“Formed in the wake of May 1968, the Prisons Information Group (GIP) was a radical resistance movement active in France in the early 1970’s. Theorist Michel Foucault was heavily involved. This book collects interdisciplinary essays that explore the GIP’s resources both for Foucault studies and for prison activism today.” From Publisher’s Website.

“Elgar Advanced Introductions are stimulating and thoughtful introductions to major fields in the social sciences and law, expertly written by the world’s leading scholars. Designed to be accessible yet rigorous, they offer concise and lucid surveys of the substantive and policy issues associated with discrete subject areas.

Organised crime has become a major problem globally. Its negative impact on economies, societies, politics, human rights and security is profound: fraud, money laundering, drug, arms and human trafficking, and collusion with both law enforcement and terrorists, for example, are all significant issues. Yet specialists disagree not only on the scale and nature of organised crime, but even on its definition. This Advanced Introduction to Organised Crime explores these disagreements, examines the nature and causes of contemporary organised crime, and offers constructive suggestions on how to counter it.” From Publisher’s Website.

“Answering the Call is an extraordinary eyewitness account from an unsung hero of the battle for racial equality in America—a battle that, far from ending with the great victories of the civil rights era, saw some of its signal achievements in the desegregation fights of the 1970s and its most notable setbacks in the affirmative action debates that continue into the present in Ferguson, Baltimore, and beyond.

Judge Nathaniel R. Jones’s pathbreaking career was forged in the 1960s: as the first African American assistant U.S. attorney in Ohio; as assistant general counsel of the Kerner Commission; and, beginning in 1969, as general counsel of the NAACP. In that latter role, Jones coordinated attacks against Northern school segregation—a vital, divisive, and poorly understood chapter in the movement for equality—twice arguing in the pivotal U.S. Supreme Court case Bradley v. Milliken, which addressed school desegregation in Detroit. He also led the national response to the attacks against affirmative action, spearheading and arguing many of the signal legal cases of that effort. Judge Jones’s story is an essential corrective to the idea of a post-racial America—his voice and his testimony offering enduring evidence of the unfinished work of ending Jim Crow’s legacy.” From Publisher’s Website.

“Utilizing a restorative, holistic approach to care for residentially treated youth who cause sexual harm works toward improving multiple outcomes, including achievement of treatment goals, academic functioning, recidivism, and overall psychological functioning. When family members and adult community members are included in their treatment, youth who cause sexual harm experience an increase in resiliency and emotional functioning. However, this did not hold true for sibling involvement or trauma-specific interventions. Despite this, findings support the use of an attachment and ecological perspective to comprehensive treatment which extends beyond focusing solely on the sexual offending and includes family and community supports and resolution of unresolved childhood trauma and disrupted relationships.” From Publisher’s Website.

“This book draws upon data collected over an 18 year period with over 1000 boys and young men across Northern Ireland. Providing critical reflections on violence, masculinity and education, it uses the voices and experiences of young men to inform and influence research, practice and policy.” From Publisher’s Website.

“Today the United States leads the world in incarceration rates. The country increasingly relies on the prison system as a “fix” for the regulation of societal issues. Captivity Beyond Prisons is the first full-length book to explicitly link prisons and incarceration to the criminalization of Latina (im)migrants.

Starting in the 1990s, the United States saw tremendous expansion in the number of imprisoned (im)migrants, specifically Latinas/os. Consequently, there was also an increase in the number of deportations. In addition to regulating society, prisons also serve as a reproductive control strategy, both in preventing female inmates from having children and by separating them from their families. With an eye to racialized and gendered technologies of power, Escobar argues that incarcerated Latinas are especially depicted as socially irrecuperable because they are not considered useful within the neoliberal labor market. This perception impacts how they are criminalized, which is not limited to incarceration but also extends to and affects Latina (im)migrants’ everyday lives. Escobar also explores the relationship between the immigrant rights movement and the prison abolition movement, scrutinizing a variety of social institutions working on solutions to social problems that lead to imprisonment.

Accessible to both academics and those in the justice and social service sectors, Escobar’s book pushes readers to consider how, even in radical spaces, unequal power relations can be reproduced by the very entities that attempt to undo them.” From Publisher’s Website.

“He started out as a professional boxer—until he found his true calling as a ruthless contract killer. Hand-picked by Vito Genovese to run the Genovese Family when Vito was sent to prison, Chin raked in more than $100 million for the Genovese family and routinely ordered the murders of mobsters who violated the Mafia code—including John Gotti. At the height of his power, he controlled an underworld empire of close to three hundred made men, making the Genovese Family the most powerful in the U.S.

And yet Vincent “Chin” Gigante was, to all outside appearances, certifiably crazy.

He wandered the streets of Greenwich Village in a ratty bathrobe and slippers. He urinated in public, played pinochle in storefronts, and hid a second family from his wife. On twenty-two occasions, he admitted himself to a mental hospital—evading criminal prosecution while insuring his continued reign as “The Oddfather.” It took nearly thirty years of endless psychiatric evaluations by a parade of puzzled doctors for federal authorities to finally bring him down.” From Publisher’s Website.

“This Handbook presents innovative research that compares different criminal procedure systems by focusing on the mechanisms by which legal systems seek to avoid error, protect rights, ground their legitimacy, expand lay participation in the criminal process and develop alternatives to criminal trials, such as plea bargaining, as well as alternatives to the criminal process as a whole, such as intelligence operations. The criminal procedures examined in this book include those of the United States, Germany, France, Spain, Russia, India, Latin America, Taiwan and Japan, among others.”

“Among the world’s hotly contested, obsessively controlled, and often dangerous borders, none is deadlier than the Mediterranean Sea. Since 2000, at least 25,000 people have lost their lives attempting to reach Italy and the rest of Europe, most by drowning in the Mediterranean. Every day, unauthorized migrants and refugees bound for Europe put their lives in the hands of maritime smugglers, while fishermen, diplomats, priests, bureaucrats, armed forces sailors, and hesitant bystanders waver between indifference and intervention—with harrowing results.

In Crimes of Peace, Maurizio Albahari investigates why the Mediterranean Sea is the world’s deadliest border, and what alternatives could improve this state of affairs. He also examines the dismal conditions of migrants in transit and the institutional framework in which they move or are physically confined. Drawing on his intimate knowledge of places, people, and European politics, Albahari supplements fieldwork in coastal southern Italy and neighboring Mediterranean locales with a meticulous documentary investigation, transforming abstract statistics into names and narratives that place the responsibility for the Mediterranean migration crisis in the very heart of liberal democracy. Global fault lines are scrutinized: between Europe, Africa, and the Middle East; military and humanitarian governance; detention and hospitality; transnational crime and statecraft; the universal law of the sea and the thresholds of a globalized yet parochial world. Crimes of Peace illuminates crucial questions of sovereignty and rights: for migrants trying to enter Europe along the Mediterranean shore, the answers are a matter of life or death.” From Publisher’s Website.

“This book represents a critical examination of key aspects of crime and criminal justice in Northern Ireland which will have resonance elsewhere. It considers the core aspects of criminal justice policy-making in Northern Ireland which are central to the process of post-conflict transition, including reform of policing, judicial decision-making and correctional services such as probation and prisons. It examines contemporary trends in criminal justice in Northern Ireland as related to various dimensions of crime relating to female offenders, young offenders, sexual and violent offenders, race and criminal justice, community safety and restorative justice. The book also considers the extent to which crime and criminal justice issues in Northern Ireland are being affected by the broader processes of ‘policy transfer’, globalisation and transnationalism and the extent to which criminal justice in Northern Ireland is divergent from the other jurisdictions in the United Kingdom. Written by leading international authorities in the field, the book offers a snapshot of the cutting edge of critical thinking in criminal justice practice and transitional justice contexts.” From Publisher’s Website.

“A key part of the evidence base for practitioners and policymakers includes the costs of interventions and the returns yielded from incurring those costs. However, to date crime reduction work economic analyses have been uncommon and even when undertaken have been partial, technically weak and insufficiently informed by economic theory. This book explains what economic analysis is, why it is important, and forms it can take. Costs are important in all forms of economic analysis although their collection tends to be partial and inadequate in capturing key information. A practical guide to the collection is therefore also provided. The book will be of great interest to students in economics and advanced students in policing and crime reduction as well as to analysts and decision makers in policing and crime reduction.” From Publisher’s Website.

“When the Founders penned the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, it was not difficult to identify the “persons, houses, papers, and effects” they meant to protect; nor was it hard to understand what “unreasonable searches and seizures” were. The Fourth Amendment was intended to stop the use of general warrants and writs of assistance and applied primarily to protect the home. Flash forward to a time of digital devices, automobiles, the war on drugs, and a Supreme Court dominated by several decades of the jurisprudence of crime control, and the legal meaning of everything from “effects” to “seizures” has dramatically changed. Michael C. Gizzi and R. Craig Curtis make sense of these changes in The Fourth Amendment in Flux. The book traces the development and application of search and seizure law and jurisprudence over time, with particular emphasis on decisions of the Roberts Court.

Cell phones, GPS tracking devices, drones, wiretaps, the Patriot Act, constantly changing technology, and a political culture that emphasizes crime control create new challenges for Fourth Amendment interpretation and jurisprudence. This work exposes the tensions caused by attempts to apply pretechnological legal doctrine to modern problems of digital privacy. In their analysis of the Roberts Court’s relevant decisions, Gizzi and Curtis document the different approaches to the law that have been applied by the justices since the Obama nominees took their seats on the court. Their account, combining law, political science, and history, provides insight into the courts small group dynamics, and traces changes regarding search and seizure law in the opinions of one of its longest serving members, Justice Antonin Scalia.

At a time when issues of privacy are increasingly complicated by technological advances, this overview and analysis of Fourth Amendment law is especially welcome—an invaluable resource as we address the enduring question of how to balance freedom against security in the context of the challenges of the twenty-first century.” From Publisher’s Website.

“Human trafficking involves the violation of societal norms and often activates criminal justice responses including police, courts, juvenile justice, and child protective services. Due to the complex nature of human trafficking, some behaviours that facilitate human trafficking cannot be easily identified and assigned to conventional crime categories. As a result of this complexity, criminologists have yet to fully explore the problem of human trafficking. In recent years, however, there has been a growing interest among criminologists in human trafficking and its intersections with the criminal justice system and overlap with conventional types of crime. This edited collection of research aims to underscore these intersections in order to further improve the description, explanation, and prevention of human trafficking. Research contained in this book provides a step forward by describing police perceptions and responses to human trafficking while also providing insight into victims with reports on victim perceptions of their treatment by the police. Most notably, this volume has moved research on human trafficking beyond descriptive frequencies to sophisticated multivariate analyses. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Crime and Justice.” From Publisher’s Website.

“What makes someone responsible for a crime and therefore liable tof punishment under the criminal law? Modern lawyers will quickly and easily point to the criminal law’s requirement of concurrent actus reus and mens rea, doctrines of the criminal law which ensure that someone will only be found criminally responsible if they have committed criminal conduct while possessing capacities of understanding, awareness, and self-control at the time of offense. Any notion of criminal responsibility based on the character of the offender, meaning an implication of criminality based on reputation or the assumed disposition of the person, would seem to today’s criminal lawyer a relic of the 18th Century. In this volume, Nicola Lacey demonstrates that the practice of character-based patterns of attribution was not laid to rest in 18th Century criminal law, but is alive and well in contemporary English criminal responsibility-attribution.

Building upon the analysis of criminal responsibility in her previous book, Women, Crime, and Character, Lacey investigates the changing nature of criminal responsibility in English law from the mid-18th Century to the early 21st Century. Through a combined philosophical, historical, and socio-legal approach, this volume evidences how the theory behind criminal responsibility has shifted over time. The character and outcome responsibility which dominated criminal law in the 18th Century diminished in ideological importance in the following two centuries, when the idea of responsibility as founded in capacity was gradually established as the core of criminal law. Lacey traces the historical trajectory of responsibility into the 21st Century, arguing that ideas of character responsibility and the discourse of responsibility as founded in risk are enjoying a renaissance in the modern criminal law. These ideas of criminal responsibility are explored through an examination of the institutions through which they are produced, interpreted and executed; the interests which have shaped both doctrines and institutions; and the substantive social functions which criminal law and punishment have been expected to perform at different points in history.” From Publisher’s Website.

“Islamist terrorism in Europe is on the rise, as evidenced by the Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris, the grisly beheading of a UK serviceman walking the streets of London in 2013, and the shooting spree in Toulouse and Montauban. Whereas the death of Osama bin Laden and the advent of the ‘Arab Spring’ fed expectations that international jihadism was a spent force, Europe has faced an increase in terrorist plots over the past few years. In addition, there are growing security concerns over the fallout of the Syrian conflict, and its sizeable contingents of battle-hardened European fighters.

This book provides a comprehensive account of the rise of jihadist militancy in Europe and offers a detailed background for understanding the current and future threat. Based on a wide range of new primary sources, it traces the phenomenon back to the late 1980s, and the formation of jihadist support networks in Europe in the early 1990s. Combining analytical rigor with empirical richness, the book offers a comprehensive account of patterns of terrorist cell formation and plots between 1995 and 2012. In contrast to existing research which has emphasized social explanations, failed immigration and homegrown radicalism, this book highlights the entrepreneurial role of former Arab-Afghan veterans and their associated organizations and ideological agendas.” From Publisher’s Website.

“Juvenile Offenders and Guns explores how and why twenty-five incarcerated young men of color acquired and used guns, and how guns made them feel. Guns have multiple meanings and serve many purposes for these youth as they attempt to construct a capable masculinity in their worlds, growing up in homes where money is often scarce and fathers absent.” From Publisher’s Website.

“What should be done with minors who kill, maim, defile, and destroy the lives of others? The state of Texas deals with some of its most serious and violent youthful offenders through “determinate sentencing,” a unique sentencing structure that blends parts of the juvenile and adult justice systems. Once adjudicated via determinate sentencing, offenders are first incarcerated in the Texas Youth Commission (TYC). As they approach age eighteen, they are either transferred to the Texas prison system to serve the remainder of their original determinate sentence or released from TYC into Texas’s communities.

The first long-term study of determinate sentencing in Texas, Lost Causes examines the social and delinquent histories, institutionalization experiences, and release and recidivism outcomes of more than 3,000 serious and violent juvenile offenders who received such sentences between 1987 and 2011. The authors seek to understand the process, outcomes, and consequences of determinate sentencing, which gave serious and violent juvenile offenders one more chance to redeem themselves or to solidify their place as the next generation of adult prisoners in Texas. The book’s findings—that about 70 percent of offenders are released to the community during their most crime-prone years instead of being transferred to the Texas prison system and that about half of those released continue to reoffend for serious crimes—make Lost Causes crucial reading for all students and practitioners of juvenile and criminal justice.” From Publisher’s Website.

“Rape in marriage is a global problem affecting millions of women — it is still legal in many countries and was only criminalized in all U.S. states in 1993. In much of the world, marital rape is too often understood as an oxymoron due to the fact that the ideology of permanent consent underlies the legal and cultural definitions of sex in marriage. From Vietnam to Guatemala to South Africa and beyond, this volume examines how cultural, legal, public health, and human rights policies and practices impact intimate partner violence. While legal and cultural conceptions of marital rape vary widely — from criminal assault to wifely duty — this volume offers evidence from different societies that forced sex undermines the physical and psychological well-being of the women who experience it, regardless of their cultural context.

Globally, the nature of marriage is changing and so are notions of individual choice, love, intimacy, and rigid gender roles. Marital Rape documents wide ranging and fluid understandings of sex, consent, and rape in marriage; such an array of perspectives demands an international and interdisciplinary approach to the study of sex and gender-based violence. This text brings together an international group of scholars from the fields of anthropology, sociology, criminology, law, public health, and human rights; their work points to the importance of understanding the lived experience of sexual violence for the design of effective and culturally sensitive public policy and practice.” From Publisher’s Website.

“Scholars and lay persons alike routinely express concern about the capacity of democratic publics to respond rationally to emotionally charged issues such as crime, particularly when race and class biases are invoked. This is especially true in the United States, which has the highest imprisonment rate in the developed world, the result, many argue, of too many opportunities for elected officials to be highly responsive to public opinion. Limiting the power of democratic publics, in this view, is an essential component of modern governance precisely because of the risk that broad democratic participation can encourage impulsive, irrational and even murderous demands.

These claims about panic-prone mass publics–about the dangers of ‘mob rule’–are widespread and are the central focus of Lisa L. Miller’s The Myth of Mob Rule. Are democratic majorities easily drawn to crime as a political issue, even when risk of violence is low? Do they support ‘rational alternatives’ to wholly repressive practices, or are they essentially the bellua multorum capitum, the “many-headed beast,” winnowing problems of crime and violence down to inexorably harsh retributive justice?

Drawing on a comparative case study of three countries–the U.S., the U.K. and the Netherlands–The Myth of Mob Rule explores when and with what consequences crime becomes a politically salient issue. Using extensive data from multiple sources, the analyses reverses many of the accepted causal claims in the literature and finds that: serious violence is an important underlying condition for sustained public and political attention to crime; the United States has high levels of both crime and punishment in part because it has failed, in racially stratified ways, to produce fundamental collective goods that insulate modern democratic citizens from risk of violence, a consequence of a democratic deficit, not a democratic surplus; and finally, countries with multi-party parliamentary systems are more responsive to mass publics than the U.S. on crime and that such responsiveness promotes protection from a range of social risks, including from excessive violence and state repression.” From Publisher’s Website.

Abingdon, Oxon, UK; New York: Routledge, 2014. 340p.

“This study provides a comprehensive critique – forensic, historical, and theoretical –
of the moral panic paradigm, using empirically grounded thnographic research to argue
argue that the panic paradigm suffers from fundamental flaws that make it a myth
rather than a viable academic perspective.” From Publisher’s Website.

“To many, Newark seems a profound symbol of postwar liberalism’s failings: an impoverished, deeply divided city where commitments to integration and widespread economic security went up in flames during the 1967 riots. While it’s true that these failings shaped Newark’s postwar landscape and economy, as Mark Krasovic shows, that is far from the whole story.

The Newark Frontier shows how, during the Great Society, urban liberalism adapted and grew, defining itself less by centralized programs and ideals than by administrative innovation and the small-scale, personal interactions generated by community action programs, investigative commissions, and police-community relations projects. Paying particular attention to the fine-grained experiences of Newark residents, Krasovic reveals that this liberalism was rooted in an ethic of experimentation and local knowledge. He illustrates this with stories of innovation within government offices, the dynamic encounters between local activists and state agencies, and the unlikely alliances among nominal enemies. Krasovic makes clear that postwar liberalism’s eventual fate had as much to do with the experiments waged in Newark as it did with the violence that rocked the city in the summer of 1967.” From Publisher’s Website.

“In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries imprisoned black women faced wrenching forms of gendered racial terror and heinous structures of economic exploitation. Subjugated as convict laborers and forced to serve additional time as domestic workers before they were allowed their freedom, black women faced a pitiless system of violence, terror, and debasement. Drawing upon black feminist criticism and a diverse array of archival materials, Sarah Haley uncovers imprisoned women’s brutalization in local, county, and state convict labor systems, while also illuminating the prisoners’ acts of resistance and sabotage, challenging ideologies of racial capitalism and patriarchy and offering alternative conceptions of social and political life.

A landmark history of black women’s imprisonment in the South, this book recovers stories of the captivity and punishment of black women to demonstrate how the system of incarceration was crucial to organizing the logics of gender and race, and constructing Jim Crow modernity.” From Publisher’s Website.

“Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) are elected representatives whose role is to ensure that police forces in England and Wales are running effectively. Intended to bring a public voice to policing and hold the police to account, this controversial role also controls budgets and strategic planning.

Drawing on unprecedented access to PCCs and their chief officer teams, Bryn Caless and Jane Owens performed confidential interviews with both sides and reveal in this book the innermost workings of PCCs’ relationships with the police, media, partners, and the public. The authors also analyze the election process (in which some PCCs have been elected by the lowest voter turnout ever in the United Kingdom) and consider the future of this politically contested role. Amid ongoing international debates over police accountability, this fascinating look at the impact of PCCs on policing will be essential reading for PCCs themselves, chief officers, police officers, and police trainers, as well as academics, students, and researchers in criminology and policing.” From Publisher’s Website.

“This book explores the relationship between the Irish police and ethnic minorities, made particularly pressing by the rapid ethnic diversification of Irish society. It addresses the current deficit in knowledge of this area by exploring how Irish police officers conceive of, talk about, and interact with Ireland’s immigrant minority communities.” From Publisher’s Website.

“The United States deported nearly two million illegal immigrants during the first five years of the Obama presidency—more than during any previous administration. President Obama stands accused by activists of being “deporter in chief.” Yet despite efforts to rebuild what many see as a broken system, the president has not yet been able to convince Congress to pass new immigration legislation, and his record remains rooted in a political landscape that was created long before his election. Deportation numbers have actually been on the rise since 1996, when two federal statutes sought to delegate a portion of the responsibilities for immigration enforcement to local authorities.

Policing Immigrants traces the transition of immigration enforcement from a traditionally federal power exercised primarily near the US borders to a patchwork system of local policing that extends throughout the country’s interior. Since federal authorities set local law enforcement to the task of bringing suspected illegal immigrants to the federal government’s attention, local responses have varied. While some localities have resisted the work, others have aggressively sought out unauthorized immigrants, often seeking to further their own objectives by putting their own stamp on immigration policing. Tellingly, how a community responds can best be predicted not by conditions like crime rates or the state of the local economy but rather by the level of conservatism among local voters. What has resulted, the authors argue, is a system that is neither just nor effective—one that threatens the core crime-fighting mission of policing by promoting racial profiling, creating fear in immigrant communities, and undermining the critical community-based function of local policing.” From Publisher’s Website.

“American conservatism rose hand-in-hand with the growth of mass incarceration. For decades, conservatives deployed “tough on crime” rhetoric to attack liberals as out-of-touch elitists who coddled criminals while the nation spiraled toward disorder. As a result, conservatives have been the motive force in building our vast prison system. Indeed, expanding the number of Americans under lock and key was long a point of pride for politicians on the right – even as the U.S. prison population eclipsed international records.

Over the last few years, conservatives in Washington, D.C. and in bright-red states like Georgia and Texas, have reversed course, and are now leading the charge to curb prison growth. In Prison Break, David Dagan and Steve Teles explain how this striking turn of events occurred, how it will affect mass incarceration, and what it teaches us about achieving policy breakthroughs in our polarized age. Combining insights from law, sociology, and political science, Teles and Dagan will offer the first comprehensive account of this major political shift. In a challenge to the conventional wisdom, they argue that the fiscal pressures brought on by recession are only a small part of the explanation for the conservatives’ shift, over-shadowed by Republicans’ increasing anti-statism, the waning efficacy of “tough on crime” politics and the increasing engagement of evangelicals. These forces set the stage for a small cadre of conservative leaders to reframe criminal justice in terms of redeeming wayward souls and rolling back government.

These developments have created the potential to significantly reduce mass incarceration, but only if reformers on both the right and the left play their cards right. As Dagan and Teles stress, there is also a broader lesson in this story about the conditions for cross-party cooperation in our polarized age. Partisan identity, they argue, generally precedes position-taking, and policy breakthroughs are unlikely to come by “reaching across the aisle,” promoting “compromise,” or appealing to “expert opinion.” Instead, change happens when political movements redefine their own orthodoxies for their own reasons. As Dagan and Teles show, outsiders can assist in this process – and they played a crucial role in the case of criminal justice – but they cannot manufacture it. This book will not only reshape our understanding of conservatism and American penal policy, but also force us to reconsider the drivers of policy innovation in the context of American politics.” From Publisher’s Website.

“It has often been said that information is power. This is more true in the information age than ever. The book profiles the tools used by criminal law to protect confidential information. It deals with the essence of information, the varieties of confidential information, and the basic models for its protection within the context of the Internet and social networks.

Eli Lederman examines the key prohibitions against collecting protected information, and against using, disclosing, and disseminating it without authorization. The investigation cuts across a broad subject matter to discuss and analyze key topics such as trespassing and peeping, the human body as a source of information, computer trespassing, tracking and collecting personal information in the public space, surveillance, privileged communications, espionage and state secrets, trade secrets, personal information held by others, and profiling and sexting.

Infocrime will appeal to graduate and undergraduate scholars and academics in the legal arena, in law schools and schools of communication, and to practicing lawyers with an interest in legal theory and a concern for the protection of the personal realm in a world of increasingly invasive technologies.” From Publisher’s Website.

“In what has been called the Dred Scott decision of our times, the US Supreme Court found in McCleskey v. Kemp that evidence of overwhelming racial disparities in the capital punishment process could not be admitted in individual capital cases—in effect institutionalizing a racially unequal system of criminal justice.

Exploring the enduring legacy of this radical decision nearly three decades later, the authors of Race and the Death Penalty examine the persistence of racial discrimination in the practice of capital punishment, the dynamics that drive it, and the human consequences of both.” From Publisher’s Website.

“EU criminal law is one of the fastest evolving, but also challenging, policy areas and fields of law. This Handbook provides a comprehensive and advanced analysis of EU criminal law as a structurally and constitutionally unique policy area and field of research.

With contributions from leading experts, focusing on their respective fields of research, the book is preoccupied with defining cross-border or ‘Euro-crimes’, while allowing Member States to sanction criminal behaviour through mutual cooperation. It contains a web of institutions, agencies and external liaisons, which ensure the protection of EU citizens from serious crime, while protecting the fundamental rights of suspects and criminals.

Students and scholars of EU criminal law will benefit from the comprehensive research present in this Handbook. National and EU policy-makers, as well as judges, defence lawyers and human rights lawyers will find the analysis of current legal action, combined with proposed solutions, useful to their work.” From Publisher’s Website.

“Zhang argues that the Chinese Criminal Justice syste constitutes rule of bureaucracy rather than rule of law. The work looks into the underlying causes of the lack of genuine rule of law in China, and identifies the major barrier: an omnipotent political bureaucracy. The long history of Chinese Mandarin bureaucracy has given rise to the habitual practice of relying on executive authority for justice rather than providing for the pursuit of justice through a system of courts. The judiciary in China has to cope with both indirect and direct challenges from the all political bureaucracy, and it lacks the social and institutional standing to provide any genuine measure of judicial independence in defense of the rule of law. While change is taking place in the direction of judicial independence and the rule of law, that change is slow in and progress often comes at great cost to those brave lawyers fighting for it.” From Publisher’s Website.

“Sex crimes, such as rape, child sexual abuse, and intimate partner violence, are increasingly transnational in nature, introducing unique cross-border and cross-cultural challenges for police, the courts, and the law. Policy makers and practitioners are in need of a resource that explores the incidence, prosecution, and treatment of sexual crimes across different countries and cultures.

This book is the first to investigate all aspects of sexual crimes and the policy and management initiatives developed to address them from a transnational, global perspective. Introducing an array of tools for reducing the prevalence and consequences of sex crimes, this volume brings together leading scholars in criminology, criminal justice, social work, and law to discuss topics ranging from sex trafficking and sex tourism to pornography, cyberstalking, and sexual abuse in the military and the Catholic church. Case studies track the reporting of these crimes, the methods used to interview victims and perpetrators, and the policies enacted to punish those involved.” From Publisher’s Website.

“During the early twentieth century, a diverse group of African American women carved out unique niches for themselves within New York City’s expansive informal economy. LaShawn Harris illuminates the labor patterns and economic activity of three perennials within this kaleidoscope of underground industry: sex work, numbers running for gambling enterprises, and the supernatural consulting business.

Mining police and prison records, newspaper accounts, and period literature, Harris teases out answers to essential questions about these women and their working lives. She also offers a surprising revelation. Harris argues that the underground economy catalyzed working-class black women’s creation of the employment opportunities, occupational identities, and survival strategies that provided them with financial stability and a sense of labor autonomy and mobility. At the same time, Harris shows, urban black women strove for economic and social prospects and pleasures, and in the process experienced the conspicuous and hidden dangers associated with newfound labor opportunities.” From Publisher’s Website.

“Sexual assault has been an aspect of the U.S. military historically and is today widely recognized as a significant problem with far-reaching repercussions. How does sexual assault negatively impact not only the victims themselves but also the U.S. military’s strength, readiness, and morale? This book answers these questions and documents the problems with reporting and prosecuting sexual assault complaints within our armed forces, examines the current policy and laws to identify what changes are needed, and analyzes recent efforts to prevent sexual assault.

Author Rosemarie Skaine introduces the subject with a historical perspective that covers women, men, gays and lesbians, and non-military personnel as the subjects of sexual assault and provides readers with clear definitions of sexual harassment and sexual assault. The chapters explain how sexual assault negatively affects the military’s performance as a whole, thereby serving to undermine national security; and covers preventative approaches and legislation intended to change the current military culture. The book also includes a bibliography, tables of key figures, and footnotes and endnotes that fully document the data presented.” From Publisher’s Website.

“In the first-ever comprehensive analysis of violence between slaves in the antebellum South, Jeff Forret challenges persistent notions of slave communities as sites of unwavering harmony and solidarity. Though existing scholarship shows that intraracial black violence did not reach high levels until after Reconstruction, contemporary records bear witness to its regular presence among enslaved populations. Slave against Slave explores the roots of and motivations for such violence and the ways in which slaves, masters, churches, and civil and criminal laws worked to hold it in check. Far from focusing on violence alone, Forret’s work also adds depth to our understanding of morality among the enslaved, revealing how slaves sought to prevent violence and punish those who engaged in it.

Forret mines a vast array of slave narratives, slaveholders’ journals, travelers’ accounts, and church and court records from across the South to approximate the prevalence of slave-against-slave violence prior to the Civil War. A diverse range of motives for these conflicts emerges, from tensions over status differences, to disagreements originating at work and in private, to discord relating to the slave economy and the web of debts that slaves owed one another, to courtship rivalries, marital disputes, and adulterous affairs. Forret also uncovers the role of explicitly gendered violence in bondpeople’s constructions of masculinity and femininity, suggesting a system of honor among slaves that would have been familiar to southern white men and women, had they cared to acknowledge it.

Though many generations of scholars have examined violence in the South as perpetrated by and against whites, the internal clashes within the slave quarters have remained largely unexplored. Forret’s analysis of intraracial slave conflicts in the Old South examines narratives of violence in slave communities, opening a new line of inquiry into the study of American slavery.” From Publisher’s Website.

“In the host clubs of Tokyo’s Kabuki-chō red-light district, ambitious young men seek their fortunes by selling love, romance, companionship, and sometimes sex to female consumers for exorbitant sums of money. Staged Seduction reveals a world where all intimacies and feigned feelings are fair game for the hosts who employ feathered bangs, polished nails, fine European suits, and the sensitivity of the finest salesmen to create a fantasy for wealthy women seeking an escape from the everyday.

Akiko Takeyama’s investigation of this beguiling underground “love business” provides an intimate window into Japanese host clubs and the lives of hosts, clients, club owners, and managers. The club is a place where fantasies are pursued and the art of seduction isn’t merely about romance; a complex set of transactions emerges. Like a casino of love, the host club is a site of desperation, aspiration, and hope, in which both hosts and clients are eager to roll the dice. Takeyama reveals the aspirational mode not only of the host club, but also of a Japanese society built on the commercialization of aspiration, seducing its citizens out of the present and into a future where hopes and dreams are imaginable—and billions of dollars can be made.” From Publisher’s Website.

“Applying cutting-edge psychiatric theories to an analysis of online Taliban literature in four languages, Neil Krishan Aggarwal constructs a game-changing narrative of the organization’s broad appeal and worldview.

Aggarwal, a cultural psychiatrist, focuses on the Taliban’s creation of culture, evoking religion in Arabic and English writings, nationalism in Dari sources, and regionalism in Urdu texts. The group also promotes a specific form of argumentation, citing religious scriptures in Arabic works, canonical poets in Dari and Urdu writings, and scholars and journalists in English publications. Aggarwal shows how the Taliban categorize all Muslims as members and all non-Muslims as outsiders; how they convince Muslims of the need for violence; and how they apply the insider/outsider dichotomy to foreign policy. By understanding these themes, Aggarwal argues, we can craft better counter-messaging strategies.”From Publisher’s Website.

“Often defined as a mostly southern phenomenon, racist violence existed everywhere. Brent M. S. Campney explodes the notion of the Midwest as a so-called land of freedom with an in-depth study of assaults both active and threatened faced by African Americans in post–Civil War Kansas.

Campney’s capacious definition of white-on-black violence encompasses not only sensational demonstrations of white power like lynchings and race riots, but acts of threatened violence and the varied forms of pervasive routine violence–property damage, rape, forcible ejection from towns–used to intimidate African Americans. As he shows, such methods were a cornerstone of efforts to impose and maintain white supremacy. Yet Campney’s broad consideration of racist violence also lends new insights into the ways people resisted threats. African Americans spontaneously hid fugitives and defused lynch mobs while also using newspapers and civil rights groups to lay the groundwork for forms of institutionalized opposition that could fight racist violence through the courts and via public opinion.

Ambitious and provocative, This Is Not Dixie rewrites fundamental narratives on mob action, race relations, African American resistance, and racism’s grim past in the heartland.” From Publisher’s Website.

“It’s often assumed that criminologists know a great deal about violent offenders, but in fact, there is little consensus about what distinguishes them from those who commit less serious crimes. There is even less agreement about whether violent offenders can be distinguished from chronic, nonviolent offenders at all. The challenging question remains: why do some individuals commit violent offenses while so many others restrict themselves to nonviolent ones?

Thugs and Thieves argues that understanding the differential etiology of violence constitutes a fundamental chasm in the criminological literature. In the introductory chapters, the authors lay out the important theoretical and methodological deficiencies that have obstructed the production of a clear set of findings to answer this question. The authors then share a highly nuanced interpretation of child development research, focused on outlining important features of early life likely to be important in the etiology of serious physical aggression and violence. They also discuss criminal motivation and contextual factors in detail. Together, these lay the foundation for the selection of “good prospects” for predicting violent offending. Separate chapters are devoted to intelligence and executive function; academic achievement and other school factors; parental attachment; parental warmth and rejection; child abuse; poverty; communities; and substance abuse. Each chapter provides a comprehensive and systematic review of the existing evidence on the topic at hand through the “differential etiology” lens, to restructure what we already know from the empirical literature. As such, the book provides a new way forward for understanding this important issue and also serves as a platform for generating hypothesis tests, directing future research, and better designing anti-violence policy. Thugs and Thieves will be of interest to criminologists, psychologists, sociologists, students, policy makers, lawmakers, and readers interested in violence and aggression.” From Publisher’s Website.

“Examining more than 160 cases involving such charges as homicide, child abuse, and drug trafficking, the authors explore systemic failures in both policing and prosecution. They also highlight the intersecting roles of gender and race. Demonstrating how women encounter circumstances that are qualitatively different than those of men, they illuminate unique challenges facing women in the criminal justice system.” From Publisher’s Website.

“Widespread youth unemployment is rapidly becoming a major—and seemingly endemic—problem around the world. And, increasingly, young people themselves are being blamed, their nonparticipation in the workforce criminalized. Ross Fergusson here mounts a powerful critique of current approaches to youth unemployment, reexamining its causes and consequences from a wide range of perspectives and revealing the structural and cultural problems that underlie it. It will be essential for anyone working with or trying to address the problems of youth today.” From Publisher’s Website.

“Trafficked children are portrayed by the media—and even by child welfare specialists—as hapless victims who are forced to migrate from a poor country to the United States, where they serve as sex slaves. But as Elzbieta M. Gozdziak reveals in Trafficked Children in the United States, the picture is far more complex.

Basing her observations on research with 140 children, most of them girls, from countries all over the globe, Gozdziak debunks many myths and uncovers the realities of the captivity, rescue, and rehabilitation of trafficked children. She shows, for instance, that none of the girls and boys portrayed in this book were kidnapped or physically forced to accompany their traffickers. In many instances, parents, or smugglers paid by family members, brought the girls to the U.S. Without exception, the girls and boys in this study believed they were coming to the States to find employment and in some cases educational opportunities.

Following them from the time they were trafficked to their years as young adults, Gozdziak gives the children a voice so they can offer their own perspective on rebuilding their lives—getting jobs, learning English, developing friendships, and finding love. Gozdziak looks too at how the children’s perspectives compare to the ideas of child welfare programs, noting that the children focus on survival techniques while the institutions focus, not helpfully, on vulnerability and pathology. Gozdziak concludes that the services provided by institutions are in effect a one-size-fits-all, trauma-based model, one that ignores the diversity of experience among trafficked children. “ From Publisher’s Website.

“Victim’s Stories and the Advancement of Human Rights takes on a set of questions suggested by the worldwide persistence of human rights abuse and the prevalence of victims’ stories in human rights campaigns, truth commissions, and international criminal tribunals: What conceptions of victims are presumed in contemporary human rights discourse? How do conventional narrative templates fail victims of human rights abuse and resist raising novel human rights issues? What is empathy, and how can victims frame their stories to overcome empathetic obstacles and promote commitment to human rights? How can victims’ stories be used ethically in the service of human rights?

The book addresses these concerns by analyzing the rhetorical resources for and constraints on victims’ ability to articulate their stories and by clarifying how their stories can contribute to enlarged understandings of human rights protections and deepened commitments to realizing human rights. It theorizes the normative content that victims’ stories can convey and the bearing of that normative content on human rights. Throughout the book, published victims’ stories-including stories of torture, slavery, genocide, rape in wartime, and child soldiering-are analyzed in conjunction with philosophical arguments. This book mobilizes philosophical theory to illuminate victims’ stories and appeals to victims’ stories to enrich the philosophy of human rights.” From Publisher’s Website.

“What drives some to violence against the state while others, living in the same place at the same time, turn to nonviolent resistance? And in this age of Islamist terrorism and Islamophobia, does the practice of Islam encourage violence? Structural explanations of violence fail to answer these questions. In Whether to Kill, Stephanie Dornschneider applies the methodology of cognitive mapping to study the beliefs that motivate individuals to take up arms or engage in nonviolent activism. Using a double-paired comparison with control groups, Dornschneider conducted extensive ethnographic interviews with violent and nonviolent Muslims and non-Muslims in both Egypt and Germany, speaking with them about their lives and contexts and what drove them to resist the state. After coding their responses into cognitive maps, which make visible the connections between an individual’s beliefs and decisions for behavior, Dornschneider used a computer model to analyze the huge number of possible factors driving people to choose or not choose violence, eventually identifying ten reasoning processes by which violent individuals can be differentiated from nonviolent ones.

Whether to Kill takes a new approach to understanding terrorism. Through first-person accounts of those involved in both violent and nonviolent action against the state—from members of groups as diverse as the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Jihad, the Socialist German Student Union, and the Red Army Faction—then analyzing that data via cognitive mapping, Stephanie Dornschneider has opened up new perspectives on what drives people to—or away from—the use of political violence.” From Publisher’s Website.

”We live in an age saturated with surveillance. Our personal and public lives are increasingly on display for governments, merchants, employers, hackers—and the merely curious—to see. In Windows into the Soul, Gary T. Marx, a central figure in the rapidly expanding field of surveillance studies, argues that surveillance itself is neither good nor bad, but that context and comportment make it so.

In this landmark book, Marx sums up a lifetime of work on issues of surveillance and social control by disentangling and parsing the empirical richness of watching and being watched. Using fictional narratives as well as the findings of social science, Marx draws on decades of studies of covert policing, computer profiling, location and work monitoring, drug testing, caller identification, and much more, Marx gives us a conceptual language to understand the new realities and his work clearly emphasizes the paradoxes, trade-offs, and confusion enveloping the field. Windows into the Soul shows how surveillance can penetrate our social and personal lives in profound, and sometimes harrowing, ways. Ultimately, Marx argues, recognizing complexity and asking the right questions is essential to bringing light and accountability to the darker, more iniquitous corners of our emerging surveillance society.” From Publisher’s Website.