socialization and other factors influence practitioners. The second part is concerned with how practitioners can be best supported to develop the skills and approaches that seem most likely to generate positive impacts. It contains accounts of new practice models and approaches, as well as reports of research projects seeking both to discover and to encourage effective practices.

This book explores internationally significant and cutting-edge theoretical and empirical work on the cultures, practices, roles and impacts of frontline practitioners in delivering penal sanctions. As such, it will be of interest to researchers in criminology, social work and social policy as well as correctional policy makers and those involved in community supervision.” From Publisher’s Website

“This book draws together the latest international literature on offender compliance during penal supervision and after a court order expires. Experts based in jurisdictions in Europe, Australia, the United States and Canada have contributed chapters which provide rich insights into international perspectives on offender compliance. The book highlights the multidimensionality of compliance, its dynamics and its mechanisms. There is also a detailed examination of the compliance issues that may be relevant to specific groups such as women and young people who offend.

There is a dearth of literature in the field of offender compliance during penal supervision; this book addresses the gap in the literature by presenting emerging international developments in compliance theory, research and practice.

This book will appeal academics in the fields of criminology, sociology, psychology, social policy and social work. It will also be a valuable resource for policy makers, criminal justice practitioners and other practitioners who are engaged in work that involves encouraging compliance with legal orders. These include police, prison, probation, youth justice and social service practitioners.” From Publisher’s Website

“The growing attention being paid to transnational criminality and the emergence of new models of State cooperation make it necessary to reconsider the traditional features of human rights enforcement. This book provides a comprehensive analysis of how criminal procedural rights are (if at all) protected within the framework of mutual recognition within the EU. The study concentrates on the framework decision of the European Arrest Warrant. The central issue of analysis is the national and extraterritorial responsibility for violations of fundamental rights which occur in the framework of such transnational procedures. Are there any provisions in international or national instruments which aim at effectively preventing or remedying violations? Is there any functioning judicial control? The effect of national legislation and human rights bars to cooperation is discussed on the basis of a comparative study of the legislation and case-law in Sweden and the UK. Further, the roles of the European courts for the protection of due process rights are analyzed. The book focuses on the special features of mutual recognition in relation to State responsibility for an executing and issuing State. Especially, the concept of mutual trust and the justifications for a system of division of labor between the States are critically discussed. Whose Responsibility? offers new and interesting perspectives regarding the specific problems of being a defendant within the EU and provides some new answers to the question of responsibility for transnational defense rights. (Series: Supranational Criminal Law: Capita Selecta – Vol. 16)” From Publisher’s Website

“Criminologists are primarily concerned with the analysis of actions that violate existing laws. But a growing number have begun analyzing crimes as actions that inflict harm, regardless of the applicability of legal sanctions. Even as they question standard definitions of crime as law-breaking, scholars of crime have few theoretical frameworks with which to understand the etiology of harmful action.

In Why We Harm, Lois Presser scrutinizes accounts of acts as diverse as genocide, environmental degradation, war, torture, terrorism, homicide, rape, and meat-eating in order to develop an original theoretical framework with which to consider harmful actions and their causes. In doing so, this timely book presents a general theory of harm, revealing the commonalities between actions that impose suffering and cause destruction.

Harm is built on stories in which the targets of harm are reduced to one-dimensional characters—sometimes a dangerous foe, sometimes much more benign, but still a projection of our own concerns and interests. In our stories of harm, we are licensed to do the harmful deed and, at the same time, are powerless to act differently. Chapter by chapter, Presser examines statements made by perpetrators of a wide variety of harmful actions. Appearing vastly different from one another at first glance, Presser identifies the logics they share that motivate, legitimize, and sustain them. From that point, she maps out strategies for reducing harm.” From Publisher’s Website

“The criminal legal system defines and authoritatively enacts the boundaries of permissible and impermissible behaviour, with a focus on that which is prohibited or transgressive. Wickedness and Crime: Laws of Homicide and Malice seeks to expose the ways in which criminal law communicates and sanctions particular models of wickedness. This book illuminates the intimate relationship of crime and definitions of wrongdoing. A central contention of the book is that if a criminal legal system empty of normative content is undesirable and implausible, then we must think critically about the types of models of wickedness that are communicated by criminal legal doctrine.

Through historical and contemporary analysis of the legal concept of malice, Penny Crofts examines the types of models of wickedness that are established through criminal legal doctrine. The book draws upon literature, philosophy and jurisprudence to place wickedness at the centre of an account of criminal law. Arguing that the current dominant idea of wickedness communicated in criminal law lacks nuance and clarity, this book examines the implications in terms of the legal subject, social responsibility and the jurisdiction of the legal system. Through historical accounts of malice the book provides resources to enrich a contemporary jurisprudence of blaming.

A fascinating contribution to the study of law, this book will interest criminal legal scholars who seek a deeper understanding of the complexity of the relationship between law and morality. The book also provides a resource for legal theorists and philosophers of wickedness, supplying a sustained example and analysis of the implications of types of models of culpability.” From Publisher’s Website

“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