“To many antebellum Americans, Appalachia was a frightening wilderness of lawlessness, peril, robbers, and hidden dangers. The extensive media coverage of horse stealing and scalping raids profiled the region’s residents as intrinsically violent. After the Civil War, this characterization continued to permeate perceptions of the area and news of the conflict between the Hatfields and the McCoys, as well as the bloodshed associated with the coal labor strikes, cemented Appalachia’s violent reputation. Blood in the Hills: A History of Violence in Appalachia provides an in-depth historical analysis of hostility in the region from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Editor Bruce E. Stewart discusses aspects of the Appalachian violence culture, examining skirmishes with the native population, conflicts resulting from the region’s rapid modernization, and violence as a function of social control. The contributors also address geographical isolation and ethnicity, kinship, gender, class, and race with the purpose of shedding light on an often-stereotyped regional past. Blood in the Hills does not attempt to apologize for the region but uses detailed research and analysis to explain it, delving into the social and political factors that have defined Appalachia throughout its violent history.” (From Publisher’s Website)

“Media clamour on issues relating to crime, justice and civil liberties has never been more insistent. Whether it is the murder of James Bulger or detaining terrorist suspects for long periods without trial, mediated comment has grown immeasurably over the last twenty years. So, how does it interact with and shape policy in these fields? How do the politicians both respond to and try to manipulate the media which permeates our society and culture?
Crime, Policy and the Media is the first academic text to map the relationship between a rapidly changing media and policymaking in criminal justice. Spanning the period, 1989-2010, it examines a number of case studies – terrorism, drugs, sentencing, policing and public protection, amongst others – and interrogates key policy-makers (including six former Home Secretaries, a former Lord Chief Justice, Attorney-General, senior police officers, government advisers and leading commentators) about the impact of the media on their thinking and practice.

Bolstered by content and framing analysis, it argues that, especially, in the last decade, fear of media criticism and the Daily Mail effect has restricted the policymaking agenda in crime and justice, concluding that the expanding influence of the Internet and Web 2.0 has begun to undermine some of the ways in which agencies such as the police have gained and held a presentational advantage.” (From Publisher’s Website)

“Criminal psychology is the application of the principles of normal and abnormal psychology to the understanding, prediction, and control of criminal behavior. Criminal Psychology: Nature, Nurture, Culture provides an in-depth yet readable introduction to the foundations of criminal psychology as it is understood and practiced from the classroom to the courtroom.

Grounded in thorough scholarship and written in a crisp, engaging style, this volume is the definitive handbook and reference source for forensic psychologists, mental health practitioners, attorneys, judges, law enforcement professionals, and military personnel. It will also serve as an authoritative core text for courses in forensic psychology, criminology, and criminal justice practice.” (From Publisher’s Website)

“From bicycle stands configured to prevent theft to pharmaceutical packaging that thwarts counterfeiters, the authors fuse crime science and design practice to point the way forward for a new generation of crime-proofed objects used in everyday contexts.” (From Publisher’s Website)

“Cosimo examines the effects of civil and criminal legal sanctions for domestic violence related offenses on recidivism and on whether the number of legal sanctions imposed by the courts influences non-recidivism status. With an overall recidivism rate of 30.3%, results show that the risk of recidivism is 45% lower for men who experienced two legal sanctions (arrest and probation) relative to men who experienced one legal sanction (civil protective order). Additionally, men with prior criminal court involvement for domestic violence offenses are more likely to recidivate. Rather than reducing opportunities to recidivate, incarceration for offenses committed during the follow-up period is a predictor of recidivism. It is possible that despite legal sanctions, some recidivists are actually emboldened and use whatever opportunities available to them to commit domestic violence.” (From Publisher’s Website)

“Forgiveness and Retribution: Responding to Wrongdoing argues that ultimately, forgiveness is always the appropriate response to wrongdoing. In recent decades, many philosophers have claimed that unless certain conditions are met, we should resent those who have wronged us personally and that criminal offenders deserve to be punished. Conversely, Margaret Holmgren posits that we should forgive those who have ill-treated us, but only after working through a process of addressing the wrong. Holmgren then reflects on the kinds of laws and social practices a properly forgiving society would adopt.” (From Publisher’s Website)

“When corruption is exposed, unknown aspects are revealed which allow us to better understand its structures and informal norms. This book investigates the hidden order of corruption, looking at the invisible codes and mechanisms that govern and stabilize the links between corrupters and corruptees. Concentrating mainly on democratic regimes, this book uses a wide range of documentation, including media and judicial sources from Italy and other countries, to locate the internal equilibria and dynamics of corruption in a broad and comparative perspective. It also analyses the Transparency International Annual Reports and the daily survey of international news to present evidence on specific cases of corruption within an institutional theory framework.” (From Publisher’s Website)

“Home Grown thus traces the deep roots of the antidrug ideology and prohibitionist policies that anchor the drug-war violence that engulfs Mexico today. Campos also counters the standard narrative of modern drug wars, which casts global drug prohibition as a sort of informal American cultural colonization. Instead, he argues, Mexican ideas were the foundation for notions of “reefer madness” in the United States. This book is an indispensable guide for anyone who hopes to understand the deep and complex origins of marijuanas controversial place in North American history.” (From Publisher’s Website)

“Although identity theft is one of the fastest growing economic crimes in the United States, researchers have devoted little attention to understanding identity thieves. Basing their work on interviews with 59 inmates serving time in federal prison for a variety of identity theft crimes, Copes and Vieraitis use criminological and sociological theories to gain insight into the cognitive, behavioral, and organizational aspects of identity theft. They also offer policy recommendations to reduce the ever-increasing threat of this crime.” (From Publisher’s Website)

“This work is a multidisciplinary analysis of the issue of insider dealing from the perspective of the applicability of criminal law to regulate it. First, it examines the nature of its prohibition in the European Union and in the United States of America. The text includes a more extensive overview of prohibition in four Member States of the European Union (France, the United Kingdom, Luxembourg and Poland). Then, it summarises the arguments presented by ethicists and economists in favour of and against insider dealing. Further, it analyses the foundations of criminal law and justifications that are given for its application. On the basis of this analysis, it presents a new two-step theory of criminalisation. The first step is based on a liberal theory of wrongfulness that makes reference to protection of the basic human rights. The second step relies on classical but often forgotten principles of criminal law. Finally, it examines possible alternatives to criminal rules.” (From Publisher’s Website)

“Starting in the 1950s, Americans eagerly built the planet’s largest public work: the 42,795-mile National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. Before the concrete was dry on the new roads, however, a specter began haunting them—the highway killer. He went by many names: the “Hitcher,” the “Freeway Killer,” the “Killer on the Road,” the “I-5 Strangler,” and the “Beltway Sniper.” Some of these criminals were imagined, but many were real. The nation’s murder rate shot up as its expressways were built. America became more violent and more mobile at the same time.

Killer on the Road tells the entwined stories of America’s highways and its highway killers. There’s the hot-rodding juvenile delinquent who led the National Guard on a multistate manhunt; the wannabe highway patrolman who murdered hitchhiking coeds; the record promoter who preyed on “ghetto kids” in a city reshaped by freeways; the nondescript married man who stalked the interstates seeking women with car trouble; and the trucker who delivered death with his cargo. Thudding away behind these grisly crime sprees is the story of the interstates—how they were sold, how they were built, how they reshaped the nation, and how we came to equate them with violence.” (From Publisher’s Website)

“This book examines the evolution, function, problems and prospects of private security companies in the maritime sector.

The private security industry continues to evolve after its renaissance over the past few decades, first in Africa, and later in Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite this, little academic work has been done to date on the role of private security in the maritime environment. This lacuna has become more pronounced as the threat of piracy, terrorism, and other acts of maritime political violence have caused littoral states and commercial entities alike to consider the use of private security to mitigate risks.” (From Publisher’s Website)

“The first extended analysis of the relationship between Italian criminology and crime fiction in English, Methods of Murder examines works by major authors both popular, such as Gianrico Carofiglio, and canonical, such as Carlo Emilio Gadda.

Many scholars have argued that detective fiction did not exist in Italy until 1929, and that the genre, which was considered largely Anglo-Saxon, was irrelevant on the Italian peninsula. By contrast, Past traces the roots of the twentieth-century literature and cinema of crime to two much earlier, diverging interpretations of the criminal: the bodiless figure of Cesare Beccaria’s Enlightenment-era On Crimes and Punishments, and the biological offender of Cesare Lombroso’s positivist Criminal Man.

Through her examinations of these texts, Past demonstrates the links between literary, philosophical, and scientific constructions of the criminal, and provides the basis for an important reconceptualization of Italian crime fiction.” (From Publisher’s Website)

“The role of capital punishment in America has been criticised by those for and against the death penalty, by the judiciary, academics, the media and by prison personnel. This book demonstrates that it is the inconsistent and often incoherent jurisprudence of the United States Supreme Court which accounts for a system so lacking in public confidence. Using case studies, Kenneth Williams examines issues such as jury selection, ineffective assistance of counsel, the role of race and claims of innocence which affect the Court’s decisions and how these decisions are played out in the lower courts, often an inmate’s last recourse before execution. Discussing international treaties and their lack of impact on capital punishment in America, this book has international appeal and makes an important contribution to legal scholarship. It also provides a unique understanding of the dynamics of an alarmingly problematic system and will be valuable to those interested in human rights and criminal justice.” (From Publisher’s Website)

“In Murder in the Métro, Gayle K. Brunelle and Annette Finley-Croswhite unravel Toureaux’s complicated and mysterious life, assessing her complex identity within the larger political context of the time. They follow the trail of Toureaux’s murder investigation to the Comité Secret d’Action Révolutionnaire, a secret right-wing political organization popularly known as the Cagoule, or “hooded ones.” Obsessed with the Communist threat they perceived in the growing power of labor unions and the French left wing, the Cagoule’s leaders aimed to overthrow France’s Third Republic and install an authoritarian regime allied with Italy. With Mussolini as their ally and Italian fascism as their model, they did not shrink from committing violent crimes and fomenting terror to accomplish their goal. In 1936, Toureaux–at the behest of the French police–infiltrated this dangerous group of terrorists and seduced one of its leaders, Gabriel Jeantet, to gain more information. This operation, the authors show, eventually cost Toureaux her life.” (From Publisher’s Website)

“The main feature of this work is that it explores criminal behavior from all aspects of Tinbergen’s Four Questions. Rather than focusing on a single theoretical point of view, this book examines the neurobiology of crime from a biosocial perspective. It suggests that it is necessary to understand some genetics and neuroscience in order to appreciate and apply relevant concepts to criminological issues. Presenting up-to-date information on the circuitry of the brain, the authors explore and examine a variety of characteristics, traits and behavioral syndromes related to criminal behavior such as ADHD, intelligence, gender, the age-crime curve, schizophrenia, psychopathy, violence and substance abuse. This book brings together the sociological tradition with the latest knowledge the neurosciences have to offer and conveys biological information in an accessible and understanding way. It will be of interest to scholars in the field and to professional criminologists.” (From Publisher’s Website)

“At last we have a book that begins to focus on abuses made possible by anonymity, freedom from liability, and lack of oversight. The distinguished scholars assembled in this volume, drawn from law and philosophy, connect the absence of legal oversight with harassment and discrimination. Questioning the simplistic notion that abusive speech and mobocracy are the inevitable outcomes of new technology, they argue that current misuse is the outgrowth of social, technological, and legal choices. Seeing this clearly will help us to be better informed about our options.” (From Publisher’s Website)

“The decade of the 1970’s was a fascinating chapter in the history of American correctional facilities, especially in the northeast. It was as though the social tumult of the 1960’s had contagiously spilled over and into the sub-cultural existence of convicted felons in correctional facilities. The corrections world of the 70’s might be viewed as a resurgence of “Freedom’s Ferment”, Alice Felt Tyler’s brilliant account of Americans’ quest for social reform and utopian life in the first half of the nineteenth century. Among the frightening events of the 70’s were deadly prison riots, especially New York’s Attica Correctional Facility, inmate strikes, correction officer strikes, the infiltration of the deadly AIDS virus among prisoners, and the first murder in USA history of a female correction officer on duty in a maximum security prison.

On a positive note, a few prison systems began to introduce cutting edge, mental health services for inmates within each maximum security prison, based on a community mental health model.” (From Publisher’s Website)

“The legal issues evoked by cross-border crime in Hong Kong and China are sparse and what does exist is mostly in Chinese. This book provides the first systematic, comprehensive, and in-depth analysis of how Chinese, British, Hong Kong, and international law were applied in the “Big Spender” case. Kam C. Wong outlines the respective positions of various parties to the dispute. Part of the case’s fascination involves competing interests, and that political clout counted for more than legal theory.

“Big Spender” may be little known outside Hong Kong and China, but he made history there. It was the first time a Hong Kong legal resident had been prosecuted, tried, and ultimately executed in China for acts largely perpetrated in Hong Kong. The case tested the limits of the one-country, two-systems approach under which Hong Kong and China coexist. It also forced politicians, government officials, and the public in both Hong Kong and China to come to terms with the legal and policy issues related to cross-border crime.

Wong sees the “Big Spender” case as making clear the dire need for both sides to find workable solutions to concurrent jurisdiction, police cooperation, and judicial assistance. Until there is an acceptable arrangement governing the rendition of offenders between Hong Kong and mainland China, the one- country, two-systems formula cannot be stabilized. This is a “case study” in large-scale terms.” (From Publisher’s Website)

“Online Child Sexual Abuse: Grooming, Policing and Child Protection in a Multi-Media World addresses the complex, multi-faceted and, at times, counter-intuitive relationships between online grooming behaviours, risk assessment, police practices, and the actual danger of subsequent abuse in the physical world. Online child sexual abuse has become a high profile and important issue in public life. When children are victims, there is clearly intense public and political interest and concern. Sex offenders are society’s most reviled deviants and the object of seemingly undifferentiated public fear and loathing. This may be evidenced in ongoing efforts to advance legislation, develop police tactics and to educate children and their carers to engage with multi-media and the internet safely. Understanding how sex offenders use the internet and how the police and the government are responding to their behaviour is central to the development of preventative measures. Based on extensive ethnographic research conducted with the police and a specialist paedophile unit, here Elena Marellozzo presents an informed analysis of online child sexual abuse: of the patterns and characteristics of online grooming, and of the challenges and techniques that characterize its policing. Connecting theory, research and practice in the field of policing, social policy, victimology and criminology, this book adds significantly to our understanding and knowledge of the problem of online child sexual abuse, the way in which victims are targeted and how this phenomenon is, and might be, policed.” (From Publisher’s Website)

“How can a society prevent-not deter, not punish-but prevent crime? Criminal justice prevention, commonly called crime control, aims to prevent crime after an initial offence has been commited through anything from an arrest to a death penalty sentence. These traditional means have been frequently examined and their efficacy just as frequently questioned. Promising new forms of crime prevention have emerged and expanded as important components of an overall strategy to reduce crime.

Crime prevention today has developed along three lines: interventions to improve the life chances of children and prevent them from embarking on a life of crime; programs and policies designed to ameliorate the social conditions and institutions that influence offending; and the modification or manipulation of the physical environment, products, or systems to reduce everyday opportunities for crime. Each strategy aims at preventing crime or criminal offending in the first instance – before the act has been committed. Each, importantly, takes place outside of the formal criminal justice system, representing an alternative, perhaps even socially progressive way to reduce crime. The Oxford Handbook of Crime Prevention is a comprehensive, up-to-date, and authoritative review of research on crime prevention. Bringing together top scholars in criminology, public policy, psychology, and sociology, this Handbook includes critical reviews of the main theories that form the basis of crime prevention, evidence-based assessments of the effectiveness of the most important interventions, and cross-cutting essays that examine implementation, evaluation methodology, and public policy.” (From Publisher’s Website)

“ACA’s newest reader features more than 22 leading practitioners’ essays on five themes in offender reentry, in an engaging, easy-to-read format. The first section, Prisoner Reentry, includes a special section on reintegration issues unique to female offenders, collateral consequences, and ways to ease the strain of prisoner reentry. The second, Building Prisoner Reentry Through Collaborative Partnerships, focuses on the resources available through faith-based and other initiatives. In the third section, authors discuss Successful Reentry Work. Part Four, What Makes Reentry Work? discusses families, mental health care, substance-abuse treatment, housing, and other issues. The reader closes with Future Perspectives on what is next for offender reentry. It includes an appendix of additional resources.” (From Publisher’s Website)

“Focusing on discourse generated between 1969 and 2006 in the legal arena and in the print news media, the author takes an historical-interpretive approach to illuminate the role of cultural forces and attendant ideologies in shaping the contours of the phenomenon commonly known as “prison rape.” Locating this work within the sociology of punishment, the author employs frame analysis and draws on two previously unrelated literatures – Garland’s cultural analytic model and constitutive legal scholarship – to produce a genealogy of discourse about sexual assault in carceral settings as manifest in two important arenas of meaning making. In addition to providing a detailed analysis of the often counterintuitive relationship between these discourses over time, the book considers the recent unanimous passage of the Prison Rape Elimination Act (2003) at a highly punitive historical moment in a nation that has traditionally preferred to litigate rather than legislate questions around the treatment of those it incarcerates.” (From Publisher’s Website)

“Yates examines the role of congressional debates in generating support for current prisoner education policy. He explores the 1994 Crime Bill and 2008 Second Chance Act debate transcripts to discover political stakeholders’ attempts to influence and maintain social policy through the creation of legitimizing myths. These include the idea that prisoners are hopelessly flawed or that they have potential only as human capital in the marketplace. Education, when available, is often limited, narrow, and vocational. Counter-hegemonic discourse is also described as well as alternative educational paths such as critical pedagogy. This study indicates that key political leaders with seemingly disparate ideological backgrounds display surprisingly similar attitudes toward prisoners.” (From Publisher’s Website)

“Race, Crime and Resistance offers a thought-provoking account of the problematic construction of crimes as racialized. Critical, empirically grounded and theoretically informed, it unpicks the persistence of concepts of race and ethnicity in perceptions and representations of crime.

In a post-Macpherson, post-9/11 context, criminal justice agencies are having to adapt their responses to criminal behavior across diverse ethnic groups. This book draws on contemporary theory and a range of case studies to consider racial inequalities within the criminal justice system and related organizations. It explores the mechanisms of discrimination and exclusion, and the ensuing processes of mobilization and resistance.

Articulate and sensitive in its approach, the book offers a vital insight into the pressing topic of race, crime and criminality. It clarifies complex ideas through the use of chapter summaries, further reading and study questions. It is essential reading for students and scholars of criminology, race and ethnicity, and sociology.” (From Publisher’s Website)

“Flexon presents an interdisciplinary perspective to the problem of racial disparities in capital case outcomes. In doing so, research from social and cognitive psychology concerning stereotypes and attitude influence were bridged with other empirical findings concerning racial disparities in capital sentencing. Specifically, the psychology of stereotypes and attitudes are used to help explain how racial discrimination can operate undetected among death qualified jurors while producing sentencing discrepancies. The introduction of a potential source of bias information concerning criminal justice and race also is offered. Results indicate that prejudicial ideas are likely operating to influence capital sentencing decisions.” (From Publisher’s Website)

“Criminal and juvenile justice systems in the United States are in crisis. One response to this crisis has been “restorative justice,” in which victims, offenders, and community members meet to reach an agreement about how to “repair the harm” caused by crime Levad explores the “moral imagination” of restorative justice as an alternative framework for understanding and responding to crime, drawing together philosophical virtue ethics inspired by Aristotle’s discussion of equity as the highest form of justice—a form of justice that requires vivid and expansive moral imagining—and an ethnography of restorative justice programs. Levad maintains that because participants in restorative justice practices become adept at vivid and expansive moral imagining, they are better able to realize justice and equity in response to particular cases. She concludes that further institutionalization of restorative justice may help answer some aspects of crises in our criminal and juvenile justice systems.” (From Publisher’s Website)

“There is a broad consensus among scholars that the idea of human rights was a product of the Enlightenment but that a self-conscious and broad-based human rights movement focused on international law only began after World War II. In this narrative, the nineteenth century’s absence is conspicuous–few have considered that era seriously, much less written books on it. But as Jenny Martinez shows in this novel interpretation of the roots of human rights law, the foundation of the movement that we know today was a product of one of the nineteenth century’s central moral causes: the movement to ban the international slave trade. Originating in England in the late eighteenth century, abolitionism achieved remarkable success over the course of the nineteenth century. Martinez focuses in particular on the international admiralty courts, which tried the crews of captured slave ships. The courts, which were based in the Caribbean, West Africa, Cape Town, and Brazil, helped free at least 80,000 Africans from captured slavers between 1807 and 1871. Here then, buried in the dusty archives of admiralty courts, ships’ logs, and the British foreign office, are the foundations of contemporary human rights law: international courts targeting states and non-state transnational actors while working on behalf the world’s most persecuted peoples–captured West Africans bound for the slave plantations of the Americas. Fueled by a powerful thesis and novel evidence, Martinez’s work will reshape the fields of human rights history and international human rights law.” (From Publisher’s Website)

“Sold into Extinction: The Global Trade in Endangered Species focuses attention on the plight of endangered wild flora and fauna as well as the specific illegal acts committed against them that have long and largely been ignored by criminology. The author provides a fresh look at the topic by presenting it within a crime reduction framework, an approach rarely taken by those with traditional criminological or conservation backgrounds, demonstrating how an innovative strategy to reduce illegal market activities can simultaneously further the conservation of these endangered species. International treaties, national and domestic laws, and international policing efforts pertaining to crimes involving endangered species are also examined.” (From Publisher’s Website)

“The 9/11 Commission investigating the September 11, 2001, attacks concluded that the nation’s intelligence community had failed to ‘connect the dots,’ thus ushering in the era of homeland security. As a result state and local fusion centers emerged; however, there is little research available addressing either their activities or effectiveness. Joyal explores these and related issues. Drawing upon the perceptions of those working in and closely with state fusion centers, particularly law enforcement, it appears that fusion centers are successful in improving law enforcement’s ability to collect and share information; however, they continue to struggle with several challenges, namely developing robust analytical capabilities and overcoming persistent subcultural obstacles.” (From Publisher’s Website)