“The criminal justice system in America does not work, and, from the perspective of current criminological thought, no ideas exist for how to truly fix it. The fault lies not with criminology as a discourse, but with us as individuals. We must, together, address three fundamental questions regarding our capacity and willingness to make a justice system of which we would be proud to pass off to our children. Specifically, we must decide (1) whether or not we are permanently saddled with a hobbling justice system; (2) if we are not inextricably bound to brokenness, whether we are brave enough to strike out for the undiscovered country; and (3) if we have the ability to embrace love despite the vulnerability it imposes. Specifically, each of us must find within ourselves the capacity to bravely love, without qualification, ourselves, each other, and our world.

The purpose of this work is to discover what justice would look like were it predicated on love. Sacred sources, including Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism, along with the thought of scholars like Erich Fromm, Karl Marx, Simone Weil, and Paolo Freire, are examined in detail for insights into the nature of love. Space is devoted to an attempt to understand why American justice practice is so broken despite the noble work of so many. The last two chapters offer both a criminology of love and a sketch of a criminal justice system predicated on love.” From Publisher’s website.

“The third edition of America’s Experiment with Capital Punishment has been expanded and updated to include several important developments since the publication of the second edition in 2003. New evidence is presented about the incidence of wrongful convictions, racial and geographical disparities in capital charging and sentencing practices, deterrence, trends in public opinion, jury decision-making, how the capital punishment process affects the families of both murder victims and offenders, the conditions and consequences of death row incarceration, the financial costs of capital punishment, executive clemency, and many other issues. Renewed attention is given to execution methods (focusing on lethal injection), capital punishment for persons with intellectual disabilities, and other matters of significance. Legal developments also are chronicled, including trends in the Supreme Court’s interpretation and application of the “evolving standards of decency” and related Eighth Amendment principles, the prohibition against executing juvenile offenders, significant changes in federal habeas corpus policies, and the repeal of death-penalty statutes in several states. New chapters have been added to address the historical evolution of capital punishment (John Bessler), and the death penalty for persons with mental disabilities (Christopher Slobogin). Several additional authors have joined to produce the updated chapters.

The book’s twenty-six chapters critically analyze the history, politics, law, empirical evidence, and principled underpinnings of the contemporary debate about the death penalty in America. They also assess likely future trends in capital punishment law and practice. Written by the country’s leading legal and social science scholars, the chapters collectively represent the most comprehensive and illuminating treatment of death penalty issues presently available in a single volume.” From Publisher’s website.

“Since the mid-1990s, the fast-growing suburb of Amherst, NY has been voted by numerous publications as one of the safest places to live in America. Yet, like many of America’s seemingly idyllic suburbs, Amherst is by no means without crime—especially when it comes to adolescents. In America’s Safest City, noted juvenile justice scholar Simon I. Singer uses the types of delinquency seen in Amherst as a case study illuminating the roots of juvenile offending and deviance in modern society. If we are to understand delinquency, Singer argues, we must understand it not just in impoverished areas, but in affluent ones as well.

Drawing on ethnographic work, interviews with troubled youth, parents and service providers, and extensive surveys of teenage residents in Amherst, the book illustrates how a suburban environment is able to provide its youth with opportunities to avoid frequent delinquencies. Singer compares the most delinquent teens he surveys with the least delinquent, analyzing the circumstances that did or did not lead them to deviance and the ways in which they confront their personal difficulties, societal discontents, and serious troubles. Adolescents, parents, teachers, coaches and officials, he concludes, are able in this suburban setting to recognize teens’ need for ongoing sources of trust, empathy, and identity in a multitude of social settings, allowing them to become what Singer terms ‘relationally modern’ individuals better equipped to deal with the trials and tribulations of modern life. A unique and comprehensive study, America’s Safest City is a major new addition to scholarship on juveniles and crime in America.” From Publisher’s website.

“Having gained unique access to California prisoners and corrections officials and to thousands of prisoners’ written grievances and institutional responses, Kitty Calavita and Valerie Jenness take us inside one of the most significant, yet largely invisible, institutions in the United States. Drawing on sometimes startlingly candid interviews with prisoners and prison staff, as well as on official records, the authors walk us through the byzantine grievance process, which begins with prisoners filing claims and ends after four levels of review, with corrections officials usually denying requests for remedies. Appealing to Justice is both an unprecedented study of disputing in an extremely asymmetrical setting and a rare glimpse of daily life inside this most closed of institutions. Quoting extensively from their interviews with prisoners and officials, the authors give voice to those who are almost never heard from. These voices unsettle conventional wisdoms within the sociological literature—for example, about the reluctance of vulnerable and/or stigmatized populations to name injuries and file claims, and about the relentlessly adversarial subjectivities of prisoners and correctional officials—and they do so with striking poignancy. Ultimately, Appealing to Justice reveals a system fraught with impediments and dilemmas, which delivers neither justice, nor efficiency, nor constitutional conditions of confinement.” From Publisher’s website.

“Remarkably little has been written about the theory and practice of applied police research, despite growing demand for evidence in crime prevention. Designed to fill this gap, this book offers a valuable new resource. It contains a carefully curated selection of contributions from some of the world’s leading applied police researchers. Together, the authors have almost 300 years of relevant experience across three continents.

The volume contains both practical everyday advice and calls for more fundamental change in how police research is created, consumed and applied. It covers diverse topics, including the art of effective collaborations, the interaction between policing, academia and policy, the interplay between theory and practice and managing ethical dilemmas. This book will interest a broad and international audience from academics and students, to police management, officers and trainees, to policymakers and research funders.” From Publisher’s website.

“The ‘punitive turn’ has brought about new ways of thinking about geography and the state, and has highlighted spaces of incarceration as a new terrain for exploration by geographers. Carceral geography offers a geographical perspective on incarceration, and this volume accordingly tracks the ideas, practices and engagements that have shaped the development of this new and vibrant subdiscipline, and scopes out future research directions. By conveying a sense of the debates, directions, and threads within the field of carceral geography, it traces the inner workings of this dynamic field, its synergies with criminology and prison sociology, and its likely future trajectories. Synthesizing existing work in carceral geography, and exploring the future directions it might take, the book develops a notion of the ‘carceral’ as spatial, emplaced, mobile, embodied and affective.” From Publisher’s website.

“A centuries-old crime, human trafficking occurs not only in undeveloped countries, but also in some surprising locations. Right here in the United States, individuals are recruited, transported, and held by unlawful means—either through deception or under threat of violence. Approaching the topic from a law enforcement perspective, Combating Human Trafficking: A Multidisciplinary Approach provides an unprecedented look at the investigation of this phenomenon in America.

Beginning with historical, sociological, and psychological perspectives, the book discusses how authorities can best conduct an investigation of trafficking. It reviews federal agencies responsible for confronting the problem, examines relevant laws and legal trends, and discusses law enforcement awareness and training. Individual chapters written by experts in law enforcement explore a host of topics, including:

• Border issues between Mexico and the U.S., including the trafficking of people, drugs, and firearms
• The role of the Internet in human trafficking
• Child victim recruitment into sex trafficking
• How sexually oriented businesses such as escort services, hostess bars, and massage parlors can be fronts for sex trafficking
• The prevalence of human trafficking among street gangs
• Forced labor aspects, especially with respect to illegal immigrants
• How victims are chosen
• Theoretical, practical, and ethical considerations in providing effective services to victims

An ideal resource for police investigators, police training, and community outreach organizations, the book is also suitable as a college text for criminal justice courses. It is hoped that the awareness created through this text will provide the knowledge and tools needed to help to end this form of modern-day slavery.” From Publisher’s website.

“For close to a century, the field of community criminology has examined the causes and consequences of community crime and delinquency rates. Nevertheless, there is still a lot we do not know about the dynamics behind these connections. In this book, Ralph Taylor argues that obstacles to deepening our understanding of community/crime links arise in part because most scholars have overlooked four fundamental concerns: how conceptual frames depend on the geographic units and/or temporal units used; how to establish the meaning of theoretically central ecological empirical indicators; and how to think about the causes and consequences of non-random selection dynamics.

The volume organizes these four conceptual challenges using a common meta-analytic framework. The framework pinpoints critical features of and gaps in current theories about communities and crime, connects these concerns to current debates in both criminology and the philosophy of social science, and sketches the types of theory testing needed in the future if we are to grow our understanding of the causes and consequences of community crime rates. Taylor explains that a common meta-theoretical frame provides a grammar for thinking critically about current theories and simultaneously allows presenting these four topics and their connections in a unified manner. The volume provides an orientation to current and past scholarship in this area by describing three distinct but related community crime sequences involving delinquents, adult offenders, and victims. These sequences highlight community justice dynamics thereby raising questions about frequently used crime indicators in this area of research. A groundbreaking work melding past scholarly practices in criminology with the field’s current needs, Community Criminology is an essential work for criminologists.” From Publisher’s website.

“Congress in the latter part of the nineteenth century decided to enact a series of statutes facilitating state enforcement of their respective criminal laws. Subsequently, Congress enacted statutes federalizing what had been solely state crimes, thereby establishing federal court and state court concurrent jurisdiction over these crimes.

Federalization of state crimes has been criticized by numerous scholars, U.S. Supreme Court justices, and national organizations. Such federalization has congested the calendars of the U.S. District Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals leading to delays in civil cases because of the Speedy Trial Act that vacates a criminal indictment if a trial is not commenced within a specific number of days, resulted in over-crowded U.S. penitentiaries, and raises the issue of double jeopardy that is prohibited by the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the constitution of each state.

This book examines the impact of federalization of state crime and draws conclusions regarding its desirability. It also offers recommendations directed to Congress and the President, one recommendation direct to state legislatures for remedial actions to reduce the undesirable effects of federalized state crimes, and one recommendation that Congress and all states enter into a federal-interstate criminal suppression compact.” From Publisher’s website.

“In Crime Prevention: Theory and Practice, Second Edition, Dr. Schneider has updated every chapter in this reliable text using the latest research, the most recently published articles and books, and feedback from professors and students using the first edition. Providing an introduction to dominant approaches, key concepts, theories, and research, the book supplies concrete advice on planning, implementing, and evaluating a crime prevention plan.
This edition includes a new chapter applying crime prevention through social development principles to adolescents and young adults. This chapter is a recognition of the disproportionate rate of offending by adolescents and young adults as well as the distinctive risk factors faced by these groups. It also emphasizes the unique nature of applying social problem-solving solutions to adolescents and young adults who have been in formal contact with the criminal justice system. The focus is on recidivism prevention, an often-ignored, but critical aspect of crime prevention.

Laying out a systematic blueprint for a successful crime prevention project, the book also updates the extant literature on crime prevention—in particular the addition of research that has been published since the first edition of this book. Updated case studies reflecting new data present real examples of crime prevention programs and organizations and illustrate the conceptual, theoretical, and empirical elements of the book. Learning objectives, discussion questions, and exercises facilitate learning and retention and a companion website provides ancillary material for students and professors.” From Publisher’s website.

“Many books seek to explain the general principles of the criminal law. Crime, Reason and History stands out and alone as a book that critically and concisely analyses these principles and comes up with a different viewpoint: that the law is shaped by social history and therefore systematically structured around conflicting elements. Updated extensively to include two new chapters on loss of control and self defence and with an extended treatment of offence and defence, this new edition combines challenging and sophisticated analysis with accessibility.” From Publisher’s website.

“Crime, Violence, and Global Warming introduces the many connections between climate change and criminal activity. Conflict over natural resources can escalate to state and non-state actors, resulting in wars, asymmetrical warfare, and terrorism. Crank and Jacoby apply criminological theory to each aspect of this complicated web, helping readers to evaluate conflicting claims about global warming and to analyze evidence of the current and potential impact of climate change on conflict and crime. Beginning with an overview of the science of global warming, the authors move on to the links between climate change, scarce resources, and crime. Their approach takes in the full scope of causes and consequences, present and future, in the United States and throughout the world. The book concludes by looking ahead at the problem of forecasting future security implications if global warming continues or accelerates. This fresh approach to the criminology of climate change challenges readers to examine all sides of this controversial question and to formulate their own analysis of our planet’s future.” From Publisher’s website.

“This volume is one of the few books to explain in-depth the international crimes behind the scenes of substantive or procedural law. The contributors place a particular focus on what motivates participation in international crime, how perpetrators, witnesses and victims see their predicament and how international crimes should be investigated at local and international level, with an emphasis on context. The book engages these questions with a broad interdisciplinary approach that is accessible to both lawyers and non-lawyers alike. It discusses international crime through the lens of anthropology, neuroscience, psychology, state crime theory and information systems theory and draws upon relevant investigative experience from experts in international and domestic law prosecutions.” From Publisher’s website.

“This book contains a selection of papers, which were presented and discussed at the second GERN Doctoral Conference for PhD students, organised by the White Rose Consortium of the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York and held in September 2013 at the University of Sheffield, UK. The book is the result of intensive reflection and engagement between the authors and the editors. The essays in the book coalesce around three themes: desistance from offending; creating and recreating social order; and responses to crime and violence. It contains cutting-edge research by emerging European scholars in the field of ‘Desistance, Social Order and Responses to Crime: Today’s Security Issues’.

The second in this series of Research Papers continues the ambition of GERN to monitor and disseminate important new studies into European security issues, reflecting the result of doctoral research in the framework of GERN. This series provides an excellent platform from which to survey key emerging topics in the field. With this series the editors and authors are contributing to a better understanding of contemporary questions, presenting recent research results and scientific reflection, by devising new approaches and by re-evaluating the heritage of social sciences in this domain. It implies a new openness with regard to other disciplines and to the normative questions arising from the commission of crime and the formal reactions to it by actors in the criminal justice system and beyond.” From Publisher’s website.

“For over sixty million Americans, possessing a criminal record overshadows everything else about their public identity. A rap sheet, or even a court appearance or background report that reveals a run-in with the law, can have fateful consequences for a person’s interactions with just about everyone else. The Eternal Criminal Record makes transparent a pervasive system of police databases and identity screening that has become a routine feature of American life.

The United States is unique in making criminal information easy to obtain by employers, landlords, neighbors, even cyberstalkers. Its nationally integrated rap-sheet system is second to none as an effective law enforcement tool, but it has also facilitated the transfer of ever more sensitive information into the public domain. While there are good reasons for a person’s criminal past to be public knowledge, records of arrests that fail to result in convictions are of questionable benefit. Simply by placing someone under arrest, a police officer has the power to tag a person with a legal history that effectively incriminates him or her for life.

In James Jacobs’s view, law-abiding citizens have a right to know when individuals in their community or workplace represent a potential threat. But convicted persons have rights, too. Jacobs closely examines the problems created by erroneous record keeping, critiques the way the records of individuals who go years without a new conviction are expunged, and proposes strategies for eliminating discrimination based on criminal history, such as certifying the records of those who have demonstrated their rehabilitation.” From Publisher’s website.

“In 2002, in Atkins v. Virginia, the United States Supreme Court concluded that the execution of intellectually disabled offenders is cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the Eighth Amendment. The Court’s Atkins ruling not only applied to future capital punishment prosecutions, but also permitted previously death-sentenced state and federal offenders to seek to establish their intellectual disability and resulting ineligibility for execution. Moreover, because of the constitutional nature of the Atkins ruling, state death-sentenced offenders could generally file Atkins claims for collateral relief in both state and federal courts.

Since Atkins, almost 600 Atkins claims have been filed in state and federal courts. In 2014, in Hall v. Florida, the Court confirmed the fundamental principles of its Atkins decision and found Florida’s implementation of Atkins unconstitutional. This book examines the state and federal legislative and judicial implementation of Atkins prior to Hall and Hall’s impact on the future implementation of Atkins. It catalogs the outcomes of Atkins claims filed prior to Hall and describes illustrative successful and unsuccessful Atkins claims. The book also discusses specific Atkins implementation issues that merit future Court consideration in the continuing effort to implement Atkins and exclude intellectually disabled offenders from execution.” From Publisher’s website.

“This book presents a Foucauldian problematisation analysis of crime, with a particular focus on the twentieth century. It considers how crime has been conceived as problem and, by scrutinising the responses that have been adapted to deal with crime, demonstrates how a range of power modalities have evolved throughout the twentieth century.

Christian Borch shows how the tendency of criminologists to focus on either disciplinary power or governmentality has neglected the broader complex of Foucault’s concerns: ignoring its historical underpinnings, whilst for the most part limiting studies to only very recent developments, without giving sufficient attention to their historical backdrop. The book uses developments in Denmark – developments that can be readily identified in most other western countries – as a paradigmatic case for understanding how crime has been problematised in the West. Thus, Foucault, Crime and Power: Problematisations of Crime in the Twentieth Century demonstrates that a Foucauldian approach to crime holds greater analytical potentials for criminological research than have so far been recognized.” From Publisher’s website.

“On any given day nearly 3000 foreign national citizens are detained under immigration powers in UK detention centres alone. Around the world immigrants are routinely detained in similar conditions. The institutions charged with immigrant detention are volatile and contested sites. They are also places about which we know very little. What is their goal? How do they operate? How are they justified?

Inside Immigration Detention lifts the lid on the hidden world of migrant detention, presenting the first national study of life in British immigration removal centres. Offering more than just a description of life behind bars of those men and women awaiting deportation, it uses staff and detainee testimonies to revisit key assumptions about state power and the legacies of colonialism under conditions of globalization.

Based on fieldwork conducted in six immigration removal centres (IRCs) between 2009 and 2012, it draws together a large amount of empirical data including: detainee surveys and interviews, staff interviews, observation, and detailed field notes. From this, the book explores how immigration removal centres identify their inhabitants as strangers, constructing them as unfamiliar, ambiguous and uncertain. In this endeavour, the establishments are greatly assisted by their resemblance to prisons and by familiar racialized narratives about foreigners and nationality.

However, as staff and detainee testimonies reveal, in their interactions and day-to-day life women and men find many points of commonality. Such recognition of one another reveals the goal and effect of detention to be incomplete. Denial requires effort. In order to minimize the effort it must expend, the state ‘governs at distance’, via the contract. It also splits itself in two, deploying some immigration staff onsite, while keeping the actual decision-makers (the caseworkers) elsewhere, sequestered from the potentially destabilizing effects of facing up to those whom they wish to remove. Such distancing, while bureaucratically effective, contributes to the uncertainty of daily life in detention, and is often the source of considerable criticism and unease. Denial and familiarity are embodied and localized activities, whose pains and contradictions inherent in concrete relationships.” From Publisher’s website.

“Introduction to Policing: The Pillar of Democracy is an introductory textbook focused on the underlying reasons why policing is conducted the way it is, why police officers police the society in the manner they do, and, finally, why law enforcement is perceived and criticized by the public the way it is. As indicated in the title, the book weaves the themes of democratic principles into the chapters. Through addressing the basic blocks of fair and professional policing, the understanding of democracy from the prism of certain police actions or inactions becomes comprehensible from a very pragmatic perspective. Other introductory policing textbooks simply concentrate on the functions of policing or on the processes that cause officers to feel the way they do, but without explanations of police functions in democratic societies.

Whether democracies are developed or are developing, they consistently provide more freedoms for their citizens than others. The basic principle of the “majority rule,” which is based on elections that are procedurally and substantively fair, is the rule of thumb around which certain themes of this text will be addressed. Civil rights, civil liberties and due process embed many of the operational realities of policing. Whether one addresses notions such as use of force, search and seizure, discretion, sub-culture, or intelligence gathering, it is always done from the perspective of the need to preserve precisely these themes, which are part of the human rights and civil rights concepts which underlie any type of a democratic society.” From Publisher’s website.

“This collection of socio-legal studies, written by leading theorists and researchers from around the world, offers original, perceptive and critical contributions to ideas and theories that have been expounded by Roger Cotterrell over a long and distinguished career. Engaging with many classic issues and theories of the sociology of law, the contributions are likely to become classics themselves as they tackle some of the most significant challenges that modern law faces. They do not shy away from what one of the contributors describes as the complexity and multiplicity of our contemporary legal world. The book is organized in three parts: socio-legal themes; methodological and jurisprudential themes; globalization, cultural and comparative law themes. Starting with a chapter that re-engages with the need to interpret legal ideas sociologically, and ending with one that explores the global significance of modern fascination with the idea of the rule of law, this selection offers important additions to the oeuvre of Roger Cotterrell (a list of whose academic writings is included in the book).” From Publisher’s website.

“This book is the first to investigate the effects of participation in separation or divorce proceedings on femicide (murder of a female), femicide-suicide, homicide, and suicide. Because separation is one of the most significant predictors of domestic violence, this book is exclusively devoted to theorizing, researching, and preventing lethal domestic violence or other assaults triggered by marital separation. The authors provide evidence supporting the use of an estrangement-specific risk assessment and estrangement-focused public education to prevent murders and assaults. This information is needed not only by instructors in criminal justice and sociology programs, but by researchers theorizing about or investigating domestic violence. In the world of practitioners, family court judges, divorce mediators, family lawyers, prosecutors involved in bail hearings, shelter staff, and family counselors urgently need this resource. Ellis includes discussion questions and chapter objectives to support learners in the classroom or in community-based settings, and instructor support material will include PowerPoint lecture slides and lesson plans. This text advocates convincingly for prevention of domestic violence, and gives academics and practitioners the tools they need.” From Publisher’s website.

“Oklahoma has long held the dubious honor of having the highest female incarceration rate in the country, nearly twice the national average. In this compelling new book, sociologist Susan Sharp sets out to discover just what has gone so wrong in the state of Oklahoma—and what that might tell us about trends in female incarceration nationwide.

The culmination of over a decade of original research, Mean Lives, Mean Laws exposes a Kafkaesque criminal justice system, one that has no problem with treating women as collateral damage in the War on Drugs or with stripping female prisoners of their parental rights. Yet it also reveals the individual histories of women who were jailed in Oklahoma, providing intimate portraits of their lives before, during, and after their imprisonment. We witness the impoverished and abusive conditions in which many of these women were raised; we get a vivid portrait of their everyday lives behind bars; and we glimpse the struggles that lead many ex-convicts to fall back into the penal system.

Through an innovative methodology that combines statistical rigor with extensive personal interviews, Sharp shows how female incarceration affects not only individuals, but also families and communities. Putting a human face on a growing social problem, Mean Lives, Mean Laws raises important questions about both the state of Oklahoma and the state of the nation.” From Publisher’s website.

“This collection of critical essays considers the criminalisation of squatting from a range of different theoretical, policy and practice perspectives. While the practice of squatting has long been criminalised in some jurisdictions, the last few years have witnessed the emergence of a newly constituted political concern with unlawful occupation of land. With initiatives to address the ‘threat’ of squatting sweeping across Europe, the offence of squatting in a residential building was created in England in 2012. This development, which has attracted a large measure of media attention, has been widely regarded as a controversial policy departure, with many commentators, Parliamentarians, and professional organisations arguing that its support is premised on misunderstandings of the current law and a precarious evidence-base concerning the nature and prevalence of ‘squatting’.

Moral Rhetoric and the Criminalisation of Squatting explores the significance of measures to criminalise squatting for squatters, owners and communities. The book also interrogates wider themes that draw on political philosophy, social policy, criminal justice and the nature of ownership, to consider how the assimilation of squatting to a contemporary punitive turn is shaping the political, social, legal and moral landscapes of property, housing and crime.” From Publisher’s website.

“The Poetics of Crime provides an invitation to reconsider and reimagine how criminological knowledge may be creatively and poetically constructed, obtained, corroborated and applied. Departing from the conventional understanding of criminology as a discipline concerned with refined statistical analyses, survey methods and quantitative measurements, this book shows that criminology can – and indeed should – move beyond such confines to seek sources of insight, information and knowledge in the unexplored corners of poetically and creatively inspired approaches and methodologies.

With chapters illustrating the ways in which criminologists and other researchers or practitioners working on crime-related questions can find inspiration in a variety of unconventional materials, writing styles and analytical strategies, The Poetics of Crime offers studies of police photography, classic and contemporary literature, silver screen movies, performative dance enactments and media images. As such, this volume opens up the field of criminological research to alternative and novel sources of knowledge about crime, its perpetrators and victims, authorities, motives and justice. It will therefore appeal not only to sociologists, social theorists and criminologists, but to scholars across disciplines with interests in crime, deviance and innovative approaches to social research.” From Publisher’s website.

“After 40 years of research championing the police profession’s move into the Community Problem-Solving era, there are police practitioners and scholars who argue that the police profession has entered a new, intelligence-led, anti-terrorism era. Police Leaders in the New Community Problem-Solving Era demonstrates that these innovations are simply ways of more finely applying the elements of a community problem-solving strategy within a technologically savvy, post-9/11, and economically downgraded United States.

This book chronicles what are arguably some of the nation’s most capable police executives as they assist in moving their police departments into this New Community Problem-Solving Era. Given unprecedented access to the Boston, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, and Newark (NJ) police departments, the cases are built using observations of police activities, in-depth interviews, surveys, and archival reviews. The reader will see how, rather than moving into a distinct era, even the most progressive police executives within rather forward-thinking settings are still on the road to fully realizing the community-based, crime and disorder reduction, and quality-of-life enhancing function of the police.

The authors illuminate the undeniable role that police executives can play in bringing their departments into the New Community Problem-Solving era and discuss the facilitators and inhibitors that will undoubtedly influence the police profession’s move in this new era. Students of policing as well as practitioners from varied policing backgrounds will find this book relatable, easy to understand, and relevant to many areas of police research and practice.” From Publisher’s website.

“This volume assembles hundreds of cases and studies to provide the most accurate and comprehensive picture of the status of pornography in the criminal justice system. Presenting high-level research in an accessible and organized manner, it explores a range of topics, including investigating and prosecuting a case, arguments favoring and opposing decriminalization of pornography, and relationships between pornography, mental disorders, and crime. It also examines criminal justice responses and international laws, policies, attitudes, and definitions of pornography in comparison to those of the United States.”From Publisher’s website.

“Drawing on thirty years of prison college courses and volunteer classes in eleven Michigan and California prisons, Prisoners on Criminology: Convict Life Stories and Crime Prevention makes criminology theories come alive through the use of the prisoners’ voices.

The book features policy background and textbook-like chapters that review major criminological theories and present prisoner essays that apply criminology insights to the prisoners’ lives. Each chapter has helpful exercises and discussion and review questions for classroom use.

Introductory informational chapters present an historical review of how the United States came to have the world’s largest prison system. A chapter on prisoners’ educational background presents information from prisoner surveys and the author’s extensive background in postsecondary correctional education. Over eighty prisoner essays show how prisoners connect criminology theories to their lives growing up, with insights on individual, family, and community levels of crime causation.

A chapter on social structure, social process and alternative criminologies is followed by additional information on in-prison criminological issues with several prisoner essays. The conclusion emphasizes the main argument of the book—that the jobless ghetto is a major reason for much of the criminality now in the large correctional apparatus of the United States.” From Publisher’s website.

“Examining two overlapping aspects of the prison experience that, despite their central importance, have not attracted the scholarly attention they deserve, this book assesses both the degree to which prisoners can withstand the rigours of solitude and how they experience the passing of time. In particular, it looks at how they deal with the potentially overwhelming prospect of a long, or even indefinite, period behind bars.

While the deleterious effects of penal isolation are well known, little systematic attention has been given to the factors associated with surviving, and even triumphing over, prolonged exposure to solitary confinement. Through a re-examination of the roles of silence and separation in penal policy, and by contrasting the prisoner experience with that of individuals who have sought out institutional solitariness (for example as members of certain religious orders), and others who have found themselves held in solitary confinement although they committed no crime (such as hostages and some political prisoners), Prisoners, Solitude, and Time seeks to assess the impact of long-term isolation and the rationality of such treatment. In doing so, it aims to stimulate interest in a somewhat neglected aspect of the prisoner’s psychological world.

The book focuses on an aspect of the prison experience – time, its meanderings, measures, and meanings – that is seldom considered by academic commentators. Building upon prisoner narratives, academic critiques, official publications, personal communications, field visits, administrative statistics, reports of campaigning bodies, and other data, it presents a new framework for understanding the prison experience. The author concludes with a series of reflections on hope, the search for meaning, posttraumatic growth, and the art of living.” From Publisher’s website.

“Multiple killings by serial or spree killers and the mass violence seen in war crimes and other atrocities have typically been understood as discrete category types, which can foster the view that there are fundamentally different kinds of human beings, including “deviants” who are born evil and innately given to sadism or a callous lack of empathy. In contrast, this book considers the violence of these “deviants” in terms of larger questions about human violence. Therefore, in addition to describing the life histories of a sample of individual serial and spree murderers, the book includes analysis of macro-level phenomena such as genocide, mass rape and killing, and torture occurring under conditions of war, state authorization, or political upheaval. The chief claim of the book is that, given the “right” combination of factors occurring at different levels of analysis, virtually anyone can emerge as a killer or perpetrator of atrocities. While it is crucial to understand individual killers in terms of the details of their biographies, it is equally crucial to understand political atrocities in terms of the details of their histories; and to see that persons and groups are always the product of complexly interacting assemblage processes.” From Publisher’s website.

“Human trafficking is consistently featured on the global political agenda. This book examines the trafficking of adult female victims for sexual exploitation, and specifically the understanding of consent and its influence in the identification and treatment of trafficking victims.

Jessica Elliott argues that when applied to situations of human trafficking, migration and sexual exploitation, the notion of consent presents problems which current international laws are unable to address. Establishing the presence of ‘coercion’ and a lack of consent can be highly problematic, particularly in situations of human trafficking and exploitative prostitution; activities which may be deemed inherently coercive and problematically clandestine.

By examining legal definitions of human trafficking in international instruments and their domestic implementation in different countries, the book explores victimhood in the context of exploitative migration, and argues that no clear line can be drawn between those who have been smuggled, trafficked, or ‘consensually trafficked’ into a situation of exploitation. The book will be great use and interest to students and researchers of migration law, transnational criminal law, and gender studies.” From Publisher’s website.

“Certain types of crime are increasingly being perpetrated across national borders and require a unified regional or global response to combat them. Transnational criminal law covers both the international treaty obligations which require States to introduce specific substantive measures into their domestic criminal law schemes, and an allied procedural dimension concerned with the articulation of inter-state cooperation in pursuit of the alleged transnational criminal.

The Routledge Handbook of Transnational Criminal Law provides a comprehensive overview of the system which is designed to regulate cross border crime. The book looks at the history and development of the system, asking questions as to the principal purpose and effectiveness of transnational criminal law as it currently stands. The book brings together experts in the field, both scholars and practitioners, in order to offer original and forward-looking analyses of the key elements of the transnational criminal law.

The book is split into several parts for ease of reference:

• Fundamental concepts surrounding the international regulation of transnational crime.
• Procedures for international cooperation against alleged transnational criminals including jurisdiction, police cooperation, asset recovery and extradition.
• Substantive crimes covered by transnational criminal law analysing the current legal provisions for each crime.
• The implementation of transnational criminal law and the effectiveness of the system of transnational criminal law.

With chapters from over 25 authorities in the field, this handbook will be an invaluable reference work for student and academics and for policy makers with an interest in transnational criminal law.” From Publisher’s website.

“The sentencing decision of the judge might be the most important decision in the criminal proceedings, not only because of the impact the punishment has on the offender, but also because the sentencing decision is a cornerstone of the legitimacy of the entire criminal justice system. Nonetheless, there still are questions about the factors judges take into account when making their sentencing decision. This study aims to improve our understanding of the sentencing decisions judges make.

The developments in criminal justice practices as regards the emergence of ‘actuarial justice’ have directed the focus of this study to risk-based sentencing: are offenders with a high risk of reoffending more likely to be sentenced to imprisonment and to longer prison terms than low-risk offenders? To what extent do judges take information into account on the risk-related personal characteristics of the offender, such as unemployment, ties to family or friends, or drug usage, when making their sentencing decision?

Using uniquely detailed data on risk-related social circumstances of the offender, and advanced quantitative and qualitative research methods, this study provides in-depth insight into sentencing.” From Publisher’s website.

“Sexual Deviance Online provides a research-based introduction to some of the lesser-known forms of sexual deviance taking place within an online environment. This is the first book to cover sexual deviance within Adult Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (AMMORPGs), sugar dating, MSM, bug chasing, child pornography, and sexting in one publication. Sexual Deviance Online examines each of these topics through published research and/or the authors’ own original research findings.” From Publisher’s website.

“Arguing that law must be looked at holistically, this book investigates the ‘hidden gender’ of the so-called neutral or objective legal principles that structure the law addressing violence against women. Adopting an explicitly feminist perspective, it investigates how legal responses to violence against women presuppose, maintain and perpetuate a certain context that may not in fact reflect women’s experiences.

Carline and Easteal draw upon relevant legislation, case law and secondary studies from a range of territories, including Australia, England and Wales, the United States, Canada and Europe, to contextualize and critique different policy responses. They go on to examine the potential and limits of law, making recommendations for best practice models of policymaking and law reform.

Aiming to help improve government, community and legal responses to women who experience violence, Shades of Grey – Domestic and Sexual Violence Against Women: Law Reform and Society will assist law-makers, academics, policymakers and a wider audience in understanding the complexities of violence against women.” From Publisher’s website.

“How do individuals, communities, and institutions react to crime, disorder, and social control events? How do such incidents shape the contours of social order and the make-up of society? Why do some crimes and disorders matter more than others in influencing how we think, feel, and act about our security? These are the questions that lie at the heart of Signal Crimes: Social Reactions to Crime, Disorder, and Control.

Signal Crimes brings together the key insights and findings from a ten-year programme of fieldwork investigating the concept of a ‘signal crime’: an incident that changes how people think, feel and behave about their safety due to it functioning as a signal of the presence of wider risks and threats.

Presenting ground-breaking new perspectives on social reactions to crime, Signal Crimes innovatively and rigorously examines how and why particular events trigger certain forms of reaction, and how these unfold and develop across social space and time. This includes detailed studies of: how fear travels within and across communities in the aftermath of criminal homicides; the ways rumours impact upon what we think about the prevalence and distribution of crime; the extent to which some individuals and neighbourhoods are vulnerable to being harmed more by disorder than others; how the conduct of counter-terrorism has been altered in recent years by the institutional effects of a number of signal events; and the ways in which social control interventions are used to communicate messages to public audiences.

Through examination of these diverse issues and using a range of both historical and contemporary sources, the author reveals how our individual and collective responses to problematic behaviour are organised. If a perspective constitutes a way of seeing, then the signal crimes perspective provides a new set of optics for how we see the impacts of crime, disorder, and control. Showcasing the development of this new concept, Signal Crimes argues for a radical and challenging understanding of how we think not only about the crime, but also about the ways in which we perceive and react to such problematic and troubling acts.” From Publisher’s website.

“Surveillance in Europe is an accessible, definitive and comprehensive overview of the rapidly growing multi-disciplinary field of surveillance studies in Europe. Written by experts in the field, including leading scholars, the Companion’s clear and up to date style will appeal to a wide range of scholars and students in the social sciences, arts and humanities.
This book makes the case for greater resilience in European society in the face of the growing pervasiveness of surveillance. It examines surveillance in Europe from several different perspectives, including:

• the co-evolution of surveillance technologies and practices
• the surveillance industry in Europe
• the instrumentality of surveillance for preventing and detecting crime and terrorism
• social and economic costs
• impacts of surveillance on civil liberties
• resilience in Europe’s surveillance society.
• the consequences and impacts for Europe of the Snowden revelations
• findings and recommendations regarding surveillance in Europe

Surveillance in Europe’s interdisciplinary approach and accessible content makes it an ideal companion to academics, policy-makers and civil society organisations alike, as well as appealing to top level undergraduates and postgraduates.” From Publisher’s website.

“Until now, most discussion of racial profiling has given only fleeting consideration of its causes. Those causes are overwhelmingly psychological. In Suspect Race, social psychologist and public policy expert Jack Glaser leverages a century’s worth of social psychological research to provide a clear understanding of how stereotypes, even those operating outside of conscious awareness or control, can cause police to make discriminatory judgments and decisions about who to suspect, stop, question, search, use force on, and arrest. Glaser argues that stereotyping, even nonconscious stereotyping, is a completely normal human mental process, but that it leads to undesirable discriminatory outcomes. Police officers are normal human beings with normal cognition. They are therefore influenced by racial stereotypes that have long connected minorities with aggression and crime. Efforts to merely prohibit racial profiling are inadequate. Additionally, Glaser finds evidence that racial profiling can actually increase crime, and he considers the implications for racial profiling in counterterrorism, finding some similarities and some interesting differences with drug war profiling. Finally, he examines the policy landscape on which racial profiling resides and calls for improved data collection and supervision, reduced discretion, and increased accountability.

Drawing on criminology, history, psychological science, and legal and policy analysis, Glaser offers a broad and deep assessment of the causes and consequence of racial profiling. Suspect Race brings to bear the vast scientific literature on intergroup stereotyping to offer the first in-depth and accessible understanding of the primary cause of racial profiling, and to explore implications for policy.” From Publisher’s website.

“Offering rare insiders’ perspectives, Trends in Corrections: Interviews with Corrections Leaders Around the World is a comprehensive survey of correctional programming and management styles used across nations. Twelve chapters present transcribed interviews of corrections leaders along with a brief portrait of the corrections system in those jurisdictions. The leaders interviewed represent a variety of cultures, political environments, and economic systems and come from North America (Canada, Mexico, and the United States), Asia (Singapore), Australia, the Caribbean (Trinidad and Tobago), and Europe (England, Hungary, and Bosnia–Herzegovina).
Topics discussed in this insightful collection of interviews include:

• Working conditions for correction officers
• How governmental changes can impact a prison system
• Overcrowding problems and efforts to modernize prisons
• Recidivism concerns and programs that facilitate offender reintegration into society upon release
• Effects of the media’s portrayal of prisons on communities

The final chapter reflects on the interviews and summarizes the common themes evident throughout the book. Advancing knowledge about corrections systems worldwide, this volume bridges the gap of knowledge that exists between scholars and researchers in academia and practitioners in the field. The candid discussions presented herein are destined to open further dialogue among these professionals, adding value to current operations and informing future directions.” From Publisher’s website.

“What motivates violence? How can good and compassionate people hurt and kill others or themselves? Why are people much more likely to kill or assault people they know well, rather than strangers? This provocative and radical book shows that people mostly commit violence because they genuinely feel that it is the morally right thing to do. In perpetrators’ minds, violence may be the morally necessary and proper way to regulate social relationships according to cultural precepts, precedents, and prototypes. These moral motivations apply equally to the violence of the heroes of the Iliad, to parents smacking their child, and to many modern murders and everyday acts of violence. Virtuous Violence presents a wide-ranging exploration of violence across different cultures and historical eras, demonstrating how people feel obligated to violently create, sustain, end, and honor social relationships in order to make them right, according to morally motivated cultural ideals.” From Publisher’s website.

“Since 2005, the Fugitive Safe Surrender (FSS) program has been implemented in more than twenty cities around the country. Tens of thousands of individuals with active warrants for their arrest have voluntarily surrendered to law enforcement in a church or other neutral setting. The sites are transformed for four days into complete justice systems with pretrial-intake, prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, and probation/parole and community services staff. The program is advertised through local media and various community-based outlets, sending the message that individuals with nonviolent felony and misdemeanor warrants can voluntarilysurrender to law enforcement and receive expedited action and favorable consideration of their cases.

Author Daniel J. Flannery has gathered information on who turns themselves in, what the warrant is for, how long the warrant has been active, and what happens to the individual. He asked participants to complete voluntarily an anonymous survey about demographics, how they heard about the program, why they surrendered, why they had not previously surrendered, what they think will happen to them, and what they might need help with in the future. Wanted on Warrants uses these site reports, media coverage, interviews with participants, and survey data to explain why FSS has proven to be such a consummate success in clearing outstanding warrants. Across all sites, less than 2% of people with warrants who surrendered during FSS were arrested. Rather, they were released to go home within hours of turning themselves in.

This collaborative initiative between local and federal law enforcement and community faith-based organizations is unique and has proven to be a successful program that is being copied and initiated throughout the country. Wanted on Warrants offers valuable insights into what happens during and after an FSS program and will be welcomed by policymakers and practitioners.” From Publisher’s website.

“The U.S. Department of Justice is under fire for failing to prosecute banks that caused the 2008 economic meltdown because they are too big to jail. Prosecutors have long neglected to hold corporate executives accountable for chronic mistakes that kill and injure workers and customers. This book, the first of its kind, analyzes five industrial catastrophes that have killed or sickened consumers and workers or caused irrevocable harm to the environment. From the Texas City refinery explosion to the Upper Big Branch mine collapse to the destruction of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig and extending to incidents of food and drug contamination that have killed or injured hundreds, the root causes of these preventable disasters include crimes of commission and omission. Although federal prosecutors have made a start on holding low-level managers liable, far more aggressive prosecution is appropriate as a matter of law, policy, and justice. Written in accessible and jargon-free language, this book recommends innovative interpretations of existing laws to elevate the prosecution of white-collar crime at the federal and state levels.” From Publisher’s website.