Books Received
August 2021

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.

The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: A Photographic History, by Karlos K. Hill. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2021.

“On the evening of May 31, 1921, and in the early morning hours of June 1, several thousand white citizens and authorities violently attacked the African American Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma. In the course of some twelve hours of mob violence, white Tulsans reduced one of the nation’s most prosperous black communities to rubble and killed an estimated 300 people, mostly African Americans. This richly illustrated volume, featuring more than 175 photographs, along with oral testimonies, shines a new spotlight on the race massacre from the vantage point of its victims and survivors.

Historian and Black Studies professor Karlos K. Hill presents a range of photographs taken before, during, and after the massacre, mostly by white photographers. Some of the images are published here for the first time. Comparing these photographs to those taken elsewhere in the United States of lynchings, the author makes a powerful case for terming the 1921 outbreak not a riot but a massacre. White civilians, in many cases assisted or condoned by local and state law enforcement, perpetuated a systematic and coordinated attack on Black Tulsans and their property.

Despite all the violence and devastation, black Tulsans rebuilt the Greenwood District brick by brick. By the mid-twentieth century, Greenwood had reached a new zenith, with nearly 250 Black-owned and Black-operated businesses. Today the citizens of Greenwood, with support from the broader community, continue to work diligently to revive the neighborhood once known as “Black Wall Street.” As a result, Hill asserts, the most important legacy of the Tulsa Race Massacre is the grit and resilience of the Black survivors of racist violence.

The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: A Photographic History offers a perspective largely missing from other accounts. At once captivating and disturbing, it will embolden readers to confront the uncomfortable legacy of racial violence in U.S. history.” From Publisher’s Website.

A Better Justice? Community Programs for Criminalized Women, by Amanda Nelund. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 2021.

“Women are the fastest growing group of incarcerated people in Canada. While feminist criminologists advocate for community alternatives to imprisonment, they often do so without offering a corresponding analysis of existing community programs. And critical criminologists rarely consider gender in their assessment of the options.

A Better Justice? brings these criminological strands together in a concise and carefully reasoned analysis of alternative justice programs for criminalized women. Using Winnipeg as a test case, Amanda Nelund draws on staff interviews and agency and program documents to reveal the complexity that underlies the governance of criminalized women. She finds that alternative programs neither fully reproduce dominant justice system norms nor provide the complete alternatives called for by feminist criminologists. Instead, formal and informal practices and governing mentalities reflect a tension between neoliberal and social justice  approaches.

A Better Justice? calls attention to the potential that alternative programs have for both alignment with and opposition to current criminal justice norms. It is in the potential points of resistance that we can find improved strategies for the treatment of criminalized women in Canada – and ultimately, greater social justice for them.

Students and scholars of feminist and critical criminology, socio-legal studies, and gender and women’s studies will find this perceptive work indispensable, as will criminal justice researchers and practitioners.” From Publisher’s Website.

The Accidental History of the U.S. Immigration Courts: War, Fear, and the Roots of Dysfunction, by Alison Peck. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2021.

“During the Trump administration, the immigration courts were decried as more politicized enforcement weapon than impartial tribunal. Yet few people are aware of a fundamental flaw in the system that has long pre-dated that administration: The immigration courts are not really “courts” at all but an office of the Department of Justice—the nation’s law enforcement agency.

This original and surprising diagnosis shows how paranoia sparked by World War II and the War on Terror drove the structure of the immigration courts. Focusing on previously unstudied decisions in the Roosevelt and Bush administrations, the narrative laid out in this book divulges both the human tragedy of our current immigration court system and the human crises that led to its creation. Moving the reader from understanding to action, Alison Peck offers a lens through which to evaluate contemporary bills and proposals to reform our immigration court system. Peck provides an accessible legal analysis of recent events to make the case for independent immigration courts, proposing that the courts be moved into an independent, Article I court system. As long as the immigration courts remain under the authority of the attorney general, the administration of immigration justice will remain a game of political football—with people’s very lives on the line.” From Publisher’s Website.

Against the KIan: A Newspaper Publisher in South Louisiana During the 1960s, by Lou Major. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University  Press, 2021.

“In 1964, less than one year into his tenure as publisher of the Bogalusa Daily News, New Orleans native Lou Major found himself guiding the newspaper through a turbulent period in the history of American civil rights. Bogalusa, Louisiana, became a flashpoint for clashes between African Americans advocating for equal treatment and white residents who resisted this change, a conflict that generated an upsurge in activity by the Ku Klux Klan. Local members of the KKK stepped up acts of terror and intimidation directed against residents and institutions they perceived as sympathetic to civil rights efforts. During this turmoil, the Daily News took a public stand against the Klan and its platform of hatred and white supremacy.

Against the Klan, Major’s memoir of those years, recounts his attempts to balance the good of the community, the health of the newspaper, and the safety of his family. He provides an in-depth look at the stance the Daily News took in response to the city’s civil rights struggles, including the many fiery editorials he penned condemning the KKK’s actions and urging peaceful relations in Bogalusa.

Major’s richly detailed personal account offers a ground-level view of the challenges local journalists faced when covering civil rights campaigns in the Deep South and of the role played by the press in exposing the nefarious activities of hate groups such as the Klan.” From Publisher’s Website.

The Ambiguities of Desistance: Ex-offenders, Higher Education, and the Desistance Journey, by David Honeywell. Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing Limited, 2021.

Introducing nuanced and rich data around the growing interest in desistance and what leads someone to move away from crime, this book explores the ongoing and individual desistance journeys of ex-offenders during re-integration into society.

Through in-depth interviews and his own lived experiences as a prisoner, the author highlights the importance of Higher Education in the desistance process as a conduit for change and rehabilitation. He explores the complex life process of the ex-offender, investigating the introspective and existential experiences that lead individuals towards an ongoing desistance journey in which they re-evaluate their sense of selves and develop new identities.

Arguing that in the current criminal justice system the focus on crime overshadows the more complex and unending process of desistance, the author showcases how the system provides no formal rite of passage for ex-offenders attempting to re-integrate into society. In response to this, this book synthesises and critically reviews desistance theory as it has emerged within contemporary criminology, and offers an opportunity for readers to engage with the complexities of the lives analysed in this research.

America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s, by Elizabeth Hinton. New York: Liveright 2021.

“What began in spring 2020 as local protests in response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police quickly exploded into a massive nationwide movement. Millions of mostly young people defiantly flooded into the nation’s streets, demanding an end to police brutality and to the broader, systemic repression of Black people and other people of color. To many observers, the protests appeared to be without precedent in their scale and persistence. Yet, as the acclaimed historian Elizabeth Hinton demonstrates in America on Fire, the events of 2020 had clear precursors—and any attempt to understand our current crisis requires a reckoning with the recent past.

Even in the aftermath of Donald Trump, many Americans consider the decades since the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s as a story of progress toward greater inclusiveness and equality. Hinton’s sweeping narrative uncovers an altogether different history, taking us on a troubling journey from Detroit in 1967 and Miami in 1980 to Los Angeles in 1992 and beyond to chart the persistence of structural racism and one of its primary consequences, the so-called urban riot. Hinton offers a critical corrective: the word riot was nothing less than a racist trope applied to events that can only be properly understood as rebellions—explosions of collective resistance to an unequal and violent order. As she suggests, if rebellion and the conditions that precipitated it never disappeared, the optimistic story of a post–Jim Crow United States no longer holds.

Black rebellion, America on Fire powerfully illustrates, was born in response to poverty and exclusion, but most immediately in reaction to police violence. In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson launched the “War on Crime,” sending militarized police forces into impoverished Black neighborhoods. Facing increasing surveillance and brutality, residents threw rocks and Molotov cocktails at officers, plundered local businesses, and vandalized exploitative institutions. Hinton draws on exclusive sources to uncover a previously hidden geography of violence in smaller American cities, from York, Pennsylvania, to Cairo, Illinois, to Stockton, California.

The central lesson from these eruptions—that police violence invariably leads to community violence—continues to escape policymakers, who respond by further criminalizing entire groups instead of addressing underlying socioeconomic causes. The results are the hugely expanded policing and prison regimes that shape the lives of so many Americans today. Presenting a new framework for understanding our nation’s enduring strife, America on Fire is also a warning: rebellions will surely continue unless police are no longer called on to manage the consequences of dismal conditions beyond their control, and until an oppressive system is finally remade on the principles of justice and equality.” From Publisher’s Website.

Armed with Sword and Scales: Law, Culture, and Local Courtrooms in London, 1860-1913, by Sascha Auerbach. Cambridge, UK: New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021.

“In the mid-eighteenth century, author and magistrate Henry Fielding adjudicated cases of theft, assault, and public disorder from his London home on Bow Street. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Fielding’s modest ‘police office’ had expanded to become the most prolific court system in Britain and the cornerstone of criminal and civil justice in the metropolis. Sascha Auerbach examines the fascinating history of this institution through the lens of ‘courtroom culture’ – the combination of formal statute and informal custom that guided everyday practice in the London Police Courts. He offers a new model for understanding the relationship between law, culture, and society in modern Britain and illuminates how the local courtroom became a crucial part of everyday life and thoroughly entangled with popular representations of justice and morality.” From Publisher’s Website.

Autopsy of a Crime Lab: Exposing the Flaws in Forensics, by Brandon L. Garrett. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2021.

“”That’s not my fingerprint, your honor,” said the defendant, after FBI experts reported a “100-percent identification.” They were wrong. It is shocking how often they are. Autopsy of a Crime Lab is the first book to catalog the sources of error and the faulty science behind a range of well-known forensic evidence, from fingerprints and firearms to forensic algorithms. In this devastating forensic takedown, noted legal expert Brandon L. Garrett poses the questions that should be asked in courtrooms every day: Where are the studies that validate the basic premises of widely accepted techniques such as fingerprinting? How can experts testify with 100 percent certainty about a fingerprint, when there is no such thing as a 100 percent match? Where is the quality control in the laboratories and at the crime scenes? Should we so readily adopt powerful new technologies like facial recognition software and rapid DNA machines? And why have judges been so reluctant to consider the weaknesses of so many long-accepted methods?

Taking us into the lives of the wrongfully convicted or nearly convicted, into crime labs rocked by scandal, and onto the front lines of promising reform efforts driven by professionals and researchers alike, Autopsy of a Crime Lab illustrates the persistence and perniciousness of shaky science and its well-meaning practitioners.” From Publisher’s Website.

Big Data Surveillance and Security Intelligence: The Canadian Case, edited by David Lyon and David Murakami Wood. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 2021.

“Intelligence gathering is in a state of flux. Enabled by massive computing power, new modes of communications analysis now touch the lives of citizens around the globe – not just those conventionally thought of as suspicious or threatening. In this astute collection, leading academics, civil society experts, and regulators debate the pressing questions raised by current security intelligence and surveillance practices in Canada.

Big Data Surveillance and Security Intelligence reveals the profound shift to “big data” practices that security agencies have made in recent years, as the increasing volume of information from social media and open sources challenges traditional ways of gathering intelligence. Working together, the Five Eyes intelligence partners – Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States – are using new methods of data analysis to identify and pre-empt risks to national security.

In Canada, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the RCMP, and the Communication Security Establishment face an uncertain regulatory environment and seemingly incompatible demands: to extend their surveillance, data gathering, and disruption/intervention powers while increasing accountability and transparency in the name of democratic values. But at what cost to civil liberties, human rights, and privacy protection?

This book will find an audience not only among academics in security studies, sociology, political science, computer science, military studies, and law but also among members of the civil liberties community, investigative journalists, and security intelligence workers.” From Publisher’s Website

Black Resistance to British Policing, by Adam Elliott-Cooper. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2021.

“As police racism unsettles Britain’s tolerant self-image, Black resistance to British policing details the activism that made movements like Black Lives Matter possible. Elliott-Cooper analyses racism beyond prejudice and the interpersonal – arguing that black resistance confronts a global system of racial classification, exploitation and violence.

Imperial cultures and policies, as well as colonial war and policing highlight connections between these histories and contemporary racisms. But this is a book about resistance, considering black liberation movements in the 20th century while utilising a decade of activist research covering spontaneous rebellion, campaigns and protest in the 21st century. Drawing connections between histories of resistance and different kinds of black struggle against policing is vital, it is argued, if we are to challenge the cutting edge of police and prison power which harnesses new and dangerous forms of surveillance, violence and criminalisation.” From Publisher’s Website.

Blessed are the Peacemakers: Martin Luther King Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders, and the “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, edited by S. Jonathan Bass. Updated ed. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2021.

“Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is arguably the most important written document of the civil rights protest era and a widely read modern literary classic. Personally addressed to eight white Birmingham clergy who sought to avoid violence by publicly discouraging King’s civil rights demonstrations in Birmingham, the nationally published “Letter” captured the essence of the struggle for racial equality and provided a blistering critique of the gradualist approach to racial justice. It soon became part of American folklore, and the image of King penning his epistle from a prison cell remains among the most moving of the era. Yet, as S. Jonathan Bass explains in the first comprehensive history of King’s “Letter,” this image and the piece’s literary appeal conceal a much more complex tale.

This updated edition of Blessed Are the Peacemakers includes a new foreword by Paul Harvey, a new afterword by James C. Cobb, and a new epilogue by the author.” From Publisher’s Website.

Bring Back Our Girls: The Untold Story of the Global Search for Nigeria’s Missing Schoolgirls, by Joe Parkinson and Drew Hinshaw. New York: HarperCollins, 2012.

“In the spring of 2014, millions of Twitter users, including some of the world’s most famous people, unwittingly helped turn a group of 276 schoolgirls abducted by a little-known Islamist sect into a central prize in the global War on Terror by retweeting a call for their release: #BringBackOurGirls. With just four words, their tweets launched an army of would-be liberators. Soldiers and drones, spies, mercenaries, and glory hunters descended into an obscure conflict that few understood, in a remote part of Nigeria that had barely begun to use the internet.

When hostage talks and military intervention failed, the schoolgirls were forced to take survival into their own hands. As their days in captivity dragged into years, the young women learned to withstand hunger, disease, and torment, and became witnesses and victims of unspeakable brutality. Many of the girls were Christians who refused to take the one path offered them—converting to their captors’ fundamentalist creed. In secret, they sang hymns, and kept a diary, relying on their faith and friendships to stay alive.

Bring Back Our Girls unfolds across four continents, from the remote forests of northern Nigeria to the White House; from clandestine meetings in Khartoum safe houses to century-old luxury hotels on picturesque lakes in the Swiss Alps. A twenty-first century story that plumbs the promise and peril of an era whose politics are fueled by the power of hashtag advocacy, this urgent and engrossing work of investigative journalism reveals the unpredictable interconnectedness of our butterfly-wings world, where a few days of online activism can bring years of offline consequences for people continents away.” From Publisher’s Website.

Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Work Industry, by Angela Jones. New York: New York University Press, 2021.

“The erotic webcam industry, also known as “camming,” is a thriving global business. Angela Jones takes readers inside this multi-billion dollar industry, revealing how its workers experience intimacy, community, empowerment—and, as she compellingly argues, pleasure.

Drawing on in-depth interviews, survey data, web analytics, and more, Jones highlights not only the dangers, but also the rewards, of working in one of the most taboo corners of the Internet. She provides an inside look at the public and private shows between cam models and their customers, from exotic dancing and pornographic videos, to masturbation shows and erotic chatrooms.

A fascinating, much-needed glimpse into the lives of cam models, Camming takes us behind the webcam lens to experience the power of erotic labor in the twenty-first century.” From Publisher’s Website.

Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life, edited by Ruha Benjamin. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.

“From electronic ankle monitors and predictive-policing algorithms to workplace surveillance systems, technologies originally developed for policing and prisons have rapidly expanded into nonjuridical domains, including hospitals, schools, banking, social services, shopping malls, and digital life. Rooted in the logics of racial disparity and subjugation, these purportedly unbiased technologies not only extend prison spaces into the public sphere but also deepen racial hierarchies and engender new systems for social control. The contributors to Captivating Technology examine how carceral technologies are being deployed to classify and coerce specific populations and whether these innovations can be resisted and reimagined for more liberatory ends. Moving from traditional sites of imprisonment to the arenas of everyday life being reshaped by carceral technoscience, this volume culminates in a sustained focus on justice-oriented approaches to science and technology that blends historical, speculative, and biographical methods to envision new futures made possible.” From Publisher’s Website.

Central Prison: A History of North Carolina’s State Penitentiary, by Gregory S. Taylor. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2021.

“Gregory S. Taylor’s Central Prison is the first scholarly study to explore the prison’s entire history, from its origins in the 1870s to its status in the first decades of the twenty-first century. Taylor addresses numerous features of the state’s vast prison system, including chain gangs, convict leasing, executions, and the nearby Women’s Prison, to describe better the vagaries of living behind bars in the state’s largest penitentiary. He incorporates vital elements of the state’s history into his analysis to draw clear parallels between the changes occurring in free society and those affecting Central Prison. Throughout, Taylor illustrates that the prison, like the state itself, struggled with issues of race, gender, sectionalism, political infighting, finances, and progressive reform. Finally, Taylor also explores the evolution of penal reform, focusing on the politicians who set prison policy, the officials who administered it, and the untold number of African American inmates who endured incarceration in a state notorious for racial strife and injustice.

Central Prison approaches the development of the penal system in North Carolina from a myriad of perspectives, offering a range of insights into the workings of the state penitentiary. It will appeal not only to scholars of criminal justice but also to historians searching for new ways to understand the history of the Tar Heel State and general readers wanting to know more about one of North Carolina’s most influential—and infamous—institutions.” From Publisher’s Website.

The Child in the Electric Chair: The Execution of George Junius Stinney Jr., and the Making of a Tragedy in the American South. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2021.

“At 7:30 a.m. on June 16, 1944, George Junius Stinney Jr. was escorted by four guards to the death chamber. Wearing socks but no shoes, the 14-year-old Black boy walked with his Bible tucked under his arm. The guards strapped his slight, five-foot-one-inch frame into the electric chair. His small size made it difficult to affix the electrode to his right leg and the face mask, which was clearly too large, fell to the floor when the executioner flipped the switch. That day, George Stinney became, and today remains, the youngest person executed in the United States during the twentieth century.

How was it possible, even in Jim Crow South Carolina, for a child to be convicted, sentenced to death, and executed based on circumstantial evidence in a trial that lasted only a few hours? Through extensive archival research and interviews with Stinney’s contemporaries—men and women alive today who still carry distinctive memories of the events that rocked the small town of Alcolu and the entire state—Eli Faber pieces together the chain of events that led to this tragic injustice.

The first book to fully explore the events leading to Stinney’s death, The Child in the Electric Chair offers a compelling narrative with a meticulously researched analysis of the world in which Stinney lived—the era of lynching, segregation, and racist assumptions about Black Americans. Faber explains how a systemically racist system, paired with the personal ambitions of powerful individuals, turned a blind eye to human decency and one of the basic tenets of the American legal system that individuals are innocent until proven guilty.

As society continues to grapple with the legacies of racial injustice, the story of George Stinney remains one that can teach us lessons about our collective past and present. By ably placing the Stinney case into a larger context, Faber reveals how this case is not just a travesty of justice locked in the era of the Jim Crow South but rather one that continues to resonate in our own time.” From Publisher’s Website.

Children Under Fire: An American Crisis, by John Woodrow Cox. New York: ECCO/Harper Collins, 2021.

“In 2017, seven-year-old Ava in South Carolina wrote a letter to Tyshaun, an eight-year-old boy from Washington, DC. She asked him to be her pen pal; Ava thought they could help each other. The kids had a tragic connection—both were traumatized by gun violence. Ava’s best friend had been killed in a campus shooting at her elementary school, and Tyshaun’s father had been shot to death outside of the boy’s elementary school. Ava’s and Tyshaun’s stories are extraordinary, but not unique. In the past decade, 15,000 children have been killed from gunfire, though that number does not account for the kids who weren’t shot and aren’t considered victims but have nevertheless been irreparably harmed by gun violence.

In Children Under Fire, John Woodrow Cox investigates the effectiveness of gun safety reforms as well as efforts to manage children’s trauma in the wake of neighborhood shootings and campus massacres, from Columbine to Marjory Stoneman Douglas. Through deep reporting, Cox addresses how we can effect change now, and help children like Ava and Tyshaun. He explores their stories and more, including a couple in South Carolina whose eleven-year-old son shot himself, a Republican politician fighting for gun safety laws, and the charlatans infiltrating the school safety business.

In a moment when the country is desperate to better understand and address gun violence, Children Under Fire offers a way to do just that, weaving wrenching personal stories into a critical call for the United States to embrace practical reforms that would save thousands of young lives.” From Publisher’s Website.

Condemned: The Transported Men, Women and Children Who Built Britain’s Empire, by Graham Seal. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021.

“In the early seventeenth century, Britain took ruthless steps to deal with its unwanted citizens, forcibly removing men, women, and children from their homelands and sending them to far-flung corners of the empire to be sold off to colonial masters. This oppressive regime grew into a brutal system of human bondage which would continue into the twentieth century.

Drawing on firsthand accounts, letters, and official documents, Graham Seal uncovers the traumatic struggles of those shipped around the empire. He shows how the earliest large-scale kidnapping and transportation of children to the American colonies were quickly bolstered with shipments of the poor, criminal, and rebellious to different continents, including Australia. From Asia to Africa, this global trade in forced labor allowed Britain to build its colonies while turning a considerable profit. Incisive and moving, this account brings to light the true extent of a cruel strand in the history of the British Empire.” From Publisher’s Website.

Controlling Immigration Through Criminal Law: European and Comparative Perspectives on ‘Crimmigration’, edited by Gian Luigi Gatta, Valsamis Mitsilegas, and Stefano Zirulia. Oxford, UK; New York: Hart/Bloomsbury, 2021.

“This book provides a systematic and comprehensive overview of the increased role of criminal law in managing migration, from a European, domestic and comparative law perspective.

The contributors critically engage with the current trends leading to the criminalisation of irregular migrants, asylum seekers and those who engage in ‘humanitarian smuggling’ and the national and common policies calling for a broader use of criminal law measures.

The chapters explore the measures used to protect borders and their impact in terms of effectiveness and their ability to strike a fair balance between security and the protection of human rights.

The contributors to the book cover a range of disciplines within law, human rights and criminology resulting in a broad understanding of the issues at play.” From Publisher’s Website.

Criminology and Public Theology: On Hope, Mercy and Restoration, edited by Andrew Millie. Bristol, UK: Bristol University Press, 2020.

“At a time when criminal justice systems appear to be in a permanent state of crisis, leading scholars from criminology and theology come together to challenge criminal justice orthodoxy by questioning the dominance of retributive punishment.

This timely and unique contribution considers alternatives that draw on Christian ideas of hope, mercy and restoration.

Promoting cross-disciplinary learning, the book will be of interest to academics and students of criminology, socio-legal studies, legal philosophy, public theology and religious studies, as well as practitioners and policy makers.” From Publisher’s Website.

A Criminology of Narrative Fiction, by Rafe McGregor. Bristol, UK: Bristol University Press, 2021.

“Criminology has been reluctant to embrace fictional narratives as a tool for understanding, explaining and reducing crime and social harm.

In this philosophical enquiry, McGregor uses examples from films, television, novels and graphic novels to demonstrate the extensive criminological potential of fiction around the world. Building on previous studies of non-fiction narratives, the book is the first to explore the ways criminological fiction provides knowledge of the causes of crime and social harm.

For academics, practitioners and students, this is an engaging and thought-provoking critical analysis that establishes a bold new theory of criminological fiction.” From Publisher’s Website.

Cybercrimes: Critical Issues in a Global Context, by Anita Lavorgna. New York: Red Globe Press, 2020.

“This new textbook offers a systematic introduction to a wide array of cybercrimes, exploring their diversity and the range of possible responses to them. Combining coverage of theoretical perspectives with more technical knowledge, the book is divided into ten chapters which first lay the foundations of the topic and then consider the most important types of cybercrimes – from crimes against devices to political offences – before finally exploring ways to prevent, disrupt, analyse and better comprehend them. Examples from several countries are included, in the attempt to show how crime and deviance in cyberspace are truly global problems, with different countries experiencing comparable sets of challenges. At the same time, the author illustrates how these challenges manifest themselves differently, depending on the socio-legal culture of reference.

This text offers an accessible introduction to the topic for all those studying cybercrimes at undergraduate or postgraduate level. Whether students approach the topic from a criminological, legal or computer science perspective, this multidisciplinary approach of this text provides a common language to guide them through the intricacies of criminal and deviant behaviours in cyberspace.” From Publisher’s Website.

Death on Ocean Boulevard: Inside the Coronado Mansion Case, by Caitlin Rother. New York: Citadel Press, 2021.

“I got a girl, hung herself in the guest house.”

The call came on the morning of July 13, 2011, from the historic Spreckels Mansion, a lavish beachfront property in Coronado, California, owned by pharmaceutical tycoon and multimillionaire Jonah Shacknai. When authorities arrived, they found the naked body of Jonah’s girlfriend, Rebecca Zahau, gagged, her ankles tied and her wrists bound behind her. Jonah’s brother, Adam, claimed to have found Rebecca hanging by a rope from the second-floor balcony. On a bedroom door in black paint were the cryptic words: SHE SAVED HIM CAN YOU SAVE HER.

Was this scrawled message a suicide note or a killer’s taunt? Rebecca’s death came two days after Jonah’s six-year-old son, Max, took a devastating fall while in Rebecca’s care. Authorities deemed Rebecca’s death a suicide resulting from her guilt. But who would stage either a suicide or a murder in such a bizarre, elaborate way?

Award-winning investigative journalist Caitlin Rother weaves stunning new details into a personal yet objective examination of the sensational case. She explores its many layers–including the civil suit in which a jury found Adam Shacknai responsible for Rebecca’s death, and the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department bombshell decision to reconfirm its original findings. As compelling as it is troubling, this controversial real-life mystery is a classic American tragedy that evokes the same haunting fascination as the JonBenet Ramsey and O.J. Simpson cases. ” From Publisher’s Website.

Desistance Processes Among Young Offenders Following Judicial Interventions, edited by Hans-Jorg Albrecht, Maria Walsh, and Efke Wienhausen=Knezevic. Berlin:Duncker & Humblot, 2019.

“The idea for this book originated from a workshop on “Desistance Processes among Young Offenders following Judicial Interventions” held at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law (MPICC) in Freiburg. Over the past three decades, there has been growing scientific interest in the discussion of why and how offenders desist from crime. Despite various approaches regarding the understanding of what is important for cessation of criminal careers, there is little consensus among professionals working in this area. However, there is basic consensus on the assumption that external and internal factors are equally important for rehabilitation. Hence, interdisciplinary empirical approaches to desistance stress the importance of an integrated analytical framework. This book provides insight into how young offenders experience judicial interventions and elucidates pathways towards desistance. The papers, written by twelve European experts in the field, represent different theoretical and methodological approaches. Empirical research findings as well as fieldwork experiences of practitioners working with young delinquents are presented. They reflect the diversity of the current European research on the phenomenon of desistance from crime.” From Publisher’s Website.

Dirty Gold: The Rise and Fall of an International Smuggling Ring, by Jay Weaver, Nicholas Nehamas, Jim Wyss, and Kyra Gurney. New York: Public Affairs, 2021.

“The explosive story of the illegal gold trade from South America, and the three Miami businessmen who got rich on it—until it all came crashing down.

In March of 2017, a team of federal agents arrested Juan Pablo Granda, Samer Barrage, and Renato Rodriguez, or as they came to be known, “the three amigos.” The trio—first identified publicly by the authors of this book—had built a $3.6 billion dollar business in metals trading, mostly illegal Peruvian gold mined in the rain forest.

Their arrest and subsequent prosecution laid bare more than a scheme between a few corrupt traders. Dirty Gold lifts the veil on a massive and very illegal international business that is more lucrative than trafficking cocaine, and often just as dangerous.

As this award-winning team of current and former Miami Herald reporters shows, illegal gold mines have become a haven for Latin American drug money. The gold is sold to metals traders, and ultimately to scores of unwitting Americans in their jewelry and phones. By following the trail of these three traders, Dirty Gold leads us into a sprawling criminal underworld that has never before been in full view.” From Publisher’s Website.

Driving While Brown: Sheriff Joe Arpaio Versus the Latino Resistance, by Terry Greene Sterling and Jude Joffe-Block. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2021.

“Journalists Terry Greene Sterling and Jude Joffe-Block spent years chronicling the human consequences of Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s relentless immigration enforcement in Maricopa County, Arizona. In Driving While Brown, they tell the tale of two opposing movements that redefined Arizona’s political landscape—the restrictionist cause embraced by Arpaio and the Latino-led resistance that rose up against it.

The story follows Arpaio, his supporters, and his adversaries, including Lydia Guzman, who gathered evidence for a racial-profiling lawsuit that took surprising turns. Guzman joined a coalition determined to stop Arpaio, reform unconstitutional policing, and fight for Latino civil rights. Driving While Brown details Arpaio’s transformation—from “America’s Toughest Sheriff,” who forced inmates to wear pink underwear, into the nation’s most feared immigration enforcer who ended up receiving President Donald Trump’s first pardon. The authors immerse readers in the lives of people on both sides of the battle and uncover the deep roots of the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

The result of tireless investigative reporting, this powerful book provides critical insights into effective resistance to institutionalized racism and the community organizing that helped transform Arizona from a conservative stronghold into a battleground state.” From Publisher’s Website.

Drug Smuggler Nation: Narcotics and the Netherlands, 1920-1995, by Stephen Snelders. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2021.

“Why did the international drug regulatory regime of the twentieth century fail to stop an explosive increase in trade and consumption of illegal drugs? This study investigates the histories of smugglers and criminal entrepreneurs in the Netherlands who succeeded in turning the country into the so-called ‘Colombia of Europe’ or, ‘the international drug supermarket’.

Increasing state regulations and interventions led to the proliferation of a ‘hydra’ of small, anarchic groups and networks ideally suited to circumvent the enforcement of regulation. Networks of smugglers and suppliers of heroin, cocaine, cannabis, XTC, and other drugs were organized without a strict formal hierarchy and based on personal relations and cultural affinities rather than on institutional arrangements. These networks created a thriving underground industry of illegal synthetic drug laboratories and indoor cannabis cultivation in the Netherlands itself. Their operations were made possible and developed because of the deep historical social and cultural ’embeddedness’ of criminal anarchy in Dutch society.

Using examples from the rich history of drug smuggling, Drug smuggler nation investigates the deeper and hidden grounds of the illegal drug trade, and its effects on our drug policies.” From Publisher’s Website.

Drunk on Genocide: Alcohol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany, by Edward B. Westermann. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021.

“In Drunk on Genocide, Edward B. Westermann reveals how, over the course of the Third Reich, scenes involving alcohol consumption and revelry among the SS and police became a routine part of rituals of humiliation in the camps, ghettos, and killing fields of Eastern Europe.

Westermann draws on a vast range of newly unearthed material to explore how alcohol consumption served as a literal and metaphorical lubricant for mass murder. It facilitated “performative masculinity,” expressly linked to physical or sexual violence. Such inebriated exhibitions extended from meetings of top Nazi officials to the rank and file, celebrating at the grave sites of their victims. Westermann argues that, contrary to the common misconception of the SS and police as stone-cold killers, they were, in fact, intoxicated with the act of murder itself.

Drunk on Genocide highlights the intersections of masculinity, drinking ritual, sexual violence, and mass murder to expose the role of alcohol and celebratory ritual in the Nazi genocide of European Jews. Its surprising and disturbing findings offer a new perspective on the mindset, motivation, and mentality of killers as they prepared for, and participated in, mass extermination.” From Publisher’s Website.

Due Process Protections for Youth: Defense Counsel Policies and Disparity in the Juvenile Justice System, by Emily K. Pelletier. London; New York: Routledge, 2020.

“This monograph illuminates the connections between juvenile defense policies and the racially disparate impact of the juvenile justice system. The limited data that exist on youth in the juvenile justice system consistently depict disparate contact and outcomes for black youth across the system. The broad rehabilitative goals of the U.S. juvenile justice system, along with the “best interest” legal standard of the child welfare system, muddle the protection of youth due process rights. States differ widely in their policies granting defense counsel, and many policies lack specific language for policies addressing notions such as appointment timing, duration of representation, waiver criteria, and role of counsel.

Using a combination of legal and sociological research methods, this book examines the lack of specificity in the language of juvenile defense policies and connects the dots between this deficiency with the racially disparate impact of the system, contextualizing findings within a broader theoretical constructs of race and law. The author introduces common elements of juvenile defense policies, describes their impact, and makes suggestions for strengthening defense counsel policies. The book concludes with a call to action regarding expanded data-collection practices for juvenile delinquency courts.

This book is essential reading for those engaged in youth and juvenile justice efforts and scholars interested in issues surrounding due process, race, class, social policy, and justice.” From Publisher’s Website.

The Emotional Brain and the Guilty Mind: Novel Paradigms of Culpability and Punishment, by Federica Coppola. London; New York: Hart/Bloomsbury, 2021.

“This book seeks to reframe the normative narrative of the ‘culpable person’ in American criminal law through a more humanising lens. It embraces such a reframed narrative to revise the criteria of the current voluntarist architecture of culpability and to advance a paradigm of punishment that positions social rehabilitation as its core principle.

The book constructs this narrative by considering behavioural and neuroscientific insights into the functions of emotions, and socio-environmental factors within moral behaviour in social settings. Hence, it suggests culpability notions that reflect a more contextualised view of human conduct, and argues that such revised notions are better suited to the principle of personal guilt. Furthermore, it suggests a model of ‘punishment’ that values the dynamic power of change of individuals, and acknowledges the importance of social relationships and positive environments to foster patterns of social (re)integration.

Ultimately, this book argues that the potential adoption of the proposed models of culpability and punishment, which view people through a more comprehensive lens, may be a key factor for turning criminal justice into a less punitive, more inclusionary and non-stigmatising system.” From Publisher’s Website.

A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome, by Emma Southon. New York: Abrams Press, 2021.

“In Ancient Rome, all the best stories have one thing in common—murder. Romulus killed Remus to found the city, Caesar was assassinated to save the Republic. Caligula was butchered in the theater, Claudius was poisoned at dinner, and Galba was beheaded in the Forum. In one 50-year period, 26 emperors were murdered.

But what did killing mean in a city where gladiators fought to the death to sate a crowd? In A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Emma Southon examines a trove of real-life homicides from Roman history to explore Roman culture, including how perpetrator, victim, and the act itself were regarded by ordinary people. Inside Ancient Rome’s darkly fascinating history, we see how the Romans viewed life, death, and what it means to be human.” From Publisher’s Website.

Forensic Psychologists: Prisons, Power, and Vulnerability, by Jason Warr. Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing, 2020.

“Built on a large body of research relating specifically to forensic psychologists and prison life more generally, this book examines how this professional discipline has become central to life within the modern prison. Exploring a number of themes, it takes the reader behind the scenes of forensic psychological practice in Her Majesty’s prisons.

Focusing not only on how practitioners themselves come to embody a pervasive system of disciplinary expertise, but also on how they experience other forms of penal control, the book offers a novel and complete exploration of forensic psychology, the modern prison, and power.” From Publisher’s Website.

The Emerald Handbook of Feminism, Criminology and Social Change, by Sandra Walklate, et al. Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing, 2020.

“The Emerald Handbook of Criminology, Feminism and Social Change combines a wide range of international contributors to chart the uneasy relationship between feminism, criminology and victimology. It explores historical and contemporary questions posed for criminology and victimology by feminist work.

The book is split into four sections which introduce the origins of feminist criminology; explore research beyond the northern hemisphere; extend the criminological agenda; and look to the future relationship between feminism and criminology.

Comprehensive and current, this handbook provides fresh insight and commentary on the capacity of criminology to listen to feminist voices and is essential reading for anyone interested in feminism, criminology and social change.” From Publisher’s Website.

The End of Asylum, by Andrew I. Schoenholtz, Jaya Ramji-Nogales, and Philip G. Schrag. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2021.

“Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign centered around immigration issues such as his promise to build a border wall separating the US and Mexico. While he never built a physical wall, he did erect a legal one. Over the past three years, the Trump administration has put forth regulations, policies, and practices all designed to end opportunities for asylum seekers. If left unchecked, these policies will effectually lead to the end of asylum, turning the United States—once a global leader in refugee aid—into a country with one of the most restrictive asylum systems.

In The End of Asylum, three experts in immigration law offer a comprehensive examination of the rise and demise of the US asylum system. Beginning with the Refugee Act of 1980, they describe how Congress adopted a definition of refugee based on the UN Refugee Convention and prescribed equitable and transparent procedures for a uniform asylum process. The authors then chart the evolution of this process, showing how Republican and Democratic administrations and Congresses tweaked the asylum system but maintained it as a means of protecting victims of persecution—until the Trump administration. By expanding his executive reach, twisting obscure provisions in the law, undermining past precedents, and creating additional obstacles for asylum seekers, Trump’s policies have effectively ended asylum. The book concludes with a roadmap and a call to action for the Biden administration and Congress to repair and reform the US asylum system.

This eye-opening work reveals the extent to which the Trump administration has dismantled fundamental American ideals of freedom from persecution and shows us what we can do about it.” From Publisher’s Website.

Familiarity and Conviction in the Criminal Justice System: Definitions, Theory, and Eyewitness Research, by Joanna Pozzulo, Emily Pica, and Chelsea Sheahan. Oxford, UK; New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

“Eyewitnesses are likely to have some degree of familiarity with a perpetrator when a crime is committed. Despite the fact that the majority of crimes are committed by someone with whom the victim/witness is familiar, the majority of eyewitness research has focused on the identification of stranger perpetrators. It is critical to examine how familiarity may influence eyewitness accuracy. Familiarity can vary from a complete stranger to a very familiar other. This book explores the “middle ground” as it relates to the criminal justice system, namely describing perpetrators, eyewitness identification, and jury decision-making. The purpose of this book is to consolidate the literature that exists regarding familiarity and to apply this research to an eyewitness context. This book attempts to better understand how familiarity may impact eyewitnesses and to highlight key considerations when an eyewitness is familiar with a perpetrator while collecting eyewitness evidence and using it in a courtroom. This is achieved through an in-depth discussion of the definition of familiarity, the examination of critical social psychological and cognitive theory in relation to familiarity, a description of the current literature examining eyewitness familiarity, a discussion of familiarity evidence in the courtroom, and a proposal for future directions and research.” From Publisher’s Website.

Gendered Domestic Violence and Abuse in Popular Culture, by Shulamit Ramon, Michele Lloyd, and Bridget Pennhale. Bingley, UK: Emerald Limited, 2020.

“As binge-watching and streaming lead to increasing amounts of content and screen time, understanding how domestic violence and abuse is portrayed in popular culture and its impact on DVA in our society is more important than ever. Amid current international attention on sexual harassment, abuse and exploitation initiated by the #MeToo movement, this collection demonstrates how networked communication is influencing activism, both online and in the real-world.

The term gendered DVA recognises the wider gender inequality underpinning DVA, and intersecting inequalities such as race, social class, sexuality, age and disability. International contributors from Europe, the USA and Australia examine how DVA is represented in different media forms comprising film, television, newspapers, digital and social media, and TED lectures. The collection examines intimate partner abuse, child abuse, grooming and sexual exploitation, elder abuse and neglect, and abuse in LGBT relationships. Authors also analyse policy changes in relation to DVA, both progressive and regressive, together with topics such as moral panic in the media and trial by media.

An in-depth and wide-ranging resource, this collection will be a valuable text for health and social care professionals, researchers, academics, undergraduate and postgraduate students, and people with lived experience of DVA.” From Publisher’s Website.

The Gig Mafia: How Small Networks and High-Speed Digital Funds Transfers Have Changed the Face of Organized Crime, by David M. Shapiro. New York: BEP (Business Expert Press) Books, 2021

“Organized crimes (e.g., weapons trafficking, drug distribution, white collar crime) persist globally due primarily to the power of modern information and communication technology (e.g., computer-based networks in the open and dark webs) to facilitate organization and the enhanced liquidity provided by electronic transfers (in effect, e-capital) to distribute criminal proceeds in the same covert and high-speed manner used by the so-called legitimate commercial enterprises. Offshore banking in tax secrecy and tax haven jurisdictions facilitates both the socially accepted process commonly known as tax avoidance, for example, and the notorious practice commonly known as tax evasion: the former is lawful; the latter is illicit.

The dirty secret of how transnational organized economic crime persists lies in global finance, especially transactions using the U.S. dollar in safe havens (e.g., the West uses the Cayman Islands; the East uses Cyprus). Regulators, monitors, auditors, and other specialists in conducting transaction review do not readily and timely tell the difference between high valued transfers that involve true sales of licit goods from high valued transfers that involve the laundering of proceeds from human trafficking, drug distribution, arms sales, and so on.” From Publisher’s Website.

Global Crime: An Encyclopedia of Cyber Theft, Weapons Sales, and Other Illegal Activities, edited by Philp L. Reichel. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2019.

“While many international corporations have benefited from the global economy and distribution of information, globalization has also had serious negative consequences. This important reference work offers students and general readers a critical understanding of how technology, governments, political unrest, war, and economic strife contribute to an increase in global crime.

This A–Z encyclopedia covers key people, events, and organizations and includes key documents that will help readers to understand the numerous problems created by the many transnational crimes that are growing in severity and frequency around the world. Entries address perpetrators and their methods; victims; who really profits; and law enforcement responses. In addition to cyber theft and sales of weapons and narcotics, the set provides a detailed look at global crimes not typically covered, such as corruption, fraudulent medicine, illegal sports betting, organ trafficking, maritime piracy, trafficking in cultural property, and wildlife and forest crime. Although some historical events and people are included, the focus is on recent and contemporary topics.

Features

  • Includes primary source documents such as international treaties and conventions related to global crime
  • Provides quick access to key terms, events, individuals, and organizations playing a key role in combating global crime
  • Includes suggested sources for additional information in each entry to aid readers who want to examine the topic in more detail
  • Features scholars and practitioners from more than 10 countries who have specific knowledge of, and experience with, many of the global crimes covered in the work. “ From Publisher’s Website
The Global Spread of Islamism and the Consequences for Terrorism, by Michael Freeman with Katherine Ellena and Amina Kator-Mubarez. Potomac Books (c/o University of Nebraska Press, 2021.

“Terrorism motivated by Islamist religious ideology has been on the rise for the last forty years. Why? The three prior waves of terrorism—anarchist, nationalist, and Marxist—arose generally from a combination of geopolitical events and local grievances. This “fourth wave” of terrorism, however, has risen out of a different set of conditions.

Existing analyses of terrorism often consider how terrorist ideologies have evolved or how grievances have changed over time. But these approaches miss what could be called the “supply” side of ideology—how state and nonstate actors have exported an ideology of Islamism and how this ideology has taken root beyond what grievances or ideological interpretations would predict.

Michael Freeman connect the dots between several key events in 1979—the hostage crisis at the Grand Mosque in Mecca, the Iranian Revolution, and the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan—and the incentives these events created for different actors to spread the supply of Islamism, the institutions they produced in various countries, and the terrorists who emerge from these institutions.

In The Global Spread of Islamism and the Consequences for Terrorism Freeman examines four countries that have experienced this export of Islamism—Indonesia, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, and the United States—and briefly describes similar patterns in other countries. Understanding the importance of the supply side of Islamism helps us better understand the strength and staying power of this current wave of terrorism as well as opportunities to better counter it.” From Publisher’s Website.

Good Policing: Trust, Legitimacy and Authority, by Mike Hough. Bristol, UK: Policy Press, 2021.

“Renowned criminologist Mike Hough considers how the police service might build trust, legitimacy and compliance with the law in this important book. He challenges conventional thinking on crime, contrasts ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ policing styles and offers a fresh approach that secures compliance with the law through ethical policing.” From Publisher’s Website.

God’s Law and Order: The Politics of Punishment in Evangelical America, By Aaron Griffith. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020.

“America incarcerates on a massive scale. Despite recent reforms, the United States locks up large numbers of people—disproportionately poor and nonwhite—for long periods and offers little opportunity for restoration. Aaron Griffith reveals a key component in the origins of American mass incarceration: evangelical Christianity.

Evangelicals in the postwar era made crime concern a major religious issue and found new platforms for shaping public life through punitive politics. Religious leaders like Billy Graham and David Wilkerson mobilized fears of lawbreaking and concern for offenders to sharpen appeals for Christian conversion, setting the stage for evangelicals who began advocating tough-on-crime politics in the 1960s. Building on religious campaigns for public safety earlier in the twentieth century, some preachers and politicians pushed for “law and order,” urging support for harsh sentences and expanded policing. Other evangelicals saw crime as a missionary opportunity, launching innovative ministries that reshaped the practice of religion in prisons. From the 1980s on, evangelicals were instrumental in popularizing criminal justice reform, making it a central cause in the compassionate conservative movement. At every stage in their work, evangelicals framed their efforts as colorblind, which only masked racial inequality in incarceration and delayed real change.

Today evangelicals play an ambiguous role in reform, pressing for reduced imprisonment while backing law-and-order politicians. God’s Law and Order shows that we cannot understand the criminal justice system without accounting for evangelicalism’s impact on its historical development.” From Publisher’s Website.

The Ground Breaking: An American City and the Search for Justice, by Scott Ellsworth. New York: Dutton, 2021.

“And then they were gone.

More than one-thousand homes and businesses. Restaurants and movie theaters, churches and doctors’ offices, a hospital, a public library, a post office. Looted, burned, and bombed from the air.

Over the course of less than twenty-four hours in the spring of 1921, Tulsa’s infamous “Black Wall Street” was wiped off the map—and erased from the history books. Official records were disappeared, researchers were threatened, and the worst single incident of racial violence in American history was kept hidden for more than fifty years. But there were some secrets that would not die.

A riveting and essential new book, The Ground Breaking not only tells the long-suppressed story of the notorious Tulsa Race Massacre. It also unearths the lost history of how the massacre was covered up, and of the courageous individuals who fought to keep the story alive. Most importantly, it recounts the ongoing archaeological saga and the search for the unmarked graves of the victims of the massacre, and of the fight to win restitution for the survivors and their families.

Both a forgotten chronicle from the nation’s past, and a story ripped from today’s headlines, The Ground Breaking is a page-turning reflection on how we, as Americans, must wrestle with the parts of our history that have been buried for far too long.” From Publisher’s Website.

Handbook of Policing, Communication, and Society, edited by Howard Giles, Edward R. Maguire, and Shawn L. Hill. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021.

“The Rowman & Littlefield Handbook of Policing, Communication, and Society brings together well-regarded academics and experienced practitioners to explore how communication intersects with policing in areas such as cop-culture, race and ethnicity, terrorism and hate crimes, social media, police reform, crowd violence, and many more. By combining research and theory in criminology, psychology, and communication, this handbook provides a foundation for identifying and understanding many of the issues that challenge police and the public in today’s society. It is an important and comprehensive analysis of the enormous changes in the roles of gender in society, digital technology, social media, and organizational structures have impacted policing and public perceptions about law enforcement.” From Publisher’s Website.

Hate Speech in Japan: The Possibility of a Non-Regulatory Approach, edited by Shinji Higaki and Yuji Nasu. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021.

“This book explains the past and present status of hate speech regulations in Japan. The United States and European countries have adopted different approaches to resolve their respective hate speech problems. Both of them, however, continue to confront the dilemma that freedom of speech and anti-racism are fundamental values of human rights. Therefore, some scholars criticize the US approach as too protective of freedom of speech, while other scholars criticize the European approach as impermissibly violating that freedom. Compared to these countries, Japan is unique in that it does not criminalize hate speech and hate crime other than in the recently enacted Kawasaki City Ordinance criminalizing some kinds of hate speech. Japan basically relies on a comprehensive set of non-regulative tools to suppress extreme hate speech. This volume analyses Japanese hate speech laws and suggests a unique distinctive model to strike a balance between both core values of democracy.” From Publisher’s Website.

The Holly: Five Bullets, One Gun, and the Struggle to Save an American Neighborhood, by Julian Rubinstein. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.

“On the last evening of summer in 2013, five shots rang out in a part of northeast Denver known as the Holly. Long a destination for African American families fleeing the Jim Crow South, the area had become an “invisible city” within a historically white metropolis. While shootings there weren’t uncommon, the identity of the shooter that night came as a shock. Terrance Roberts was a revered anti-gang activist. His attempts to bring peace to his community had won the accolades of both his neighbors and the state’s most important power brokers. Why had he just fired a gun?

In The Holly, the award-winning Denver-based journalist Julian Rubinstein reconstructs the events that left a local gang member paralyzed and Roberts facing the possibility of life in prison. Much more than a crime story, The Holly is a multigenerational saga of race and politics that runs from the civil rights movement to Black Lives Matter. With a cast that includes billionaires, elected officials, cops, developers, and street kids, the book explores the porous boundaries between a city’s elites and its most disadvantaged citizens. It also probes the fraught relationships between police, confidential informants, activists, gang members, and ex–gang members as they struggle to put their pasts behind them. In The Holly, we see how well-intentioned efforts to curb violence and improve neighborhoods can go badly awry, and we track the interactions of law enforcement with gang members who conceive of themselves as defenders of a neighborhood. When Roberts goes on trial, the city’s fault lines are fully exposed. In a time of national reckoning over race, policing, and the uses and abuses of power, Rubinstein offers a dramatic and humane illumination of what’s at stake.” From Publisher’s Website.

Homegrown Hate: Why White Nationalists and Militant Islamists are Waging War Against the United States, by Sara Kamali. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2021.

“To better understand current events and threats, this book outlines the organizations and beliefs of domestic terrorists in the United States and how to counter their attacks on American democracy.

Who are the American citizens—White nationalists and militant Islamists—perpetrating acts of terrorism against their own country? What are their grievances and why do they hate? How can this transnational peril be effectively addressed?

Homegrown Hate is a groundbreaking and deeply researched work that directly compares White nationalists and militant Islamists in the United States. In this timely book, scholar and holistic justice activist Sara Kamali examines these Americans’ self-described beliefs, grievances, and rationales for violence, and details their organizational structures within a transnational context. She presents compelling insight into the most pressing threat to homeland security not only in the United States, but in nations across the globe: citizens who are targeting their homeland according to their respective narratives of victimhood. She also explains the hate behind the headlines and provides the tools to counter this hate from within, cogently offering hope in uncertain and divisive times. Innovative and engaging, this is an indispensable resource for all who cherish equity and justice in the United States and around the world.” From Publisher’s Website.

How Rights Went Wrong: Why Our Obsession with Rights is Tearing America Apart, by Jamal Greene. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2021.

“You have the right to remain silent—and the right to free speech. The right to worship, and to doubt. The right to be free from discrimination, and to hate. The right to life, and the right to own a gun.

Rights are a sacred part of American identity. Yet they also are the source of some of our greatest divisions. We believe that holding a right means getting a judge to let us do whatever the right protects. And judges, for their part, seem unable to imagine two rights coexisting—reducing the law to winners and losers. The resulting system of legal absolutism distorts our law, debases our politics, and exacerbates our differences rather than helping to bridge them.

As renowned legal scholar Jamal Greene argues, we need a different approach—and in How Rights Went Wrong, he proposes one that the Founders would have approved. They preferred to leave rights to legislatures and juries, not judges, he explains. Only because of the Founders’ original sin of racial discrimination—and subsequent missteps by the Supreme Court—did courts gain such outsized power over Americans’ rights. In this paradigm-shifting account, Greene forces readers to rethink the relationship between constitutional law and political dysfunction and shows how we can recover America’s original vision of rights, while updating them to confront the challenges of the twenty-first century.” From Publisher’s Website.

Immigration Matters: Movements, Visions, and Strategies for a Progressive Future, edited by Ruth Milkman, Deepak Bhargava, and Penny Lewis. New York: The New Press, 2021.

“During the past decade, right-wing nativists have stoked popular hostility to the nation’s foreign-born population, forcing the immigrant rights movement into a defensive posture. In the Trump years, preoccupied with crisis upon crisis, advocates had few opportunities to consider questions of long-term policy or future strategy. Now is the time for a reset.

Immigration Matters offers a new, actionable vision for immigration policy. It brings together key movement leaders and academics to share cutting-edge approaches to the urgent issues facing the immigrant community, along with fresh solutions to vexing questions of so-called “future flows” that have bedeviled policy makers for decades. The book also explores the contributions of immigrants to the nation’s identity, its economy, and progressive movements for social change. Immigration Matters delves into a variety of topics including new ways to frame immigration issues, fresh thinking on key aspects of policy, challenges of integration, workers’ rights, family reunification, legalization, paths to citizenship, and humane enforcement.

The perfect handbook for immigration activists, scholars, policy makers, and anyone who cares about one of the most contentious issues of our age, Immigration Matters makes accessible an immigration policy that both remediates the harm done to immigrant workers and communities under Trump and advances a bold new vision for the future.” From Publisher’s Website.

Information Pollution as Social Harm: Investigating the Digital Drift of Medical Misinformation in a Time of Crisis, by Anita Lavorgna. Bingsley, UK: Emerald Publishing Limited, 2021.

“The coronavirus pandemic struck the world in a very distinctive way: experience from past pandemics or from more recent outbreaks could give us only a limited understanding of how the situation was likely to unfold. In this context, and with cyberspace being increasingly used to support health-related decision making and to market health products, potentially harmful behaviours have been carried out by individuals propagating non-science-based health (mis)information and conspiratorial thinking. This includes, among other actions, boycotting the use of masks and physical distancing, proactively opposing the use of the COVID-19 candidate vaccines, and promoting the use of useless or even dangerous substances to prevent or resist the virus. By relying on a virtual ethnography approach carried out on Italian-speaking alternative lifestyle and counter-information online communities, this book shows how the nature of personal interactions online and the construction of both personal and group identities through the development of an ‘us vs. them’ narrative, are central to the creation and propagation of medical misinformation.” From Publisher’s Website.

It Can Happen Here: White Power and the Rising Threat of Genocide in the US, by Alexander Laban Hinton. New York: New York University Press, 2021.

“If many people were shocked by Donald Trump’s 2016 election, many more were stunned when, months later, white supremacists took to the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting “Blood and Soil” and “Jews will not replace us!” Like Trump, the Charlottesville marchers were dismissed as aberrations—crazed extremists who did not represent the real US. It Can Happen Here demonstrates that, rather than being exceptional, such white power extremism and the violent atrocities linked to it are a part of American history. And, alarmingly, they remain a very real threat to the US today.

Alexander Hinton explains how murky politics, structural racism, the promotion of American exceptionalism, and a belief that the US has have achieved a color-blind society have diverted attention from the deep roots of white supremacist violence in the US’s brutal past. Drawing on his years of research and teaching on mass violence, Hinton details the warning signs of impending genocide and atrocity crimes, the tools used by ideologues to fan the flames of hate, and the shocking ways in which “us” versus “them” violence is supported by inherently racist institutions and policies.

It Can Happen Here is an essential new assessment of the dangers of contemporary white power extremism in the United States. While revealing the threat of genocide and atrocity crimes that loom over the country, Hinton offers actions we can take to prevent it from happening, illuminating a hopeful path forward for a nation in crisis.” From Publisher’s Website.

Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue: A Life’s Work Fighting for a More Perfect Union, by Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Amanda L. Tyler. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2021.

“In the fall of 2019, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg visited the University of California, Berkeley School of Law to deliver the first annual Herma Hill Kay Memorial Lecture in honor of her friend, the late Herma Hill Kay, with whom Ginsburg had coauthored the very first casebook on sex-based discrimination in 1974. Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue is the result of a period of collaboration between Ginsburg and Amanda L. Tyler, a Berkeley Law professor and former Ginsburg law clerk. During Justice Ginsburg’s visit to Berkeley, she told her life story in conversation with Tyler. In this collection, the two bring together that conversation and other materials—many previously unpublished—that share details from Justice Ginsburg’s family life and long career. These include notable briefs and oral arguments, some of Ginsburg’s last speeches, and her favorite opinions that she wrote as a Supreme Court Justice (many in dissent), along with the statements that she read from the bench in those important cases. Each document was chosen by Ginsburg and Tyler to tell the story of the litigation strategy and optimistic vision that were at the heart of Ginsburg’s unwavering commitment to the achievement of “a more perfect Union.”

In a decades-long career, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was an advocate and jurist for gender equality and for ensuring that the United States Constitution leaves no person behind. Her work transformed not just the American legal landscape, but American society more generally. Ginsburg labored tirelessly to promote a Constitution that is ever more inclusive and that allows every individual to achieve their full human potential. As revealed in these pages, in the area of gender rights, Ginsburg dismantled long-entrenched systems of discrimination based on outdated stereotypes by showing how such laws hold back both genders. And as also shown in the materials brought together here, Justice Ginsburg had a special ability to appreciate how the decisions of the high court impact the lived experiences of everyday Americans. The passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in September 2020 as this book was heading into production was met with a public outpouring of grief. With her death, the country lost a hero and national treasure whose incredible life and legacy made the United States a more just society and one in which “We the People,” for whom the Constitution is written, includes everyone.” From Publisher’s Website.

Knowing About Genocide: Armenian Suffering and Epistemic Struggles, by Joachim J. Savelsberg. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2021.

“This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of the University of Minnesota. Learn more at the TOME website, available at openmonographs.org.

How do victims and perpetrators generate conflicting knowledge about genocide? Using a sociology of knowledge approach, Savelsberg answers this question for the Armenian genocide committed in the context of the First World War. Focusing on Armenians and Turks, he examines strategies of silencing, denial, and acknowledgment in everyday interaction, public rituals, law, and politics. Drawing on interviews, ethnographic accounts, documents, and eyewitness testimony, Savelsberg illuminates the social processes that drive dueling versions of history. He reveals counterproductive consequences of denial in an age of human rights hegemony, with implications for populist disinformation campaigns against overwhelming evidence.” From Publisher’s Website.

Labor and Punishment: Work In and Out of Prison, ed. By Erin Hatton. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2021.

“The insightful chapters in this volume reveal the multiple and multifaceted intersections between mass incarceration and neoliberal precarity. Both mass incarceration and the criminal justice system are profoundly implicated in the production and reproduction of the low-wage “exploitable” precariat, both within and beyond prison walls. The carceral state is a regime of labor discipline—and a growing one—that extends far beyond its own inmate labor. This regime not only molds inmates into compliant workers willing and expected to accept any “bad” job upon release but also compels many Americans to work in such jobs under threat of incarceration, all the while bolstering their “exploitability” and socioeconomic marginality.

Contributors include Anne Bonds, Philip Goodman, Amanda Bell Hughett, Caroline M. Parker, Gretchen Purser, Jacqueline Stevens, and Noah D. Zatz.” From Publisher’s Website.

Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York, by Elon Green. New York: Celadon Books, 2021.

“The Townhouse Bar, midtown, July 1992: The piano player seems to know every song ever written, the crowd belts out the lyrics to their favorites, and a man standing nearby is drinking a Scotch and water. The man strikes the piano player as forgettable.

He looks bland and inconspicuous. Not at all what you think a serial killer looks like. But that’s what he is, and tonight, he has his sights set on a gray haired man. He will not be his first victim.

Nor will he be his last.

The Last Call Killer preyed upon gay men in New York in the ‘80s and ‘90s and had all the hallmarks of the most notorious serial killers. Yet because of the sexuality of his victims, the skyhigh murder rates, and the AIDS epidemic, his murders have been almost entirely forgotten.

This gripping true-crime narrative tells the story of the Last Call Killer and the decades-long chase to find him. And at the same time, it paints a portrait of his victims and a vibrant community navigating threat and resilience.” From Publisher’s Website.

Law and Neurodiversity: Youth with Autism and the Juvenile Justice Systems in Canada and the United States, by Dana Lee Baker, Laurie A. Drapela, and Whitney Littlefield. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 2020.

“As social perceptions of diversity become more nuanced, awareness of the prevalence of autism has grown. But how do we accommodate natural human neurodiversity within the juvenile justice system? And what are the consequences for young people?

Law and Neurodiversity offers invaluable guidance on how autism research can inform and improve juvenile justice policies in Canada and the United States. Both countries rely on decentralized systems of governance to craft and implement law and policy, but their treatment of detained youth with autism differs substantively. This perceptive book examines the history of institutionalization, the evolution of disability rights, and advances in juvenile justice that explicitly incorporate considerations of neurological difference into court practice. In Canada, the diversion of delinquent autistic youth away from formal processing has fostered community-based strategies for them under state authority in its place. US policies rely more heavily on formal responses, often employing detention in juvenile custody facilities. These differing approaches profoundly affect how crucial services such as education are delivered to youth on the autism spectrum.

Building on a rigorous exploration of how assessment tools, rehabilitation programs, and community re-entry plans differ between the two countries, Law and Neurodiversity offers a much-needed comparative analysis of autism and juvenile justice policies on both sides of the forty-ninth parallel.

Scholars and students of socio-legal studies, criminology, and disability studies will find this book essential reading, as will policy analysts and policymakers in juvenile justice and frontline workers working with autistic youth in the justice system.” From Publisher’s Website.

A Long Dark Shadow: Minor-Attracted People and Their Pursuit of Dignity, by Allyn Walker. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2021.

“Challenging widespread assumptions that persons who are preferentially attracted to minors—often referred to as “pedophiles”—are necessarily also predators and sex offenders, this book takes readers into the lives of non-offending minor-attracted persons (MAPs). There is little research into non-offending MAPs, a group whose experiences offer valuable insights into the prevention of child abuse. Navigating guilt, shame, and fear, this universally maligned group demonstrates remarkable resilience and commitment to living without offending and to supporting and educating others. Using data from interview-based research, A Long, Dark Shadow offers a crucial account of the lived experiences of this hidden population.” From Publisher’s Website.

Monsters, Law, Crime: Explorations in Gothic Criminology, edited by Caroline Joan “Kay” S. Picart. Lanham, MD: University Press Copublishing Division / Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2020.

“Monsters, Law, Crime, an edited collection composed of essays written by prominent U.S. and international experts in Law, Criminology, Sociology, Anthropology, Communication and Film, constitutes a rigorous attempt to explore fertile interdisciplinary inquiries into “monsters” and “monster-talk,” and law and crime. This edited collection explores and updates contemporary discussions of the emergent and evolving frontiers of monster theory in relation to cutting-edge research on law and crime as extensions of a Gothic Criminology. This theoretical framework was initially developed by Caroline Joan “Kay” S. Picart, a Philosophy and Film professor turned Attorney and Law professor, and Cecil Greek, a Sociologist (Picart and Greek 2008). Picart and Greek proposed a Gothic Criminology to analyze the fertile synapses connecting the “real” and the “reel” in the flow of Gothic metaphors and narratives that abound around criminological phenomena that populate not only popular culture but also academic and public policy discourses. Picart’s edited collection adapts the framework to focus predominantly on law and the social sciences.” From Publisher’s Website.

National Climate Change Acts: The Emergence, Form and Nature of National Framework Climate Legislation, edited by Thomas L. Muinzer. London; New York: Bloomsbury/Hart, 2020.

“This groundbreaking book collects contributions from many of the world’s leading climate and energy law scholars and provides the first major study of national Climate Change Acts. This cutting-edge type of legislation originated with the first Climate Change Act framework which was passed in the United Kingdom in 2008, and is intended to enable the law to grapple effectively with one of the great problems of our times, anthropogenic climate change.

Since 2008, national framework climate legislation has been slowly but steadily emerging in countries across the world. This trailblazing collection employs a comparative analytical legal methodology and offers the first comprehensive study of this new, innovative form of legislative regime.

In addition to containing broad internationalist chapters, deep-dive national case study chapters are included that focus on individual countries and provide analytical depth. A final chapter draws together the threads of the book’s foregoing contributions to deduce generalisable conceptual insights based on current knowledge and experience. Uniquely, the book provides a conceptual model for Climate Change Acts that can usefully inform the development of national framework climate legislation in all countries.” From Publisher’s Website.

Neurointerventions, Crime and Punishment: Ethical Considerations, by Jesper Ryberg. Oxford, UK; New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

“Advances in new neuroscientific research tools and technologies have not only led to new insight into the processes of the human brain, they have also refined and provided genuinely new ways of modifying and manipulating the human brain. The aspiration of such interventions is to affect conative, cognitive, and affective brain processes associated with emotional regulation, empathy, and moral judgment. Can the use of neuroscientific technologies for influencing the human functioning brain as a means of preventing offenders from engaging in future criminal conduct be justified?

In Neurointerventions, Crime, and Punishment, Jesper Ryberg considers various ethical challenges surrounding this question. More precisely, he provides a framework for considering neuroethical issues within the criminal justice system and examines a set of procedures which the criminal justice system relies on to deal with criminal offending. To do this, Ryberg addresses the following questions, among others: Is it morally acceptable to offer more lenient sentences to offenders in return for participation in neuroscientific treatment programs? Or would such offers be unacceptably coercive? Is it possible to administer neurointerventions as a type of punishment? Would it be acceptable for physicians to participate in the administration of neurointerventions on offenders? What is the moral significance of the sordid history of brain interventions for the present or future use of such treatment options? As rehabilitation comes back into fashion after many decades and as neuroscientific knowledge and technology advance rapidly, these intricate and controversial topics become increasingly more urgent. Ryberg argues that many of the in-principle objections to neuroscientific treatment are premature, but given the way criminal justice systems currently function, such treatment methods should not be put into practice.” From Publisher’s Website.

North of El Norte: Illegalized Mexican Migrants in Canada, by Paloma E. Villegas. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 2020.

“Undocumented. In popular perception and most research, the term connotes movement to and from the United States. North of El Norte provides an important counterpoint by examining a lesser-known migration route: that taken by contemporary Mexican migrants to Canada.

Paloma Villegas examines the changing landscape of Canadian immigration policy and practice, and the implications for Mexican migrants who lack permanent resident status or citizenship. Her analysis takes into account the context in Mexico, the experience of border crossing, policies to restrict migration, and options available to Mexican migrants to achieve secure status in Canada. Villegas also provides an assessment of the barriers migrants encounter once in Canada, specifically in the labour market, in their creative pursuits, and in accessing health care.

Drawing on interviews, policy documents, media descriptions, and literature from local social service organizations, North of El Norte concludes that migration – and by extension migrant illegalization – is assembled, produced, and negotiated. The comprehensive research in this book sheds light on how individuals and institutions work to illegalize migrants through the production and circulation of discourse such as policies, media accounts, and speeches, and on migrants’ active resistance to these efforts.” From Publisher’s Website.

Of One-Eyed and Toothless Miscreants: Making the Punishment Fit the Crime? Edited by Michael Tonry. Oxford, UK; New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

“Can punishments ever meaningfully be proportioned in severity to the seriousness of the crimes for which they are imposed? A great deal of attention has been paid to the general justification of punishment, but the thorny practical questions have received significantly less. Serious analysis has seldom delved into what makes crimes more or less serious, what makes punishments more or less severe, and how links are to be made between them.

In Of One-eyed and Toothless Miscreants, Michael Tonry has gathered together a distinguished cast of contributors to offer among the first sustained efforts to specify with precision how proportionality can be understood in relation to the implementation of punishment. Each chapter examines scholarly and lay thinking about punishment of people convicted of crimes with particular emphasis on “making the punishment fit the crime.” The contributors challenge the most prevalent current theories and emphasize the need for a shift away from the politicized emotionalism of recent decades. They argue that theories that coincided with mass incarceration and rampant injustice to countless individuals are evolving in ways that better countenance moving toward more humane and thoughtful approaches.

Written by many of the leading thinkers on punishment, this volume dissects previously undeveloped issues related to considerations of deserved punishment and provides new ways to understand both the severities of punishment and the seriousness of crime.” From Publisher’s Website.

Organised Crime and Law Enforcement: A Network Perspective, by David Bright and Chad Whelan. Abingdon, UK: New York: Routledge, 2020.

“Organised Crime and Law Enforcement: A Network Perspective examines organised crime and law enforcement through the conceptual lens of networks. The book takes stock of the many ways in which network theories and concepts, including social network analysis, can apply to studying both organised crime and law enforcement responses to organised crime. It is the first attempt to bring these diverse network perspectives and distinct fields of research together.

The book is organised into two parts. The first part uses network perspectives to advance our understanding of the interconnected social structure of organised criminal groups, to expose their strengths and vulnerabilities, and to illuminate factors that enable such groups to undertake complex criminal activities. The second part uses a network lens to examine the challenges that organised criminal groups present for a wide range of law enforcement agencies, and the utility of network theories and concepts in understanding and informing their responses to organised crime.

Written in a clear and direct style, the book will appeal to scholars and practitioners of criminology, sociology, law enforcement, and all those interested in learning more about theories of organised crime and its relationship with law enforcement.” From Publisher’s Website.

The Oxford Handbook of Freedom of Speech, edited by Adrienne Stone and Frederick Schauer. Oxford UK; New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.

“Freedom of speech is central to the liberal democratic tradition. It touches on every aspect of our social and political system and receives explicit and implicit protection in every modern democratic constitution. It is frequently referred to in public discourse and has inspired a wealth of legal and philosophical literature. The liberty to speak freely is often questioned; what is the relationship between this freedom and other rights and values, how far does this freedom extend, and how is it applied to contemporary challenges?

The Oxford Handbook on Freedom of Speech seeks to answer these and other pressing questions. It provides a critical analysis of the foundations, rationales, and ideas that underpin freedom of speech as a political idea, and as a principle of positive constitutional law. In doing so, it examines freedom of speech in a variety of national and supra-national settings from an international perspective.

Compiled by a team of renowned experts in the field, this handbook features original essays by leading scholars and theorists exploring the history, legal framework and controversies surrounding this tennet of the democratic constitution.” From Publisher’s Website.

Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon, by Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko. Redwood City, CA: Redwood Press, 2021.

“In January 2021, thousands descended on the U.S. Capitol to aid President Donald Trump in combating a shadowy cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles. Two women were among those who died that day. They, like millions of Americans, believed that a mysterious insider known as “Q” is exposing a vast deep-state conspiracy. The QAnon conspiracy theory has ensnared many women, who identify as members of “pastel QAnon,” answering the call to “save the children.”

With Pastels and Pedophiles, Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko explain why the rise of QAnon should not surprise us: believers have been manipulated to follow the baseless conspiracy. The authors track QAnon’s unexpected leap from the darkest corners of the Internet to the filtered glow of yogi-mama Instagram, a frenzy fed by the COVID-19 pandemic that supercharged conspiracy theories and spurred a fresh wave of Q-inspired violence.

Pastels and Pedophiles connects the dots for readers, showing how a conspiracy theory with its roots in centuries-old anti-Semitic hate has adapted to encompass local grievances and has metastasized around the globe—appealing to a wide range of alienated people who feel that something is not quite right in the world around them. While QAnon claims to hate Hollywood, the book demonstrates how much of Q’s mythology is ripped from movie and television plot lines.

Finally, Pastels and Pedophiles lays out what can be done about QAnon’s corrosive effect on society, to bring Q followers out of the rabbit hole and back into the light.” From Publisher’s Website.

Paving the Way: The First American Women Law Professors, by Herma Hill Kay, edited by Patricia A. Caine. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2021.

“When it comes to breaking down barriers for women in the workplace, Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s name speaks volumes for itself—but, as she clarifies in the foreword to this long-awaited book, there are too many trailblazing names we do not know. Herma Hill Kay, former Dean of UC Berkeley School of Law and Ginsburg’s closest professional colleague, wrote Paving the Way to tell the stories of the first fourteen female law professors at ABA- and AALS-accredited law schools in the United States. Kay, who became the fifteenth such professor, labored over the stories of these women in order to provide an essential history of their path for the more than 2,000 women working as law professors today and all of their feminist colleagues.

Because Herma Hill Kay, who died in 2017, was able to obtain so much first-hand information about the fourteen women who preceded her, Paving the Way is filled with details, quiet and loud, of each of their lives and careers from their own perspectives. Kay wraps each story in rich historical context, lest we forget the extraordinarily difficult times in which these women lived. Paving the Way is not just a collection of individual stories of remarkable women but also a well-crafted interweaving of law and society during a historical period when women’s voices were often not heard and sometimes actively muted. The final chapter connects these first fourteen women to the “second wave” of women law professors who achieved tenure-track appointments in the 1960s and 1970s, carrying on the torch and analogous challenges. This is a decidedly feminist project, one that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg advocated for tirelessly and admired publicly in the years before her death.” From Publisher’s Website.

Planet Palm: How Palm Oil Ended Up in Everything – and Endangered the World, by Joselyn C. Zuckerman. New York: The New Press, 2021.

“Over the past few decades, palm oil has seeped into every corner of our lives. Worldwide, palm oil production has nearly doubled in just the last decade: oil-palm plantations now cover an area nearly the size of New Zealand, and some form of the commodity lurks in half the products on U.S. grocery shelves. But the palm oil revolution has been built on stolen land and slave labor; it’s swept away cultures and so devastated the landscapes of Southeast Asia that iconic animals now teeter on the brink of extinction. Fires lit to clear the way for plantations spew carbon emissions to rival those of industrialized nations.

James Beard Award–winning journalist Jocelyn C. Zuckerman spent years traveling the globe, from Liberia to Indonesia, India to Brazil, reporting on the human and environmental impacts of this poorly understood plant. The result is Planet Palm, a riveting account blending history, science, politics, and food as seen through the people whose lives have been upended by this hidden ingredient.

This groundbreaking work of first-rate journalism compels us to examine the connections between the choices we make at the grocery store and a planet under siege.” From Publisher’s Website.

Police Response to Mental Health Calls for Service: Gatekeepers and Street Corner Psychiatrists, by Kayla G. Jachimowski and Jonathon A. Cooper. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020.

“Police Response to Mental Health Calls for Service: Gatekeepers and Street Corner Psychiatrists focuses on closing the gap in literature surrounding police responses to mental health calls for service, with an emphasis on the effect of training and relationships with mental health agencies, in order to better understand the interaction between police officers and individuals with mental health diagnoses. Kayla G. Jachimowski and Jonathon A. Cooper pay close attention to Crisis Intervention Training (CIT) and its impact on how police officers would respond to these calls for service, also examining how the relationships between police, the community, and mental health service providers impact police response. Jachimowski and Cooper argue for the importance of police training about mental health disorders and explore the likelihood of diverting individuals with mental illness from the criminal justice system. Scholars of criminology, sociology, and psychology will find this book particularly useful.” From Publisher’s Website.

Police Street Powers and Criminal Justice: Regulation and Discretion in a Time of Change, by Geoff Pearson and Mike Rowe. London; New York: Hart/Bloomsbury, 2020.

“Police Street Powers and Criminal Justice analyses the utilisation, regulation and legitimacy of police powers. Drawing upon six-years of ethnographic research in two police forces in England, this book uncovers the importance of time and place, supervision and monitoring, local policies and law. Covering a period when the police were under intense scrutiny and subject to austerity measures, the authors contend that the concept of police culture does not help us understand police discretion. They argue that change is a dominant feature of policing and identify fragmented responses to law and policy reform, varying between police stations, across different policing roles, and between senior and frontline ranks.” From Publisher’s Website.

Police Visibility: Privacy, Surveillance, and the False Promise of Body-Worn Cameras, by Bryce Clayton Newell. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2021.

Police Visibility presents empirically grounded research into how police officers experience and manage the information politics of surveillance and visibility generated by the introduction of body cameras into their daily routines and the increasingly common experience of being recorded by civilian bystanders. Newell elucidates how these activities intersect with privacy, free speech, and access to information law and argues that rather than being emancipatory systems of police oversight, body-worn cameras are an evolution in police image work and state surveillance expansion. Throughout the book, he catalogs how surveillance generates information, the control of which creates and facilitates power and potentially fuels state domination. The antidote, he argues, is robust information law and policy that puts the power to monitor and regulate the police squarely in the hands of citizens.” From Publisher’s Website.

Policing China: Street-Level Cops in the Shadow of Protest, by Suzanne E. Scoggins. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021.

“In Policing China, Suzanne E. Scoggins delves into the paradox of China’s self-projection of a strong security state while having a weak police bureaucracy. Assessing the problems of resources, enforcement, and oversight that beset the police, outside of cracking down on political protests, Scoggins finds that the central government and the Ministry of Public Security have prioritized “stability maintenance” (weiwen) to the detriment of nearly every aspect of policing. The result, she argues, is a hollowed out and ineffective police force that struggles to deal with everyday crime.

Using interviews with police officers up and down the hierarchy, as well as station data, news reports, and social media postings, Scoggins probes the challenges faced by ground-level officers and their superiors at the Ministry of Public Security as they attempt to do their jobs in the face of funding limitations, reform challenges, and structural issues. Policing China concludes that despite the social control exerted by China’s powerful bureaucracies, security failures at the street level have undermined Chinese citizens’ trust in the legitimacy of the police and the capabilities of the state.” From Publisher’s Website.

Policing Welfare: Punitive Adversarialism in Public Welfare, by Spencer Headworth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2021.

“Means-tested government assistance in the United States requires recipients to meet certain criteria and continue to maintain their eligibility so that benefits are paid to the “truly needy.” Welfare is regarded with such suspicion in this country that considerable resources are spent policing the boundaries of eligibility, which are delineated by an often confusing and baroque set of rules and regulations. Even minor infractions of the many rules can cause people to be dropped from these programs, and possibly face criminal prosecution. In this book, Spencer Headworth offers the first study of the structure of fraud control in the welfare system by examining the relations between different levels of governmental agencies, from federal to local, and their enforcement practices. Policing Welfare shows how the enforcement regime of welfare has been constructed to further stigmatize those already living in poverty and deepens disparities of class, race, and gender in our society.” From Publisher’s Website.

The Pornification of America: How Raunch Culture is Ruining our Society, by Bernadette Barton. New York: New York University Press, 2021.

“Pictures of half-naked girls and women can seem to litter almost every screen, billboard, and advertisement in America. Pole-dancing studios keep women fit. Men airdrop their dick pics to female passengers on planes and trains. To top it off, the last American President has bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy.”

This pornification of our society is what Bernadette Barton calls “raunch culture.” Barton explores what raunch culture is, why it matters, and how it is ruining America. She exposes how internet porn drives trends in programming, advertising, and social media, and makes its way onto our phones, into our fashion choices, and into our sex lives. From twerking and breast implants, to fake nails and push-up bras, she explores just how much we encounter raunch culture on a daily basis—porn is the new normal.

Drawing on interviews, television shows, movies, and social media, Barton argues that raunch culture matters not because it is sexy, but because it is sexist. She shows how young women are encouraged to be sexy like porn stars, and to be grateful for getting cat-called or receiving unsolicited dick pics. As politicians vote to restrict women’s access to birth control and abortion, The Pornification of America exposes the double standard we attach to women’s sexuality.” From Publisher’s Website.

The Prison Dilemma: To Incarcerate of Rehabilitate? A Controversial Argument, by Bernd Maelicke. 2d rev. ed. Nomen Verlag.

THE GERMAN PRISON SYSTEM – a topic that interests politicians when elections are looming, and the media whenever scandal is involved – is expensive and largely ineffective: over half of the people released from prison re-offend within five years. Locking people up does not rehabilitate them. Instead, the influences of prison subculture prevail. Bernd Maelicke examines the causes of this dilemma, and highlights pathways to the successful social reintegration of offenders. With the “Rehabilitation Agenda 2025”, Bernd Maelicke outlines guidelines and an action plan for concrete and desperate improvement. His credo: “Punishing people is easy, but usually leads nowhere. Showing people a better path and helping them navigate it is difficult, but it’s worth it.” Roughly 50,000 people are released from German prisons each year. Over half of them have committed minor or moderately severe offences, almost one third are dangerous or serious offenders. While the German penal system – an exemplary model for a treatment-based approach – has experienced wide reform over the past decades, re-offending rates remain high. This “revolving door” that is the German penal system costs about 4.5 billion Euros each year. This is the starting point for offender rehabilitation expert Bernd Maelicke. His assumption is that imprisonment is only truly necessary for serious and dangerous offenders. In his view, for most offenders, prisons remain “schools of crime” that do little to change them for the better. The detrimental effects of prison subculture predominate. Drawing on case studies, personal and professional experiences, and empirical data, Bernd Maelicke demonstrates where the shoe still pinches. He outlines innovative strategies and projects that are slowly emerging in Germany, that focus on supporting offenders with their social reintegration more effectively, and that policymakers and practitioners around the world can draw on to better prevent re-offending and protect potential victims.

The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression, by A. Dirk Moses. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021.

“Genocide is not only a problem of mass death, but also of how, as a relatively new idea and law, it organizes and distorts thinking about civilian destruction. Taking the normative perspective of civilian immunity from military attack, A. Dirk Moses argues that the implicit hierarchy of international criminal law, atop which sits genocide as the ‘crime of crimes’, blinds us to other types of humanly caused civilian death, like bombing cities, and the ‘collateral damage’ of missile and drone strikes. Talk of genocide, then, can function ideologically to detract from systematic violence against civilians perpetrated by governments of all types. The Problems of Genocide contends that this violence is the consequence of ‘permanent security’ imperatives: the striving of states, and armed groups seeking to found states, to make themselves invulnerable to threats.” From Publisher’s Website.

Proportionality and Crime Control in Criminal Justice, edited by Emmanouil Billis, Nandor Knust and Jon Petter Rui. Oxford, UK; New York: Hart/Bloomsbury, 2021.

“This edited volume seeks to reassess the old and to analyse and develop novel approaches to the notion of proportionality in criminal matters and the new security architecture. The discourse is not limited to conventional constitutional constellations and standard problems of sentencing in traditional criminal proceedings. Rather, the book offers an interdisciplinary and cross-jurisdictional exploration of highly topical, proportionality-related issues pertinent to penal theory and legal philosophy, criminalisation policies, security and anti-terrorism strategies, alternative types of justice delivery, and supranational enforcement as well as human rights and international criminal and humanitarian law.

In today’s global risk society, with its numerous visible and invisible enemies of the state and the individual, balancing freedom and security has become nothing less than an attempt at untying a Gordian knot. Against this background, the proportionality of measures of crime prevention and repression is unquestionably an issue of utmost importance, which basic research and legal policy in rule-of-law based systems are urgently called to address.

The timely and fascinating contributions in this book, covering jurisdictions from both the common law and the civil law as well as hybrid and international jurisdictions, will appeal to academics, researchers, policy advisers and practitioners working in the areas of national and international criminal law, comparative criminal justice/criminology and legal philosophy as well as constitutional and security law.” From Publisher’s Website.

Race and Riots in Thatcher’s Britain, by Simon Peplow. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2019.

“This powerful and original book locates the anti-police violence that spread across England in 1980-1 within a longer struggle against racism and disadvantage faced by black Britons, which had seen a growth in more militant forms of resistance since the Second World War. It explains these disturbances as ‘collective bargaining by riot’ – attempts to increase political inclusion by this marginalised group. Through case studies of Bristol, Brixton and Manchester, the book explores the actions of community organisations in the aftermath of disorders. Highlighting the political activities of black Britons and the often-problematic reliance upon ‘official’ sources when forming historical narratives, it demonstrates the contested value awarded to public inquiries – contrastingly viewed by black Britons as either a method for increased political participation or simply a governmental diversionary tactic.” From Publisher’s Website.

Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South: African Americans and Law Enforcement in Birmingham, Memphis, and New Orleans, 1920-1945, by Brandon T. Jett. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2021.

“Throughout the Jim Crow era, southern police departments played a vital role in the maintenance of white supremacy. Police targeted African Americans through an array of actions, including violent interactions, unjust arrests, and the enforcement of segregation laws and customs. Scholars have devoted much attention to law enforcement’s use of aggression and brutality as a means of maintaining African American subordination. While these interpretations are vital to the broader understanding of police and minority relations, Black citizens have often come off as powerless in their encounters with law enforcement. Brandon T. Jett’s Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South, by contrast, reveals previously unrecognized efforts by African Americans to use, manage, and exploit policing. In the process, Jett exposes a much more complex relationship, suggesting that while violence or the threat of violence shaped police and minority relations, it did not define all interactions.

Black residents of southern cities repeatedly complained about violent policing strategies and law enforcement’s seeming lack of interest in crimes committed against African Americans. These criticisms notwithstanding, Blacks also voiced a desire for the police to become more involved in their communities to reduce the seemingly intractable problem of crime, much of which resulted from racial discrimination and other structural factors related to Jim Crow. Although the actions of the police were problematic, African Americans nonetheless believed that law enforcement could play a role in reducing crime in their communities. During the first half of the twentieth century, Black citizens repeatedly demanded better policing and engaged in behaviors designed to extract services from law enforcement officers in Black neighborhoods as part of a broader strategy to make their communities safer.

By examining the myriad ways in which African Americans influenced the police to serve the interests of the Black community, Jett adds a new layer to our understanding of race relations in the urban South in the Jim Crow era and contributes to current debates around the relationship between the police and minorities in the United States.” From Publisher’s Website.

Reimagining Black Art and Criminology: A New Criminological Imagination, by Martin Glynn. Bristol, UK: Bristol University Press, 2021.

“It is time to disrupt current criminological discourses which still exclude the perspectives of black scholars.

Through the lens of black art, Martin Glynn explores the relevance black artistic contributions have for understanding crime and justice. Through art forms including black crime fiction, black theatre and black music, this book brings much needed attention to marginalized perspectives within mainstream criminology.

Refining academic and professional understandings of race, racialization and intersectional aspects of crime, this text provides a platform for the contributions to criminology which are currently rendered invisible.” From Publisher’s Website.

Reinventing Licentiousness: Pornography and Modern China, by Y. Yvon Wang. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021.

“Reinventing Licentiousness navigates an overlooked history of representation during the transition from the Qing Empire to the Chinese Republic—a time when older, hierarchical notions of licentiousness were overlaid by a new, pornographic regime.

Y. Yvon Wang draws on previously untapped archives—ranging from police archives and surveys to ephemeral texts and pictures—to argue that pornography in China represents a unique configuration of power and desire that both reflects and shapes historical processes. On the one hand, since the late imperial period, pornography has democratized pleasure in China and opened up new possibilities of imagining desire. On the other, ongoing controversies over its definition and control show how the regulatory ideas of premodern cultural politics and the popular products of early modern cultural markets have contoured the globalized world.

Reinventing Licentiousness emphasizes the material factors, particularly at the grassroots level of consumption and trade, that governed “proper” sexual desire and led to ideological shifts around the definition of pornography. By linking the past to the present and beyond, Wang’s social and intellectual history showcases circulated pornographic material as a motor for cultural change. The result is an astonishing foray into what historicizing pornography can mean for our understandings of desire, legitimacy, capitalism, and culture.” From Publisher’s Website.

Religious Hatred: Prejudice, Islamophobia, and Antisemitism in Global Context, by Paul Hedges. London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021.

“Why does religion inspire hatred? Why do people in one religion sometimes hate people of another religion, and also why do some religions inspire hatred from others?

This book shows how scholarly studies of prejudice, identity formation, and genocide studies can shed light on global examples of religious hatred. The book is divided into four parts, focusing respectively on: theories of prejudice and violence; historical developments of antisemitism, Islamophobia, and race; contemporary Western antisemitism and Islamophobia; and, prejudices beyond the West in the Islamic, Buddhist, and Hindu traditions. Each part ends with a special focus section.

Key features include:

– A compelling synthesis of theories of prejudice, identity, and hatred to explain Islamophobia and antisemitism.

– An innovative theory of human violence and genocide which explains the link to prejudice.

– Case studies of both Western antisemitism and Islamophobia in history and today, alongside global studies of Islamic antisemitism and Hindu and Buddhist Islamophobia

– Integrates discussion of race and racialisation as aspects of Islamophobic and antisemitic prejudice in relation to their framing in religious discourses.

– Accessible for general readers and students, it can be employed as a textbook for students or read with benefit by scholars for its novel synthesis and theories.

The book focuses on antisemitism and Islamophobia, both in the West and beyond, including examples of prejudices and hatred in the Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist traditions. Drawing on examples from Europe, North America, MENA, South and Southeast Asia, and Africa, Paul Hedges points to common patterns, while identifying the specifics of local context.

Religious Hatred is an essential guide for understanding the historical origins of religious hatred, the manifestations of this hatred across diverse religious and cultural contexts, and the strategies employed by activists and peacemakers to overcome this hatred.” From Publisher’s Website.

Reverberations of Racial Violence: Critical Reflections on the History of the Border, edited by Sonia Hernandez and John Moran Gonzalez. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2021.

“Between 1910 and 1920, thousands of Mexican Americans and Mexican nationals were killed along the Texas border. The killers included strangers and neighbors, vigilantes and law enforcement officers—in particular, Texas Rangers. Despite a 1919 investigation of the state-sanctioned violence, no one in authority was ever held responsible.

Reverberations of Racial Violence gathers fourteen essays on this dark chapter in American history. Contributors explore the impact of civil rights advocates, such as José Tomás Canales, the sole Mexican-American representative in the Texas State Legislature between 1905 and 1921. The investigation he spearheaded emerges as a historical touchstone, one in which witnesses testified in detail to the extrajudicial killings carried out by state agents. Other chapters situate anti-Mexican racism in the context of the era’s rampant and more fully documented violence against African Americans. Contributors also address the roles of women in responding to the violence, as well as the many ways in which the killings have continued to weigh on communities of color in Texas. Taken together, the essays provide an opportunity to move beyond the more standard Black-white paradigm in reflecting on the broad history of American nation-making, the nation’s rampant racial violence, and civil rights activism.” From Publisher’s Website.

Right Here, Right Now: Life Stories from America’s Death Row, edited by Lynden Harris. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021.

“Upon receiving his execution date, one of the thousands of men living on death row in the United States had an epiphany: “All there ever is, is this moment. You, me, all of us, right here, right now, this minute, that’s love.” Right Here, Right Now collects the powerful, first-person stories of dozens of men on death rows across the country. From childhood experiences living with poverty, hunger, and violence to mental illness and police misconduct to coming to terms with their executions, these men outline their struggle to maintain their connection to society and sustain the humanity that incarceration and its daily insults attempt to extinguish. By offering their hopes, dreams, aspirations, fears, failures, and wounds, the men challenge us to reconsider whether our current justice system offers actual justice or simply perpetuates the social injustices that obscure our shared humanity.” From Publisher’s Website.

The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America, by Carol Anderson. London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021.

“Historian Carol Anderson powerfully illuminates the history and impact of the Second Amendment, how it was designed, and how it has consistently been constructed to keep African Americans powerless and vulnerable. Through compelling historical narrative merging into the unfolding events of today, Anderson’s penetrating investigation shows that the Second Amendment is not about guns but about anti-Blackness, shedding shocking new light on another dimension of racism in America.” From Publisher’s Website.

Sensory Penalties: Exploring the Senses in Spaces of Punishment and Social Control, by Kate Herrity, Bethany E. Schmidt; Jason Warr. Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing, 2021.

“Sensory Penalities reflects an explosion in explorations of the sensory and disrupts conventional expectations of both form and focus by expanding anthropological practices and craft into the field of criminology and criminological research.

In providing accounts of physical/sensorial experiences within sites of surveillance and control, the authors in this edited collection bring elements of research experiences (often absent from existing work) to the fore; the impressions and sensual experiences which remain forever in field notes. In so doing they carve out spaces to consider these places and the ways in which they are theorised anew.

The book aims to explore what sensory aspects of experience mean to those engaged in such research, and how they can shape our criminological thinking. What are the sensory textures of these experiences? What do they tell us? How do we communicate them? Finally, what does consideration of these elements tell us about penality?

This timely volume challenges and remakes assumptions about what criminology is and should be; more accurately reflecting the post-disciplinary nature of the field.” From Publisher’s Website.

Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right, by Anne Nelson. London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021.

“In 1981, emboldened by Ronald Reagan’s election, a group of some fifty Republican operatives, evangelicals, oil barons, and gun lobbyists met in a Washington suburb to coordinate their attack on civil liberties and the social safety net. They called their coalition the Council for National Policy. Over four decades, this elite club has become a strategic nerve center for channeling money and mobilizing votes. Its secretive membership rolls represent a high-powered roster of fundamentalists, oligarchs, and their allies, from Oliver North, Ed Meese, and Tim LaHaye in the Council’s early days to Kellyanne Conway, Ralph Reed, Tony Perkins, and the DeVos and Mercer families today.

In Shadow Network, award-winning author and media analyst Anne Nelson chronicles this astonishing history and illuminates the coalition’s key figures and their tactics. She traces how the collapse of local journalism laid the foundation for the Council for National Policy’s information war and listens in on the hardline broadcasting its members control. And she reveals how the group has collaborated with the Koch brothers to outfit Radical Right organizations with state-of-the-art apps and a shared pool of captured voter data – outmaneuvering the Democratic Party in a digital arms race whose result has yet to be decided.

In a time of stark and growing threats to our most valued institutions and democratic freedoms, Shadow Network is essential reading.” From Publisher’s Website.

Slut-Shaming, Whorephobia, and the Unfinished Sexual Revolution, by Meredith Ralston. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021.

The sexual revolution is unfinished. A sexual double standard between men and women still exists, and society continues to punish bad girls and reward good ones. Until we eliminate good-girl privilege and bad-girl stigma, women will not be fully free to embrace their sexuality.

In Slut-Shaming, Whorephobia, and the Unfinished Sexual Revolution Meredith Ralston looks at the common denominators between the #MeToo movement, the myths of rape culture, and the pleasure gap between men and women to reveal the ways that sexually liberated women threaten the patriarchy. Weaving in history, pop culture, philosophy, interviews with sex workers, and personal anecdotes, Ralston shows how women cannot achieve sexual equality until the sexual double standard and good girl/bad girl binary are eliminated and women viewed by society as “whores” are destigmatized. Illustrating how women’s sexuality is policed by both men and women, she argues that women must be allowed the same personal autonomy as men: the freedom to make sexual decisions for themselves, to obtain orgasm equality, and to insist on their own sexual pleasure.

Dispelling the myth that all sex workers are victims and all clients are violent, Slut-Shaming, Whorephobia, and the Unfinished Sexual Revolution calls out Western society’s hypocrisy about sex and shows how stigma and the marginalization of sex workers harms all women.

Southern Scoundrels: Grifters and Graft in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Jeff Forret and Bruce E. Baker. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021.

“The history of capitalist development in the United States is long, uneven, and overwhelmingly focused on the North. Macroeconomic studies of the South have primarily emphasized the role of the cotton economy in global trading networks. Until now, few in-depth scholarly works have attempted to explain how capitalism in the South took root and functioned in all of its diverse—and duplicitous—forms. Southern Scoundrels explores the lesser-known aspects of the emergence of capitalism in the region: the shady and unscrupulous peddlers, preachers, slave traders, war profiteers, thieves, and marginal men who seized available opportunities to get ahead and, in doing so, left their mark on the southern economy.

Eschewing conventional economic theory, this volume features narrative storytelling as engaging and seductive as the cast of shifty characters under examination. Contributors cover the chronological sweep of the nineteenth-century South, from the antebellum era through the tumultuous and chaotic Civil War years, and into Reconstruction and beyond. The geographic scope is equally broad, with essays encompassing the Chesapeake, South Carolina, the Lower Mississippi Valley, Texas, Missouri, and Appalachia. These essays offer a series of social histories on the nineteenth-century southern economy and the changes wrought by capitalist transformation. Tracing that story through the kinds of oily individuals who made it happen, Southern Scoundrels provides fascinating insights into the region’s hucksters and its history.” From Publisher’s Website.

Spiritual Entrepreneurs: Florida’s Faith-Based Prisons and the American Carceral State, by Brad Stoddard. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2021.

The overall rate of incarceration in the United States has been on the rise since 1970s, skyrocketing during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, and recently reaching unprecedented highs. Looking for innovative solutions to the crises produced by gigantic prison populations, Florida’s Department of Corrections claims to have found a partial remedy in the form of faith and character-based correctional institutions (FCBIs). While claiming to be open to all religious traditions, FCBIs are almost always run by Protestants situated within the politics of the Christian right. The religious programming is typically run by the incarcerated along with volunteers from outside the prison. Stoddard takes the reader deep inside FCBIs, analyzing the subtle meanings and difficult choices with which the incarcerated, prison administrators, staff, and chaplains grapple every day. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research and historical analysis, Brad Stoddard argues that FCBIs build on and demonstrate the compatibility of conservative Christian politics and neoliberal economics.

Even without authoritative data on whether FCBIs are assisting rehabilitation and reducing recidivism rates, similar programs are appearing across the nation—only Iowa has declared them illegal under non-establishment-of-religion statutes. Exposing the intricate connections among incarceration, neoliberal economics, and religious freedom, Stoddard makes a timely contribution to debates about religion’s role in American society.´ From Publisher’s Website.

Theorizing Criminality and Policing in the Digital Media Age, by Julie B. Weist. London; New York: Emerald Publishing, 2021.

“Sponsored by the Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology section of the American Sociological Association (CITAMS), this volume in Emerald Studies in Media and Communications features social science research on criminality, policing, and mass media in the digital age. Chapters offer empirically supported studies that expand on knowledge about new possibilities for crime and policing, representations of criminality via digital media, and methodological considerations for contemporary studies of crime and media.

Criminality, policing, and mass media are enduring topics in studies of the social world, and scholarly advances in these areas are particularly pertinent in times of social and cultural change. The digital revolution that began in post-industrial societies has affected, to varying extents, most nations in the world, introducing new opportunities for crime commission and law enforcement, transforming social structures and organization, and altering norms and practices of social interaction. Each chapter offers empirically supported insights into the new and evolving landscape of criminality and policing. Scholars address emerging patterns and practices such as technologically mediated intimate partner violence, digitally altered pornography and its consequences, and algorithm-supported methods of policing; representations of criminals and law enforcement in international news and entertainment media; and research methods for studying crime and media in a changing world.” From Publisher’s Website.

Terror to the Wicked: America’s First Trial by Jury That Enabled a War and Helped to Form a Nation, by Tobey Pearl. New York: Pantheon Books, 2021.

“A little-known moment in colonial history that changed the course of America’s future. A riveting account of a brutal killing, an all-out manhunt, and the first murder trial in America, set against the backdrop of the Pequot War (between the Pequot tribe and the colonists of Massachusetts Bay) that ended this two-year war and brought about a peace that allowed the colonies to become a nation.

The year: 1638. The setting: Providence, near Plymouth Colony. A young Nipmuc tribesman returning home from trading beaver pelts is fatally stabbed in a robbery in the woods near Plymouth Colony by a vicious white runaway indentured servant. The tribesman, fighting for his life, is able with his final breaths to reveal the details of the attack to Providence’s governor, Roger Williams. A frantic manhunt by the fledgling government ensues to capture the killer and his gang, now the most hunted men in the New World.

With their capture, the two-year-old Plymouth Colony faces overnight its first trial—a murder trial—with Plymouth’s governor presiding as judge and prosecutor, interviewing witnesses and defendants alike, and Myles Standish, Plymouth Colony authority, as overseer of the courtroom, his sidearm at the ready. The jury—Plymouth colonists, New England farmers (“a rude and ignorant sorte,” as described by former governor William Bradford)—white, male, picked from a total population of five hundred and fifty, knows from past persecutions the horrors of a society without a jury system. Would they be tempted to protect their own—including a cold-blooded murderer who was also a Pequot War veteran—over the life of a tribesman who had fought in a war allied against them?” From Publisher’s Website.

To Poison a Nation: The Murder of Robert Charles and the Rise of Jim Crow Policing in America, by Andrew Baker. New York: The New Press, 2021.

“On a steamy Monday evening in 1900, New Orleans police officers confronted a Black man named Robert Charles as he sat on a doorstep in a working-class neighborhood where racial tensions were running high. What happened next would trigger the largest manhunt in the city’s history, while white mobs took to the streets, attacking and murdering innocent Black residents during three days of bloody rioting. Finally cornered, Charles exchanged gunfire with the police in a spectacular gun battle witnessed by thousands.

Building outward from these dramatic events, To Poison a Nation connects one city’s troubled past to the modern crisis of white supremacy and police brutality. Historian Andrew Baker immerses readers in a boisterous world of disgruntled laborers, crooked machine bosses, scheming businessmen, and the Black radical who tossed a flaming torch into the powder keg. Baker recreates a city that was home to the nation’s largest African American community, a place where racial antagonism was hardly a foregone conclusion—but which ultimately became the crucible of a novel form of racialized violence: modern policing.

A major new work of history, To Poison a Nation reveals disturbing connections between the Jim Crow past and police violence in our own times.” From Publisher’s Website.

Treatment for Crime: Neurointerventions in Criminal Justice, edited by David Birks and Thomas Douglas. Oxford, UK; New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.

“Crime-preventing neurointerventions (CPNs) are increasingly being used or advocated for crime prevention. There is increasing use of testosterone-lowering agents to prevent recidivism in sexual offenders, and strong political and scientific interest in developing pharmaceutical treatments for psychopathy and anti-social behaviour. Recent developments suggest that we may ultimately have at our disposal a range of drugs capable of suppressing violent aggression, and it is not difficult to imagine possible applications of such drugs in crime prevention. But should neurointerventions be used in crime prevention, and may the state ever permissibly impose CPNs as part of the criminal justice process? It is widely thought that preventing recidivism is one of the aims of criminal justice, yet existing means of pursuing this aim are often poorly effective, restrictive of basic freedoms, and harmful. Incarceration, for example, tends to be disruptive of personal relationships and careers, detrimental to physical and mental health, highly restrictive of freedom of movement and association, and rarely more than modestly effective at preventing recidivism. Neurointerventions hold the promise of preventing recidivism in ways that are more effective and more humane, but the use of CPNs in criminal justice raises several ethical concerns. CPNs could be highly intrusive and may threaten fundamental human values, such as bodily integrity and freedom of thought, and humanity has a track record of misguided, harmful, and unwarrantedly coercive use of neurotechnological ‘solutions’ to criminality. This collection brings together original contributions from emerging scholars and internationally renowned moral and political philosophers to address these issues.” From Publisher’s Website.

The Trial of Jeanne Catherine: Infanticide in Early Modern Geneva, by Sara Beam. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021.

“In 1686 in Geneva, a single mother named Jeanne Catherine Thomasset is charged with poisoning two young children: her own illegitimate daughter and the son of a rural wet nurse. So begins a harrowing criminal trial during which authorities interrogate Jeanne Catherine several times, sometimes with torture, to determine the truth.

The Trial of Jeanne Catherine is a suspenseful historical mystery that offers students the opportunity to learn about motherhood, child rearing, gender, religion, local politics, and the practice of criminal justice in early modern Europe. This edition provides the complete trial transcript as well as the deliberations of the Genevan authorities and relevant correspondence.” From Publisher’s Website.

Tulsa 1921: Reporting a Massacre, by Randy Krehbiel. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2021.

“In 1921 Tulsa’s Greenwood District, known then as the nation’s “Black Wall Street,” was one of the most prosperous African American communities in the United States. But on May 31 of that year, a white mob, inflamed by rumors that a young Black man had attempted to rape a white teenage girl, invaded Greenwood. By the end of the following day, thousands of homes and businesses lay in ashes, and perhaps as many as three hundred people were dead.

Tulsa, 1921 shines new light into the shadows that have long been cast over this extraordinary instance of racial violence. With the clarity and descriptive power of a veteran journalist, author Randy Krehbiel digs deep into the events and their aftermath and investigates decades-old questions about the local culture at the root of what one writer has called a white-led pogrom.

Krehbiel analyzes local newspaper accounts in an unprecedented effort to gain insight into the minds of contemporary Tulsans. In the process he considers how the Tulsa World, the Tulsa Tribune, and other publications contributed to the circumstances that led to the disaster and helped solidify enduring white justifications for it. Some historians have dismissed local newspapers as too biased to be of value for an honest account, but by contextualizing their reports, Krehbiel renders Tulsa’s papers an invaluable resource, highlighting the influence of news media on our actions in the present and our memories of the past.

The Tulsa Massacre was a result of racial animosity and mistrust within a culture of political and economic corruption. In its wake, Black Tulsans were denied redress and even the right to rebuild on their own property, yet they ultimately prevailed and even prospered despite systemic racism and the rise during the 1920s of the second Ku Klux Klan. As Krehbiel considers the context and consequences of the violence and devastation, he asks, Has the city—indeed, the nation—exorcised the prejudices that led to this tragedy?” From Publisher’s Website.

Unexpected Subjects: Intimate Partner Violence, Testimony, and the Law, by Alessandra Gribaldo. HAU Books, 2021.

“Unexpected Subjects is an ethnography of the encounter between women’s words and the demands of the law in the context of adjudications on intimate partner violence. A study of institutional devices, it focuses on women’s practices of resistance and the elicitation of intelligible subjectivities. Using Italy as an illustrative case, Alessandra Gribaldo explores the problematic encounter between the need to speak, the entanglement of violence and intimacy, and the way the law approaches domestic violence. On this basis she advances theoretical reflections on questions of evidence, persuasion, and testimony, and their implications for ethnographic theory. Gribaldo analyzes dynamics that create the victim-subject, shedding light on how the Italian legal system reproduces broader conditions of violence against women. This book will be of great interest to all social scientists concerned with gender and the law.” From Publisher’s Website.

Vice Patrol: Cops, Courts, and the Struggle Over Urban Gay Life Before Stonewall, by Anna Lvorsky. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021.

“In the mid-twentieth century, gay life flourished in American cities even as the state repression of queer communities reached its peak. Liquor investigators infiltrated and shut down gay-friendly bars. Plainclothes decoys enticed men in parks and clubs. Vice officers surveilled public bathrooms through peepholes and two-way mirrors.

In Vice Patrol, Anna Lvovsky chronicles this painful story, tracing the tactics used to criminalize, profile, and suppress gay life from the 1930s through the 1960s, and the surprising controversies those tactics often inspired in court. Lvovsky shows that the vice squads’ campaigns stood at the center of live debates about not only the law’s treatment of queer people, but also the limits of ethical policing, the authority of experts, and the nature of sexual difference itself—debates that had often unexpected effects on the gay community’s rights and freedoms. Examining those battles, Vice Patrol enriches understandings of the regulation of queer life in the twentieth century and disputes about police power that continue today.” From Publisher’s Website.

Voices of the Border: Testimonies of Migration, Deportation, and Asylum, edited by Tobin Hansen, Maria Engracia Robles Robles. ME. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2021.

“Migrants, refugees, and deportees live through harrowing situations, yet their personal stories are often ignored. While politicians and commentators mischaracterize and demonize, herald border crises, and speculate about who people are and how they live, the actual memories of migrants are rarely shared. In the tradition of oral storytelling, Voices of the Border reproduces the stories migrants have told, offering a window onto both individual and shared experiences of crossing the US―Mexico border.

This collection emerged from interviews conducted by the Kino Border Initiative (KBI), a Jesuit organization that provides humanitarian assistance and advocates for migrants. Based in Nogales, Arizona, and Nogales, Sonora ― twin border cities connected by shared histories, geographies, economies, and cultures ― the editors and their colleagues documented migrants’ testimonios to amplify their voices. These personal narratives of lived experiences, presented in the original Spanish with English translations, bring us closer to these individuals’ strength, love, and courage in the face of hardship and injustice. Short introductions written by migrant advocates, humanitarian workers, religious leaders, and scholars provide additional context at the beginning of each chapter.

These powerful stories help readers better understand migrants’ experiences, as well as the consequences of public policy for their community.” From Publisher’s Website.

The Walls Within: The Politics of Immigration in Modern America, by Sarah R. Coleman. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021.

“The 1965 Hart-Celler Act transformed the American immigration system by abolishing national quotas in favor of a seemingly egalitarian approach. But subsequent demographic shifts resulted in a backlash over the social contract and the rights of citizens versus noncitizens. In The Walls Within, Sarah Coleman explores those political clashes, focusing not on attempts to stop immigration at the border, but on efforts to limit immigrants’ rights within the United States through domestic policy. Drawing on new materials from the Carter, Reagan, and Clinton administrations, and immigration and civil rights organizations, Coleman exposes how the politics of immigration control has undermined the idea of citizenship for all.

Coleman shows that immigration politics was not just about building or tearing down walls, but about employer sanctions, access to schools, welfare, and the role of local authorities in implementing policies. In the years after 1965, a rising restrictionist movement sought to marginalize immigrants in realms like public education and the labor market. Yet throughout the 1970s and 1980s, restrictionists faced countervailing forces committed to an expansive notion of immigrants’ rights. In the 1990s, with national politics gridlocked, anti-immigrant groups turned to statehouses to enact their agenda. Achieving strength at the local level, conservatives supporting immigration restriction actually acquired more influence under the Clinton presidency than even during the so-called Reagan revolution, resulting in dire consequences for millions of immigrants.

Revealing the roots behind much of today’s nativist sentiment, The Walls Within examines debates about who is entitled to the American dream, and how such dreams can be subverted for those already calling the country home,” From Publisher’s Website.

Warsaw Ghetto Police: The Jewish Order Service During the Nazi Occupation, by Katarzyna Person. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021.

“Person tracks the everyday life of policemen as their involvement with the horrors of ghetto life gradually increased. Facing and engaging with brutality, corruption, and the degradation and humiliation of their own people, these policemen found it virtually impossible to exercise individual agency. While some saw the Jewish police as fellow victims, others viewed them as a more dangerous threat than the German occupation authorities; both were held responsible for the destruction of a historically important and thriving community. Person emphasizes the complexity of the situation, the policemen’s place in the network of social life in the ghetto, and the difficulty behind the choices that they made. By placing the actions of the Jewish Order Service in historical context, she explores both the decisions that its members were forced to make and the consequences of those actions.

Featuring testimonies of members of the Jewish Order Service, and of others who could see them as they themselves could not, Warsaw Ghetto Police brings these impossible situations to life. It also demonstrates how a community chooses to remember those whose allegiances did not seem clear.” From Publisher’s Website.

We Are Bellingcat: Global Crime, Online Sleuths, and the Bold Future of News, by Eliot Higgins. London: New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021.

In 2018, Russian exile Sergei Skripal and his daughter were nearly killed in an audacious poisoning attempt in Salisbury, England. Soon, the identity of one of the suspects was revealed: he was a Russian spy. This huge investigative coup wasn’t pulled off by an intelligence agency or a traditional news outlet. Instead, the scoop came from Bellingcat, the open-source investigative team that is redefining the way we think about news, politics, and the digital future.

We Are Bellingcat tells the inspiring story of how a college dropout pioneered a new category of reporting and galvanized citizen journalists-working together from their computer screens around the globe-to crack major cases, at a time when fact-based journalism is under assault from authoritarian forces. Founder Eliot Higgins introduces readers to the tools Bellingcat investigators use, tools available to anyone, from software that helps you pinpoint the location of an image, to an app that can nail down the time that photo was taken. This book digs deep into some of Bellingcat’s most important investigations-the downing of flight MH17 over Ukraine, Assad’s use of chemical weapons in Syria, the identities of alt-right protestors in Charlottesville-with the drama and gripping detail of a spy novel.

When Machines Can Be Judge, Jury, and Executioner: Justice in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, by Katherine B. Forrest. Singapore: World Scientific, 2021.

“This book explores justice in the age of artificial intelligence. It argues that current AI tools used in connection with liberty decisions are based on utilitarian frameworks of justice and inconsistent with individual fairness reflected in the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence. It uses AI risk assessment tools and lethal autonomous weapons as examples of how AI influences liberty decisions. The algorithmic design of AI risk assessment tools can and does embed human biases. Designers and users of these AI tools have allowed some degree of compromise to exist between accuracy and individual fairness.

Written by a former federal judge who lectures widely and frequently on AI and the justice system, this book is the first comprehensive presentation of the theoretical framework of AI tools in the criminal justice system and lethal autonomous weapons utilized in decision-making. The book then provides a comprehensive explanation as to why, tracing the evolution of the debate regarding racial and other biases embedded in such tools. No other book delves as comprehensively into the theory and practice of AI risk assessment tools.” From Publisher’s Website.

Women, Film, and Law: Cinematic Representations of Female Incarceration by Suzanne Bouclin. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 2021.

“Women, Film, and Law convincingly argues that popular fictional depictions of women’s imprisonment can illuminate the multiple forms of marginalization, social exclusion, and oppression experienced by criminalized women. While entertainment and profit constitute the driving force behind popular representations of women in correctional facilities, the creative influence of film and television also generates legal meaning. The women-in-prison (WIP) genre can leave viewers feeling both empathetic toward the women portrayed in these films and troubled about the crimes for which they find themselves incarcerated.

Focusing on five exemplary WIP films and a television series – Ann Vickers, Caged, Caged Heat, Stranger Inside, Civil Brand, and Orange Is the New Black – Women, Film, and Law asks how fictional representations explore, shape, and refine beliefs about women who are incarcerated. WIP films grapple with women’s liberation and subjugation, sexuality and sexual identities, forbidden desires, and physical and emotional imprisonment. They are also rich material for critical legal readings of the construction of the “female criminal” and the offences for which stock characters are convicted. From melodrama to exploitation, and from theatre screenings to on-demand film, television programs, and music videos, these media bring into view the legal, economic, and political structures that criminalize women differently from men, and that target those women who are already at the margins of society.

This work will start new conversations among film and cultural studies scholars, and students and scholars of law and legal studies, particularly those working in law and film. Readers interested in questions of governance, the regulation of women, and social exclusion will also find it engaging.” From Publisher’s Website.

Women, Intimate Partner Violence, and the Law, by Heather Douglas. Oxford, UK; New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.

“Every year, millions of women across the world turn to the law to help them live free from intimate partner violence. They engage with child protection services and police and apply for civil protection orders. They seek family court orders to keep their children safe from violent fathers, and take special visa pathways to avoid deportation following their separation from an abuser. Women are often driven to interact with the law to counteract their abuser’s myriad legal applications against them. While separation may seem like a solution, often the abuse just gets worse.

Countless women who have experienced intimate partner violence are enmeshed in overlapping, complex, and often inconsistent legal processes. They have both fleeting and longer-term connections with the legal system. Women, Intimate Partner Violence, and the Law explores how women from many different backgrounds interact with the law in response to intimate partner violence, over time. Drawing on their experiences of seeking help from the law, this book highlights the many failures of the legal system to provide safety for women and their children. The women’s stories show how abusers often harness aspects of the legal process to continue their abuse. Heather Douglas reveals women’s complex experiences of using law as a response to intimate partner violence.

Douglas interviewed women three times over three years to reveal their journey through the legal process. On occasion, the legal system allowed some women closure. However, circular and unexpected outcomes were a common experience. The resulting book showcases the level of endurance, tenacity, and patience it takes women to seek help and receive protection through law. This book shows how the legal system is failing too often to keep women and their children safe and how it might do better.” From Publisher’s Website.

The World for Sale: Money, Power, and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources, by Javier Blas and Jack Farchy. Oxford, UK; New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.

“The World for Sale tells the story of the modern-day commodity traders, largely unknown to the public. Commodity traders are the last swashbucklers of global capitalism: willing to do businesses where other companies don’t dare set foot, thriving through a mixture of ruthlessness and personal charm – and often shaping global politics, from Cuba to Iraq, and from Russia to Libya.

The book profiles companies like Glencore, which emerged from the shadow of its notorious founder Marc Rich, a long-time fugitive from US justice, to become a blue-chip stock, and Cargill, the 153-year-old agricultural trading house whose family of American shareholders contains 14 billionaires – more than any other family in the world. It also shows how commodity traders play a critical role in modern finance, facilitating the flows of raw materials that keep the world’s populations fed, its factories supplied, and its ships, planes and automobiles fuelled.

Benefiting from three decades of reporting from nearly 100 countries, including tens of thousands of pages of previously unpublished financial and legal documents and interviews with more than one hundred former and current executives, the book sheds unprecedented light onto an industry that has long operated in the shadows. ” From Publisher’s Website.

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