Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service, by Carol Leonnig, tells the story of a relatively little-known branch of the Federal law enforcement apparatus.  The Secret Service has, for example, received far less publicity than such counterparts as the FBI and the DEA.  Leonnig’s history does not leave the reader with a particularly glowing view of the Service.  To the contrary, it comes across as being so error-prone and highly politicized as to shake one’s confidence in its ability to protect the President and all the others now under its supposedly protective shield.  Reviewer Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones says that the author’s goal “was to write a book that will prompt reform of one of America’s essential agencies.”  In pursuit of this goal, Jeffreys-Jones suggests that “[l]egislators on Capitol Hill usually have too many distractions to pay heed to the appearance of an individual book. But they would be wise to consider what Carol Leonnig has to say.”

Police departments, and especially urban police departments, have recently come under the microscope.  But in reality, this scrutiny has been going on for more than a decade, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the case of the Baltimore Police Department.  That department is scrutinized by Justin Fenton in We Own this City: A True Story of Crime, Cops, and Corruption — reviewed here by Michael Pinard.  Pinard says the recent past has been “horrific” for the police department, but even worse for the individuals and communities of Baltimore.  Fenton, concludes Pinard, “imparts valuable lessons, the most important of which is that police abuse, brutality, cruelty, and criminality do not – and cannot – persist in a vacuum.  It takes systems to victimize perpetually.”

One of the best-known dictums about the value of studying history is to learn its lessons and avoid its mistakes.  In this time of criminal justice reform, including with respect to what is labelled “mass incarceration, it is useful to look back at the origins of the prison system in the United States.  Ashley Rubin takes such a look in The Deviant Prison: Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary and the Origins of America’s Modern Penal System, 1829-1913.  Our reviewer is historian Mary Gibson.  What was known as the Pennsylvania model of prison reform used the “solitary” or “separate” system in which reform was supposed to occur through isolation “allowing inmates to reflect on their misdeeds.”  Opponents of this model criticized the separate approach, and in Gibson’s words “demonized solitary confinement as cruel and detrimental to inmates’ physical and mental health.”  This should seem very familiar to anyone following today’s criticisms about the use of solitary confinement in contemporary jails and prisons. 

 J.C. Salyer’s Court of Injustice: Law Without Recognition in U.S. Immigration addresses several themes, and among them is the country’s ongoing struggle to come to grips with immigration and immigrants, and with the question of the extent to which U.S. constitutional and legal principles are or are not applicable in immigration cases.  Reviewer Anita Maddali says “Salyer removes the veil on presumed notions of justice, equality and fairness in order to reveal the techniques of power used in the context of immigration, which dehumanize and blame immigrants.”  Another theme developed in the book is the contrast between what those in the legal profession have long viewed as the difference between the law on the books and the law as practiced.  Of this, Maddali writes “[t]his book impressively combines legal and anthropological expertise [Salyer is both a lawyer and an anthropologist], contrasting the nuance of law and practice with the on-the-ground experiences of individuals working within the system.”

Further on the theme of the value of the study of history in general, but particularly relevant to the ongoing controversial debate about including the history of slavery in the study of American history, comes Alexandra Finley’s An Intimate Economy: Enslaved Women, Work, and America’s Domestic Slave Trade, reviewed here by Christy Clark-Pujara.  An Intimate Economy tells the life stories of women who represent four categories of female laborers, who in Clark-Pujara’s words, were critical to a full accounting and understanding of the slave trade.  She says that Finley has provided “an engaging and accessible narrative that will appeal to scholars as well as general readers…. [one that] carefully and brilliantly connects scholarships of slavery, capitalism and women’s studies.”

Coming as it does in this time of controversy, disagreement and divisiveness with respect to political demonstrations and protests – some of which have resulted in violence and deaths — Elizabeth Hinton’s America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s, is most timely.  The book is reviewed for us by Stephen Bohigian.  Hinton looks at various urban uprisings that have occurred since 1968 — in other words, after the tumult of the four years preceding that time.  She does not focus only on the big cities, but also includes Cairo, Illinois and York, Pennsylvania in her analyses.  Hinton concludes that Black urban rebellion was mostly a response to and was precipitated by overpolicing and police violence.  Bohigian calls the book “a remarkable and important work that contributes to a more nuanced understanding of not only Black rebellion, but federal and municipal politics, Black political power, criminal justice reform, and the overpolicing of low-income communities.”