Books Received
September 2021

Listed below are books received for review over the last two months. Entries include publishing information as well as a description of the book. Unless otherwise stated, the book description is taken from the publisher’s website or the book jacket. Selected titles from this list will be chosen for a full review in forthcoming issues of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books. Previous books received are available from the links below.

Al-Qaeda’s Revenge: The 2004 Madrid Train Bombings, by Fernando Reinares. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017 Hardcopy/ 2021 Paperback edition.

“In Al-Qaeda’s Revenge: The 2004 Madrid Train Bombings, Fernando Reinares tells the story of “3/11” – the March 11, 2004, bombings of commuter trains in Madrid, which killed 191 people and injured more than 1,800. He examines the development of an al-Qaeda conspiracy in Spain from the 1990s through the formation of the 3/11 bombing network beginning in March 2002, and discusses the preparations for and fallout from the attacks. Reinares draws on judicial, police, and intelligence documents to which he had privileged access, as well as on personal interviews with officials in Spain and elsewhere. His full analysis links the Madrid bombings to al-Qaeda’s senior leadership and unveils connections between 3/11 and 9/11.” From Publisher’s Website.

Carceral Con: The Deceptive Terrain of Criminal Justice Reform, by Kay Whitlock and Nancy A. Hetizeg. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2021.

“A critical examination of how contemporary criminal justice reforms expand rather than shrink structurally violent systems of policing, surveillance, and carceral control in the United States.

Public opposition to the structural racist, gendered, and economic violence that fuels the criminal legal system is reaching a critical mass. Ignited by popular uprisings, protests, and campaigns against state violence, demands for transformational change have escalated. In response, a now deeply entrenched so-called bipartisan industry has staked its claim to the reform terrain. Representing itself as a sensible bridge across bitterly polarized political divides and party lines, the bipartisan reform industry has sought to control the nature and scope of local, state, and federal reforms. Along the way, it creates an expanding web of neoliberal public-private partnerships, with the promotion and implementation of efforts managed by billionaires, public officials, policy factories, foundations, universities, and mega nonprofit organizations. Yet many bipartisan reforms constitute deceptive sleights of hand that not only fail to produce justice but actively reproduce structural racial and economic inequality.

Carceral Con pulls the veil away from the reform public relations machine, providing a riveting overview of the repressive US carceral state and a critical examination of the reform terrain, quagmires, and choices that face us. This book vividly illustrates how contemporary bipartisan reform agendas leave the structural apparatus of mass incarceration intact while widening the net of carceral control and surveillance. Readers are also provided with information and insights useful for examining the likely impacts of reforms today and in the future. What can we learn from reforms of the past? What strategies hold most promise for dismantling structural inequalities, corporate control, and state violence? What approaches will reduce reliance on carceral control and also bring about community safety? Utilizing an abolitionist lens, Carceral Con makes the compelling case for liberatory approaches to envisioning and creating a just society.” From Publisher’s Website.

The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream: The Hunt for a Victorian Era Serial Killer, by Dean Jobb. New York: Algonquin Publishing, 2021.

“When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals,” Sherlock Holmes observed during one of his most baffling investigations. “He has nerve and he has knowledge.” In the span of fifteen years, Dr. Thomas Neill Cream murdered as many as ten people in the United States, Britain, and Canada, a death toll with almost no precedent. Poison was his weapon of choice. Largely forgotten today, this villain was as brazen as the notorious Jack the Ripper.

Structured around the doctor’s London murder trial in 1892, when he was finally brought to justice, The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream exposes the blind trust given to medical practitioners, as well as the flawed detection methods, bungled investigations, corrupt officials, and stifling morality of Victorian society that allowed Dr. Cream to prey on vulnerable and desperate women, many of whom had turned to him for medical help.

Dean Jobb transports readers to the late nineteenth century as Scotland Yard traces Dr. Cream’s life through Canada and Chicago and finally to London, where new investigative tools called forensics were just coming into use, even as most police departments still scoffed at using science to solve crimes. But then, most investigators could hardly imagine that serial killers existed—the term was unknown. As the Chicago Tribune wrote, Dr. Cream’s crimes marked the emergence of a new breed of killer: one who operated without motive or remorse, who “murdered simply for the sake of murder.” For fans of Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City, all things Sherlock Holmes, or the podcast My Favorite MurderThe Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream is an unforgettable true crime story from a master of the genre.” From Publisher’s Website.

Conviction: The Making and Unmaking of the Violent Brain, by Oliver Rollins. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021.

“Biological explanations for violence have existed for centuries, as has criticism of this kind of deterministic science, haunted by a long history of horrific abuse. Yet, this program has endured because of, and not despite, its notorious legacy. Today’s scientists are well beyond the nature versus nurture debate. Instead, they contend that scientific progress has led to a nature and nurture, biological and social, stance that allows it to avoid the pitfalls of the past. In Conviction Oliver Rollins cautions against this optimism, arguing that the way these categories are imagined belies a dangerous continuity between past and present.

The late 1980s ushered in a wave of techno-scientific advancements in the genetic and brain sciences. Rollins focuses on an often-ignored strand of research, the neuroscience of violence, which he argues became a key player in the larger conversation about the biological origins of criminal, violent behavior. Using powerful technologies, neuroscientists have rationalized an idea of the violent brain—or a brain that bears the marks of predisposition toward “dangerousness.”

Drawing on extensive analysis of neurobiological research, interviews with neuroscientists, and participant observation, Rollins finds that this construct of the brain is ill-equipped to deal with the complexities and contradictions of the social world, much less the ethical implications of informing treatment based on such simplified definitions. Rollins warns of the potentially devastating effects of a science that promises to “predict” criminals before the crime is committed, in a world that already understands violence largely through a politic of inequality.” From Publisher’s Website.

Crime TV: Streaming Criminology in Popular Culture, ed. by Jonathan A. Grubb and Chad Posick. New York: New York University Press, 2021.

“In Crime TV, Jonathan A. Grubb and Chad Posick bring together an eminent group of scholars to show us the ways in which crime—and the broader criminal justice system—are depicted on television. From Breaking Bad and Westworld to Mr. Robot and Homeland, this volume highlights how popular culture frames our understanding of crime, criminological theory, and the nature of justice through modern entertainment.

Featuring leading criminologists, Crime TV makes the key concepts and analytical tools of criminology as engaging as possible for students and interested readers. Contributors tackle an array of exciting topics and shows, taking a fresh look at feminist criminology on The Handmaid’s Tale, psychopathy on The Fall, the importance of social bonds on 13 Reasons Why, radical social change on The Walking Dead, and the politics of punishment on Game of Thrones.

Crime TV offers a fresh and exciting approach to understanding the essential concepts in criminology and criminal justice and how theories of crime circulate in popular culture.” From Publisher’s Website.

Crimes Against Humanity: The Limits of Universal Jurisdiction in the Global South, by Nergis Cenefe. University of Wales Press, 2021.

“Currently, there is an engorging fascination with and heightened expectations from international legal accountability. Crimes Against Humanity examines whether international criminal law, in particular legislation and institutions pertaining to war crimes and crimes against humanity, is equipped to be a panacea for the ills of the recalcitrant nation-state system. The main thread that runs through the text is to determine the ultimate aim and efficacy of adjudicating some of the most egregious infractions of the internationally sanctioned human rights regime. While international criminal law strives to develop a shared understanding of, and golden standards for, acceptable behavior of states and governments, it also suffers from a degree of institutional idealism pertaining to current accountability regimes in public international law. Focusing on the Global South, it also examines the problem-laden notion of collective responsibility for societal and political mass crimes and questions the merits of disproportionate reliance on international criminal law in the aftermath of civil wars, ethnic cleansing, genocidal violence, and mass exodus.” From Publisher’s Website.

Criminal Contagion: How Mafias, Gangsters and Scammers Profit from a Pandemic, by Tuesday Reitano and Mark Shaw. London; New York: Hurst Publishing, 2021.

“Covid-19 is reshaping and challenging governments, societies and economies in previously unimaginable ways—but gangsters and profiteers have adapted. They have found new routes for illegal commodities, from narcotics to people.

Shortages, lockdowns and public attitudes have brought the underworld and upperworld closer together, as criminals strive to meet needs, maximise opportunities and fill governance vacuums. Unscrupulous fraudsters are touting fake remedies to desperate people: counterfeit drugs, and trafficked wildlife used in traditional medicine. Social distancing and restrictions have seen online transactions and cyber-ops replacing or supplementing physical shipments, opening opportunities for scammers and hackers. Heavy-handed state responses have created new illicit markets by prohibiting the sale of particular goods and services, while some elites have capitalised on the pandemic for personal or political gain.

Covid has cast a long shadow over the rule of law. Criminal Contagion uncovers its extraordinary impacts on the global illicit economy, and their long-term implications.” From Publisher’s Website.

Decoding Madness: A Forensic Psychologist Explores the Criminal Mind, by Richard Lettieri. Lanham, MD: (Globe Pequot) Rowman and Littlefield, 2021.

“Dealing with some of the most heinous crimes imaginable, forensic neuropsychologist and psychoanalyst Dr. Richard Lettieri gives a behind-the-scenes look at criminal psychology through case studies from his over 30 years of experience as a court-appointed and privately retained psychologist.

With cases like Michael, who stabbed his mother in the back believing she was the evil force causing the sun to descend upon the earth and gobble him up, and Tina, who seriously injured her boyfriend and stabbed his son to death, Decoding Madness is filled with gripping stories and forensic analysis. Through psychological examination, it is the author’s job to conclude whether these individuals are truly guilty and understand their actions are wrong, or if these individuals are not guilty by reason of insanity and instead require treatment.

Decoding Madness offers a nuanced psychological understanding of defendants and their personal complexities beyond the usual clinical accounts. The book introduces the novel idea of the daimonic as a basic force of human nature that is the source of our constructive and destructive capacities and argues for an update to the criminal justice system’s perspective on rationality and conscious thinking.

Featuring new findings and personal insights, Dr. Lettieri presents an engrossing view of the psychology of defendants accused of committing heinous crimes and the insight that they provide towards the human mind.” From Publisher’s Website.

Democracy and Deliberation: The Law and Politics of Sex Offender Legislation, by Cary Federman. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021.

“Sex offender laws include residency restrictions, registration and notification requirements, and post-conviction civil commitment. These laws and regulations impose serious restrictions on the movements of convicted sex offenders. This is controversial because these laws and regulations occur after the sex offender has completed his time in prison. These laws and regulations are intended to have both a deterrent and therapeutic effect. Residency restrictions seek to prevent sex offenders from recommitting their crimes and civil commitment provides psychological services while incarcerated in a forensic facility. Most works on this subject are deeply critical of these laws.

Cary Federman takes a more sympathetic approach to sex offender legislation. He focuses on the deliberation.” From Publisher’s Website.

Dirty Works: Obscenity on Trial in America’s First Sexual Revolution, by Brett Gary. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021.

“At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States was experiencing an awakening. Victorian-era morality was being challenged by the introduction of sexual modernism and women’s rights into popular culture, the arts, and science. Set during this first sexual revolution, when civil libertarian-minded lawyers overthrew the yoke of obscenity laws, Dirty Works focuses on a series of significant courtroom cases that were all represented by the same lawyer: Morris L. Ernst.

Ernst’s clients included a who’s who of European and American literati and sexual activists, among them Margaret Sanger, James Joyce, and Alfred Kinsey. They, along with a colorful cast of burlesque-theater owners and bookstore clerks, had run afoul of stiff obscenity laws, and became actors in Ernst’s legal theater that ultimately forced the law to recognize people’s right to freely consume media. In this book, Brett Gary recovers the critically neglected Ernst as the most important legal defender of literary expression and reproductive rights by the mid-twentieth century. Each chapter centers on one or more key trials from Ernst’s remarkable career battling censorship and obscenity laws, using them to tell a broader story of cultural changes and conflicts around sex, morality, and free speech ideals.

Dirty Works sets the stage, legally and culturally, for the sexual revolution of the 1960s and beyond. In the latter half of the century, the courts had a powerful body of precedents, many owing to Ernst’s courtroom successes, that recognized adult interests in sexuality, women’s needs for reproductive control, and the legitimacy of sexual inquiry. The legacy of this important, but largely unrecognized, moment in American history must be reckoned with in our contentious present, as many of the issues Ernst and his colleagues defended are still under attack eight decades later.” From Publisher’s Website.

Disruptive Prisoners: Resistance, Reform, and the New Deal, by Chris Clarkson and Melissa Munn. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021.

“Disruptive Prisoners reconstitutes the history of Canada’s federal prison system in the mid-twentieth century through a process of collective biography – one involving prisoners, administrators, prison reformers, and politicians. This social history relies on extensive archival research and access to government documents, but more importantly, uses the penal press materials created by prisoners themselves and an interview with one of the founding penal press editors to provide a unique and unprecedented analysis.

Disruptive Prisoners is grounded in the lived experiences of men who were incarcerated in federal penitentiaries in Canada and argues that they were not merely passive recipients of intervention. Evidence indicates that prisoners were active agents of change who advocated for and resisted the initiatives that were part of Canada’s “New Deal in Corrections.” While prisoners are silent in other criminological and historical texts, here they are central figures: the juxtaposition of their voices with the official administrative, parliamentary, and government records challenges the dominant tropes of progress and provides a more nuanced and complicated reframing of the post-Archambault Commission era.

The use of an alternative evidential base, the commitment of the authors to integrating subaltern perspectives, and the first-hand accounts by prisoners of their experiences of incarceration makes this book a highly readable and engaging glimpse behind the bars of Canada’s federal prisons.” From Publisher’s Website.

Don’t Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo, by Mansoor Adayfi. New York: Hatchette Books, 2021.

“At the age of 18, Mansoor Adayfi left his home in Yemen for a cultural mission to Afghanistan. He never returned. Kidnapped by warlords and then sold to the US after 9/11, he was disappeared to Guantánamo Bay, where he spent the next 15 years as Detainee #441.

Don’t Forget Us Here tells two coming-of-age stories in parallel: a makeshift island outpost becoming the world’s most notorious prison and an innocent young man emerging from its darkness. Arriving as a stubborn teenager, Mansoor survived the camp’s infamous interrogation program and became a feared and hardened resistance fighter leading prison riots and hunger strikes. With time though, he grew into the man prisoners nicknamed “Smiley Troublemaker”: a student, writer, and historian. With unexpected warmth and empathy, he unwinds a narrative of fighting for hope and survival in unimaginable circumstances, illuminating the limitlessness of the human spirit. And through his own story, Mansoor also tells Guantánamo’s story, offering an unprecedented window into one of the most secretive places on earth and the people—detainees and guards alike—who lived there with him.

Twenty years later, Guantánamo remains open, and at a moment of due reckoning, Mansoor Adayfi helps us understand what actually happened there—both the horror and the beauty—a vital chronicle of an experience we cannot afford to forget.” From Publisher’s Website.

Ecocide: Kill the Corporation Before it Kills Us, by David Whyte. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2020. 240p.

“We have reached the point of no return. The existential threat of climate change is now a reality. The world has never been more vulnerable.

Yet corporations are already planning a life beyond this point. The business models of fossil fuel giants factor in continued profitability in a scenario of a five-degree increase in global temperature. An increase that will kill millions, if not billions.

This is the shocking reality laid bare in a new, hard-hitting book by David Whyte. Ecocide makes clear the problem won’t be solved by tinkering around the edges, instead it maps out a plan to end the corporation’s death-watch over us.

This book will reveal how the corporation has risen to this position of near impunity, but also what we need to do to fix it.” From Publisher’s Website.

El Chapo: The Untold Story of the World’s Most Infamous Drug Lord, by Noah Hurdwitz. New York: Atria, 2021. 448p.

“This is the true story of how El Chapo built the world’s wealthiest and most powerful drug-trafficking operation, based on months’ worth of trial testimony and dozens of interviews with cartel gunmen, Mexican journalists and political figures, Chapo’s family members, and the DEA agents who brought him down.

Over the course of three decades, El Chapo was responsible for smuggling hundreds of tons of cocaine, marijuana, heroin, meth, and fentanyl around the world, becoming in the process the most celebrated and reviled drug lord since Pablo Escobar. El Chapo waged ruthless wars against his rivals and former allies, plunging vast areas of Mexico into unprecedented levels of violence, even as many in his home state of Sinaloa continued to view him as a hero.

This unputdownable book, written by a great new talent, brings El Chapo’s exploits into a focus that previous profiles have failed to capture. Hurowitz digs in deep beyond the legends and delves into El Chapo’s life and legacy—not just the hunt for him, revealing some of the most dramatic and often horrifying moments of his notorious career, including the infamous prison escapes, brutal murders, multi-million-dollar government payoffs, and the paranoia and narcissism that led to his downfall. From the evolution of organized crime in Mexico to the militarization of the drug war to the devastation wrought on both sides of the border by the introduction of synthetic opioids like fentanyl, this book is a gripping and comprehensive work of investigative, on-the-ground reporting.” From Publisher’s Website.

Firepower: How the NRA Turned Gun Owners into A Political Force, by Matthew J. Lacombe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021. 328p.

“The National Rifle Association is one of the most powerful interest groups in America, and has consistently managed to defeat or weaken proposed gun regulations—even despite widespread public support for stricter laws and the prevalence of mass shootings and gun-related deaths. Firepower provides an unprecedented look at how this controversial organization built its political power and deploys it on behalf of its pro-gun agenda.

Taking readers from the 1930s to the age of Donald Trump, Matthew Lacombe traces how the NRA’s immense influence on national politics arises from its ability to shape the political outlooks and actions of its followers. He draws on nearly a century of archival records and surveys to show how the organization has fashioned a distinct worldview around gun ownership and used it to mobilize its supporters. Lacombe reveals how the NRA’s cultivation of a large, unified, and active base has enabled it to build a resilient alliance with the Republican Party, and examines why the NRA and its members formed an important constituency that helped fuel Trump’s unlikely political rise.

Firepower sheds vital new light on how the NRA has grown powerful by mobilizing average Americans, and how it uses its GOP alliance to advance its objectives and shape the national agenda.” From Publisher’s Website.

Heavy Traffic: The Global Drug Trade in Historical Perspective, by Ken Faunce. Oxford, UK; New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 176p.

“Growing directly out of the experiences of a team of historians at Washington State University who designed a new foundational course for WSU’s common requirements, the Roots of Contemporary Issues series is built on the premise that students will be better at facing current and future challenges, no matter their major or career path, if they are capable of addressing controversial and pressing issues in mature, reasoned ways using evidence, critical thinking, and clear written and oral communication skills. To help students achieve these goals, each title in the Roots of Contemporary Issues series argues that we need both a historical understanding and an appreciation of the ways in which humans have been interconnected with places around the world for decades and even centuries.

Much of the world’s politics revolve around questions about the development of the international market for drugs; the roles merchants, government officials, and drug manufacturers played in shaping this market over time and space; and the process of globalization. There are no easy answers to these questions, but the decisions that all of us make about them will have tremendous consequences for individuals and for the planet in the future.

Heavy Traffic helps students to understand globalization not as an inevitable or natural process, but instead as one that is created by and responds to a variety of human motivations. Examining the international trade in coffee, alcohol, opium, heroin, and cocaine, which have had a significant impact on economies and societies in countries around the world, it offers insight into globalization as a historical process, thereby helping to make sense of today’s interconnected world, where products grown or produced in only a handful of places circulate widely, with varying impacts on local populations.” From Publisher’s Website.

Indigenous Women and Violence: Feminist Activist Research in Heightened States of Injustice, edited by Lynn Stephen and Shannon Speed. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2021. 272p.

“Indigenous Women and Violence offers an intimate view of how settler colonialism and other structural forms of power and inequality created accumulated violences in the lives of Indigenous women. This volume uncovers how these Indigenous women resist violence in Mexico, Central America, and the United States, centering on the topics of femicide, immigration, human rights violations, the criminal justice system, and Indigenous justice. Taking on the issues of our times, Indigenous Women and Violence calls for the deepening of collaborative ethnographies through community engagement and performing research as an embodied experience. This book brings together settler colonialism, feminist ethnography, collaborative and activist ethnography, emotional communities, and standpoint research to look at the links between structural, extreme, and everyday violences across time and space.

Indigenous Women and Violence is built on engaging case studies that highlight the individual and collective struggles that Indigenous women face from the racial and gendered oppression that structures their lives. Gendered violence has always been a part of the genocidal and assimilationist projects of settler colonialism, and it remains so today. These structures—and the forms of violence inherent to them—are driving criminalization and victimization of Indigenous men and women, leading to escalating levels of assassination, incarceration, or transnational displacement of Indigenous people, and especially Indigenous women.

This volume brings together the potent ethnographic research of eight scholars who have dedicated their careers to illuminating the ways in which Indigenous women have challenged communities, states, legal systems, and social movements to promote gender justice. The chapters in this book are engaged, feminist, collaborative, and activism focused, conveying powerful messages about the resilience and resistance of Indigenous women in the face of violence and systemic oppression.” From Publisher’s Website.

Institutional Sexual Abuse in the #MeToo Era, edited by Jason D. Spraitz and Kendra N. Bower. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press 2021. 232p.

“In this timely and important collection, editors Jason D. Spraitz and Kendra N. Bowen bring together the work of contributors in the fields of criminal justice and criminology, sociology, journalism, and communications. These chapters show #MeToo is not only a support network of victims’ voices and testimonies but also a revolutionary interrogation of policies, power imbalances, and ethical failures that resulted in decades-long cover-ups and institutions structured to ensure continued abuse. This book reveals #MeToo as so much more than a hashtag.

Contributors discuss how #MeToo has altered the landscape of higher education; detail a political history of sexual abuse in the United States and the UK; discuss a recent grand jury report about religious institutions; and address the foster care and correctional systems. Hollywood instances are noted for their fear of retaliation among victims and continued accolades for alleged abusers. In sports, contributors examine the Jerry Sandusky scandal and the abuse by Larry Nassar. Advertising and journalism are scrutinized for covering the #MeToo disclosures while dealing with their own scandals. Finally, social media platforms are investigated for harassment and threats of violent victimization.

Drawing on the general framework of the #MeToo Movement, contributors look at complex and very different institutions—athletics, academia, religion, politics, justice, childcare, social media, and entertainment. Contributors include revelatory case studies to ensure we hear the victims’ voices; bring to light the complicity and negligence of social institutions; and advocate for systemic solutions to institutional sexual abuse, violence, and harassment.” From Publisher’s Website.

Intelligence for Homeland Security: An Introduction, by Jeffrey Douglas Dailey and James Robert Phelps. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishing, 2021. 275p.

“Since the September 11 terrorist attacks—considered one of the worst intelligence failures in US history—the many agencies that constitute the homeland security enterprise have aggressively developed their intelligence capabilities and activities. Jeffrey Dailey and James Phelps provide a comprehensive introduction to the nature of intelligence, its structures, roles, and missions, in the context of homeland security.

This accessible text:

  • Covers the full gamut of agencies involved in homeland security
  • Tackles difficult ethical issues
  • Discusses specific threats—ranging from drug trafficking and money laundering to bioterrorism and the challenges of Covid-19—and how they are dealt with by the intelligence community
  • Looks at how intelligence for national security can be applied to domestic security
  • Addresses the realities of intelligence sharing among federal, state, and local organizations

Enriched with numerous case studies of both successes and failures, the book has been carefully designed to meet the needs of students focusing on homeland security, intelligence, criminal justice, policing, security management, and related fields.” From Publisher’s Website.

Intolerable: Writing from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group (1870-1881), by Michel Foucault and Prisons Information Group, Edited by Kevin Thompson and Perry Zurn, Translated by Perry Zurn and Erik Beranek. 2021. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021.

“Founded by Michel Foucault and others in 1970–71, the Prisons Information Group (GIP) circulated information about the inhumane conditions within the French prison system. Intolerable makes available for the first time in English a fully annotated compilation of materials produced by the GIP during its brief but influential existence, including an exclusive new interview with GIP member Hélène Cixous and writings by Gilles Deleuze and Jean Genet.

These archival documents—public announcements, manifestos, reports, pamphlets, interventions, press conference statements, interviews, and round table discussions—trace the GIP’s establishment in post-1968 political turmoil, the new models of social activism it pioneered, the prison revolts it supported across France, and the retrospective assessments that followed its denouement. At the same time, Intolerable offers a rich, concrete exploration of Foucault’s concept of resistance, providing a new understanding of the arc of his intellectual development and the genesis of his most influential book, Discipline and Punish.

Presenting the account of France’s most vibrant prison resistance movement in its own words and on its own terms, this significant and relevant collection also connects the approach and activities of the GIP to radical prison resistance movements today.” From Publisher’s Website.

The Irish Assassins: Conspiracy, Revenge, and the Phoenix Park Murders That Stunned Victorian England, by Julie Kavanagh. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press.2021.

“Ireland, 1879–1882. After 700 years of British rule, the post-Famine generation of Irish tenant farmers began to push back against the reigning feudal system of landownership. The charismatic political leader, Charles Stewart Parnell, headed up the Land League, a revolutionary movement that promised to restore land and power to the people through a series of protests, strikes, and boycotts. After what became known as the Irish Land War had escalated into nationwide anarchy, Parnell and two associates were incarcerated without trial in Kilmainham Gaol. In April 1882, Parnell secretly forged the Kilmainham Treaty, a pact in which he pledged to work diplomatically with British Prime Minister William Gladstone for peace and the eventual independence of Ireland from England. It was a moment of real hope and a potential turning point in history, one that Gladstone himself described as “golden.”

Yet it would be shattered one sunlit evening, on May 6, l882, as Gladstone’s emissary, Lord Frederick Cavendish, who had arrived that day in Dublin, and Thomas Burke, the undersecretary for Ireland, were ambushed and stabbed to death while strolling through Phoenix Park in Dublin. The murders were funded by American supporters of Irish independence and carried out by the Invincibles, a militant faction of republicans armed with specially made surgeon’s blades. The impact of the assassinations was so cataclysmic that it destroyed the peace pact, almost brought down the government, and set in motion repercussions that would last long into the twentieth century.

In a story that spans Donegal, Dublin, London, Paris, New York, Cannes, and Cape Town, Julie Kavanagh traces the crucial events that came before and after the murders. From Parnell’s passionate affair with an Irish MP’s wife, Katharine “Kitty” O’Shea, which eventually caused his downfall, to Queen Victoria’s prurient obsession with the assassinations; from the investigation spearheaded by Superintendent John Mallon, the “Irish Sherlock Holmes,” who tirelessly tracked down each member of the Invincibles, to the eventual betrayal and clandestine escape of leading Invincible James Carey and his murder on the high seas; The Irish Assassins brings us intimately into this fascinating story that shaped Irish politics and engulfed an empire. This is an unputdownable book from one of our most “compulsively readable” (Guardian) writers.” From Publisher’s Website.

Italian Prisons in the Age of Positivism, 1861-1914, by Mary Gibson. London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021.

“During a period dominated by the biological determinism of Cesare Lombroso, Italy constructed a new prison system that sought to reconcile criminology with nation building and new definitions of citizenship. Italian Prisons in the Age of Positivism, 1861-1914 examines this “second wave” of global prison reform between Italian Unification and World War I, providing fascinating insights into the relationship between changing modes of punishment and the development of the modern Italian state.

Mary Gibson focuses on the correlation between the birth of the prison and the establishment of a liberal government, showing how rehabilitation through work in humanitarian conditions played a key role in the development of a new secular national identity. She also highlights the importance of age and gender for constructing a nuanced chronology of the birth of the prison, demonstrating that whilst imprisonment emerged first as a punishment for women and children, they were often denied “negative” rights, such as equality in penal law and the right to a secular form of punishment. Employing a wealth of hitherto neglected primary sources, such as yearly prison statistics, this cutting-edge study also provides glimpses into the everyday life of inmates in both the new capital of Rome and the nation as a whole.

Italian Prisons in the Age of Positivism, 1861-1914 is a vital study for understanding the birth of the prison in modern Italy and beyond.” From Publisher’s Website.

Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court, by Orville Vernon Burton and Armand Derfner. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021.

“The Supreme Court is usually seen as protector of our liberties: it ended segregation, was a guarantor of fair trials, and safeguarded free speech and the vote. But this narrative derives mostly from a short period, from the 1930s to the early 1970s. Before then, the Court spent a century largely ignoring or suppressing basic rights, while the fifty years since 1970 have witnessed a mostly accelerating retreat from racial justice.

From the Cherokee Trail of Tears to Brown v. Board of Education to the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, historian Orville Vernon Burton and civil rights lawyer Armand Derfner shine a powerful light on the Court’s race record—a legacy at times uplifting, but more often distressing and sometimes disgraceful. For nearly a century, the Court ensured that the nineteenth-century Reconstruction Amendments would not truly free and enfranchise African Americans. And the twenty-first century has seen a steady erosion of commitments to enforcing hard-won rights.

Justice Deferred is the first book that comprehensively charts the Court’s race jurisprudence. Addressing nearly two hundred cases involving America’s racial minorities, the authors probe the parties involved, the justices’ reasoning, and the impact of individual rulings. We learn of heroes such as Thurgood Marshall; villains, including Roger Taney; and enigmas like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Hugo Black. Much of the fragility of civil rights in America is due to the Supreme Court, but as this sweeping history also reminds us, the justices still have the power to make good on the country’s promise of equal rights for all.” From Publisher’s Website.

The Law of the Police, by Rachel Harmon. New York: Wolters Kluwer, 2021.

“This important new book provides materials and analysis for law school classes on policing and the law. It offers a resource for students and others seeking to understand and evaluate how American law governs police interactions with the public. The book provides primary materials, including cases, statutes, and departmental policies, and commentary and questions designed to help readers explore policing practices; the law that governs them; and the law’s consequences for the costs, benefits, fairness, and accountability of policing. Among other issues, the notes and questions encourage readers to consider the form and content of the law; how it might change; who is making it; and how the law affects policing. Part I introduces local policing—its history, its goals, and its problems; Part II considers the law that regulates criminal investigations; Part III addresses the law that governs street policing; and Part IV looks at policing’s legal remedies and reforms.

Professors and students will benefit from:

  • Chapters and notes designed to allow flexibility—allow professors to assign materials selectively according to the needs of the course. As a result, the casebook can serve as materials for a range of lecture and discussion-based courses on the law regulating police conduct; on legal remedies and reforms for problems in policing; or on more specific topics, such as the use of force or constitutional rules governing police conduct.
  • Descriptions of controversial policing encounters and links to and discussion of videos of such incidents—help students practice applying the law, consider its policy implications, and gain awareness of contemporary controversies on policing.
  • Diverse primary materials, including federal and state cases and statutes and police department policies—provide a broad exposure to the types of law that govern public policing.
  • Photos, links to videos, protest art, and charts—pique student interest, enable richer discussions, and provide additional context for legal materials in the book.
  • Integration of scholarly work on policing, on the law, and on the impact of police practices—enables students to make more sophisticated assessments of the law.
  • Notes and questions—designed to (a) highlight alternative strategies lawyers might use to change the law, and (b) raise comparative institutional questions about who is best suited to regulate the police.
  • Discussion of legal topics relevant to contemporary discussions of policing—studied nowhere else in the law school curriculum.” From Publisher’s Website.
Legal Fictions in International Law, by Reece Lewis. Cheltenham, UK; Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2021.

“This innovative book extensively probes and reveals the existence of legal fictions in international law, developing a theory of their effectiveness and legitimacy. Reece Lewis argues that, since legal fictions exist in all systems and types of law, international law is no different and deserves discrete, detailed examination.

The book considers the implications of the phenomenon, showing that while some international legal fictions are problematic, others can assist the application of international law through maintaining a coherent, stable and peaceful international legal order. The author identifies and critically analyses a host of international legal fictions and explores, in detail, the factors that determine their effectiveness. Chapters answer key questions such as: what is a legal fiction?, How do they exist in international law?, Should international law use legal fictions? and many more.

Shedding light on a subject that is of contemporary relevance and importance, Legal Fictions in International Law will be an informative read for academics, researchers and students in international law, legal theory and public policy.” From Publisher’s Website.

MS-13: The Making of America’s Most Notorious Gang, by Steven Dudley. Hanover Square Press, 2020.

“In the 1980s, El Salvador was involved in a bloody fight for control of the government. To escape the guerrilla assaults and death squads many fled to the US. As a survival instinct, they formed a group called the Mara Salvatrucha Stoners, a relatively harmless social network bound by rock and roll. But later, as they brushed against established local gangs, the group took on a harder edge, selling drugs, stealing cars and killing rivals who threatened their territories. As authorities cracked down, gang members were incarcerated and deported. But in the prison system, the group only grew stronger.

Today, MS-13 is one of the most infamous street gangs on Earth, with tens of thousands of members operating in a half-dozen nations and two continents, and linked to thousands of grisly murders each year. Through the story of former gang member Norman and his family, journalist Steven Dudley brings readers inside the deadly group.” From Publisher’s Website.

Murder in Our Midst: Comparing Crime Coverage Ethics in an Age of Globalized News, by Romayne Smith Fullerton and Maggie Jones Patterson. Oxford, UK; New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.

“Crime stories attract audiences and social buzz, but they also serve as prisms for perceived threats. As immigration, technological change, and globalization reshape our world, anxiety spreads. Because journalism plays a role in how the public adjusts to moral and material upheaval, this unease raises the ethical stakes. Reporters can spread panic or encourage reconciliation by how they tell these stories. Murder in Our Midst uses crime coverage in select North American and Western European countries as a key to examine culturally constructed concepts like privacy, public, public right to know, and justice. Working from close readings of news coverage, codes of ethics and style guides, and personal interviews with almost 200 news professionals, this book offers fertile material for a provocative conversation. The findings divide the ten countries studied into three media models. The book explores what the differing coverage decisions suggest about underlying attitudes to criminals and crime and how justice in a democracy is best served. Today, journalists’ work can be disseminated around the world without any consideration of whether what’s being told (or how) might dissolve cultural differences or undermine each community’s right to set its own standards to best reflect its citizens’ values. At present, unique reporting practices persist among the three models, but the Internet and social media threaten to dissolve distinctions and the cultural values they reflect. There is a need for a journalism that both opens local conversations and bridges differences among nations. This book is a first step in that direction.” From Publisher’s Website.

On Crime, Society, and Responsibility in the Work of Nicola Lacey, ed. by Iyiola Solanke. Oxford, UK; New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.

“Few contemporary scholars have done more in their work to develop the idea of responsibility than Nicola Lacey. She ranks alongside thinkers and writers such as HLA Hart and Antony Honoré in developing approaches to understanding responsibility. Like these authors, the influence of her work has spread beyond academia to change the perception of responsibility amongst practitioners. Both Hart and Honoré have during their lifetime had volumes dedicated to their work. This book does the same for Nicola Lacey, marking her ongoing influence and accomplishments in the common law world through a collection of essays by leading international scholars reflecting and interrogating her contribution to understanding criminal responsibility. Additionally, the book aims to promote the best legal scholarship on responsibility in the common law world and inspire the brightest legal scholars through a collection of essays designed to mark Professor Lacey’s ongoing contribution to the understanding of criminal responsibility.

The role of Professor Lacey’s work in this area (as well as others) cannot be overlooked: her scholarship includes not only a prize-winning biography of HLA Hart himself but numerous articles and tomes on the subject, culminating with her most recent work In Search of Criminal Responsibility: Ideas, Interests, and Institutions (OUP 2016). This Festschrift, one of few common law publications to pay homage to the erudition of a female jurist, can be seen as a continuation of the themes in this book via reflection and interrogation of her work by leading scholars on the topic. The Festschrift will therefore not only be a celebration of her work but also an attempt to take forward intellectual engagement with the topic of responsibility by continued engagement with her ideas.

Each author brings new ideas to bear on her work, touching upon important aspects of responsibility that are current in the scholarship: categorization, frameworks for understanding criminal responsibility and the relationships between them, women in criminal law, the history of criminal law, blameworthiness and ascriptions of responsibility, moral responsibility, the role of politics and political economy.

Nicola Lacey is a School Professor of Law, Gender, and Social Policy. From 1998 to 2010 she held a Chair in Criminal Law and Legal Theory at the LSE; she returned to the LSE in 2013 after spending three years as Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, and Professor of Criminal Law and Legal Theory at the University of Oxford. She has held a number of visiting appointments, most recently at Harvard Law School and the Australian National University. She is an Honorary Fellow of New College Oxford and University College Oxford; and a Fellow of the British Academy. In 2011 she was awarded the Hans Sigrist Prize by the University of Bern for outstanding scholarship on the function of the rule of law in late modern societies; and in 2018, an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Edinburgh. In 2017 she was awarded a CBE for services to Law, Justice, and Gender Politics.” From Publisher’s Website.

Policing Protest: The Post Democratic State and the Figure of Black Insurrection, by Paul A. Passavant. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021.

“In Policing Protest Paul A. Passavant explores how the policing of protest in the United States has become increasingly hostile since the late 1990s, moving away from strategies that protect protesters toward militaristic practices designed to suppress protests. He identifies reactions to three interrelated crises that converged to institutionalize this new mode of policing: the political mobilization of marginalized social groups in the Civil Rights era that led to a perceived crisis of democracy, the urban fiscal crisis of the 1970s, and a crime crisis that was associated with protests and civil disobedience of the 1960s. As Passavant demonstrates, these reactions are all haunted by the figure of black insurrection, which continues to shape policing of protest and surveillance, notably in response to the Black Lives Matter movement. Ultimately, Passavant argues, this trend of violent policing strategies against protesters is evidence of the emergence of a post-democratic state in the United States.” From Publisher’s Website.

Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism, by Heather Berg. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2021.

“Every porn scene is a record of people at work. But on-camera labor is only the beginning of the story. Porn Work takes readers behind the scenes to explore what porn performers think of their work and how they intervene to hack it. Blending extensive fieldwork with feminist and antiwork theorizing, Porn Work details entrepreneurial labor on the boundaries between pleasure and tedium. Rejecting any notion that sex work is an aberration from straight work, it reveals porn workers’ creative strategies as prophetic of a working landscape in crisis. In the end, it looks to what porn has to tell us about what’s wrong with work, and what it might look like to build something better.” From Publisher’s Website.

Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights, by Erwin Chemerinsky. New York; Liveright, 2021.

“Police are nine times more likely to kill African-American men than they are other Americans—in fact, nearly one in every thousand will die at the hands, or under the knee, of an officer. As eminent constitutional scholar Erwin Chemerinsky powerfully argues, this is no accident, but the horrific result of an elaborate body of doctrines that allow the police and, crucially, the courts to presume that suspects—especially people of color—are guilty before being charged.

Today in the United States, much attention is focused on the enormous problems of police violence and racism in law enforcement. Too often, though, that attention fails to place the blame where it most belongs, on the courts, and specifically, on the Supreme Court. A “smoking gun” of civil rights research, Presumed Guilty presents a groundbreaking, decades-long history of judicial failure in America, revealing how the Supreme Court has enabled racist practices, including profiling and intimidation, and legitimated gross law enforcement excesses that disproportionately affect people of color.

For the greater part of its existence, Chemerinsky shows, deference to and empowerment of the police have been the modi operandi of the Supreme Court. From its conception in the late eighteenth century until the Warren Court in 1953, the Supreme Court rarely ruled against the police, and then only when police conduct was truly shocking. Animating seminal cases and justices from the Court’s history, Chemerinsky—who has himself litigated cases dealing with police misconduct for decades—shows how the Court has time and again refused to impose constitutional checks on police, all the while deliberately gutting remedies Americans might use to challenge police misconduct.” From Publisher’s Website.

Redeeming Justice: From Defendant to Defender, My Fight for Equity on Both Sides of a Broken System, by Jarrett Adams. New York: Convergent, 2021.

“He was seventeen when an all-white jury sentenced him to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Now a pioneering lawyer, he recalls the journey that led to his exoneration—and inspired him to devote his life to fighting the many injustices in our legal system.

Seventeen years old and facing nearly thirty years behind bars, Jarrett Adams sought to figure out the why behind his fate. Sustained by his mother and aunts who brought him back from the edge of despair through letters of prayer and encouragement, Adams became obsessed with our legal system in all its damaged glory. After studying how his constitutional rights to effective counsel had been violated, he solicited the help of the Wisconsin Innocence Project, an organization that exonerates the wrongfully convicted, and won his release after nearly ten years in prison.” .From Publisher’s Website.

Regulating Fraud Across Borders: Internationalised Criminal Law Protection of Capital Markets, by Edgardo Rotman. London: Hart/Bloomsbury, 2021.

“At a time when financial crime routinely crosses international boundaries, this book provides a novel understanding of its spread and criminalisation. It traces the international convergence of financial crime regulation with a uniquely comparative approach that examines key institutional and state actors including the European Union, the International Organization of Securities Commissions, as well as the United States, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, France, Italy and Germany, all countries that harbour some of the most influential stock exchanges in the Western world.

The book describes and documents the phenomenon of internationalisation of securities frauds – such as insider trading and market manipulation – and the laws criminalising those acts, most notably those responding to recent dramatic transformations in securities markets, high frequency trading, and benchmark manipulation. At the European level, it shows the progressive uniformisation of laws culminating in the 2014 European Union Market Abuse Regulation.

The book argues that criminal prohibitions against internationalised market abuse must be understood as an economic and legal imperative to protect financial markets against activities that imperil its integrity, compromising the confidence of investors and thus affecting the economy as a whole. The book is supported by an extensive review of the most significant scholarship in each country.” From Publisher’s Website.

Rejecting Retributivism: Free Will, Punishment, and Criminal Justice, by Gregg D. Caruso. New York: Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021.

“Within the criminal justice system, one of the most prominent justifications for legal punishment is retributivism. The retributive justification of legal punishment maintains that wrongdoers are morally responsible for their actions and deserve to be punished in proportion to their wrongdoing. This book argues against retributivism and develops a viable alternative that is both ethically defensible and practical. Introducing six distinct reasons for rejecting retributivism, Gregg D. Caruso contends that it is unclear that agents possess the kind of free will and moral responsibility needed to justify this view of punishment. While a number of alternatives to retributivism exist – including consequentialist deterrence, educational, and communicative theories – they have ethical problems of their own. Moving beyond existing theories, Caruso presents a new non-retributive approach called the public health-quarantine model. In stark contrast to retributivism, the public health-quarantine model provides a more human, holistic, and effective approach to dealing with criminal behavior.

Explains and defends the arguments for free will skepticism

Provides specific policy proposals for implementing a public health approach to crime prevention

Identifies and documents the social determinants of criminal behavior.” From Publisher’s Website.

Redistributing the Poor: Jails, Hospitals, and the Crisis of Law and Fiscal Austerity, by Armando Lara-Millan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.

“Whenever the topic of large jails and public hospitals in urban America is raised, a single idea comes to mind. It is widely believed that because we as a society have dis-invested from public health, the sick and poor now find themselves within the purview of criminal justice institutions. In Redistributing the Poor, ethnographer and historical sociologist Armando Lara-Millán takes us into the day-to-day operations of running the largest hospital and jail system in the world and argues that such received wisdom is a drastic mischaracterization of the way that states govern urban poverty at the turn of the 21st century. Rather than focus on our underinvestment of health and overinvestment of criminal justice, his idea of “redistributing the poor” draws attention to how state agencies circulate people between different institutional spaces in such a way that generates revenue for some agencies, cuts costs for others, and projects illusions that services have been legally rendered. By centering the state’s use of redistribution, Lara-Millán shows how certain forms of social suffering-the premature death of mainly poor, people of color-are not a result of the state’s failure to act, but instead the necessary outcome of so-called successful policy.” From Publisher’s Website.

Re-Thinking Self Defence: The Ancient Rights’ Rationale Disentangled, by T. Markus Funk. Oxford, UK: Hart/Bloomsbury, 2021.

“Self-defence – the ‘ancient right’ – has never been more relevant than in the present era of widespread calls for criminal justice reform. The book substantially advances the patinaed discussion by introducing for the first time a comprehensive value-centric approach to thinking about the defence’s deeper rationale. It tackles core issues such as the relative importance of the State’s claimed monopoly on force, procedural justice and the need to shore up the justice system’s legitimacy and creditworthiness, everyone’s presumptive ‘right to life,’ and the importance of ensuring equal standing between citizens. And, in so doing, the book breaks ground by addressing public perceptions of ‘just’ and ‘right’ outcomes, as well as the emphasis legal systems place (and should place) on State power.” From Publisher’s Website.

Ruling Culture: Art Police, Tomb Robbers, and the Rise of Cultural Power in Italy, by Fiona Greenland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021.

“Through much of its history, Italy was Europe’s heart of the arts, an artistic playground for foreign elites and powers who bought, sold, and sometimes plundered countless artworks and antiquities. This loss of artifacts looted by other nations once put Italy at an economic and political disadvantage compared with northern European states. Now, more than any other country, Italy asserts control over its cultural heritage through a famously effective art-crime squad that has been the inspiration of novels, movies, and tv shows. In its efforts to bring their cultural artifacts home, Italy has entered into legal battles against some of the world’s major museums, including the Getty, New York’s Metropolitan Museum, and the Louvre. It has turned heritage into patrimony capital—a powerful and controversial convergence of art, money, and politics.

In 2006, the then-president of Italy declared his country to be “the world’s greatest cultural power.” With Ruling Culture, Fiona Greenland traces how Italy came to wield such extensive legal authority, global power, and cultural influence—from the nineteenth century unification of Italy and the passage of novel heritage laws, to current battles with the international art market. Today, Italy’s belief in its cultural superiority is evident through interactions between citizens, material culture, and the state—crystallized in the Art Squad, the highly visible military-police art protection unit. Greenland reveals the contemporary actors in this tale, taking a close look at the Art Squad and state archaeologists on one side and unauthorized excavators, thieves, and smugglers on the other. Drawing on years in Italy interviewing key figures and following leads, Greenland presents a multifaceted story of art crime, cultural diplomacy, and struggles between international powers. “From Publisher’s Website.

Say It Loud! On Race, Law, History, and Culture, by Randall Kennedy. New York: Pantheon, 2021.

“In a magnum opus that spans two decades, Harvard Law School professor Randall Ken­nedy, one of our preeminent legal scholars and public intellectuals, gives us twenty-nine provocative essays—some previously published, others written for this occasion—that explore key social justice issues of our time.

Informed by sharpness of observation and often courting controversy, deep fellow feeling, decency, and wit, Say It Loud! includes:

The George Floyd Moment: Promise and Peril • Isabel Wilkerson, the Election of 2020, and Racial Caste • The Princeton Ultimatum: Anti­racism Gone Awry • The Constitutional Roots of “Birtherism” • Inequality and the Supreme Court • “Nigger”: The Strange Career Contin­ues • Frederick Douglass: Everyone’s Hero • Remembering Thurgood Marshall • Why Clar­ence Thomas Ought to Be Ostracized • The Politics of Black Respectability • Policing Ra­cial Solidarity

In each essay, Kennedy is mindful of com­plexity, ambivalence, and paradox, and he is always stirring and enlightening. Say It Loud! is a wide-ranging summa of Randall Kennedy’s thought on the realities and imaginaries of race in America.” From Publisher’s Website.

A Second Reckoning: Race, Injustice, and the Last Hanging in Annapolis, by Scott D. Seligman. Lincoln, NE: Potomac Books, 2021.

“A Second Reckoning tells the story of John Snowden, a Black man accused of the murder of a pregnant white woman in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1917. He refused to confess despite undergoing torture, was tried—through legal shenanigans—by an all-white jury, and was found guilty on circumstantial evidence and sentenced to death. Despite hair-raising, last-minute appeals to spare his life, Snowden was hanged for the crime. But decades after his death, thanks to tireless efforts by interested citizens and family members who believed him a victim of a “legal lynching,” Snowden was pardoned posthumously by the governor of Maryland in 2001.

A Second Reckoning uses Snowden’s case to bring posthumous pardons into the national conversation about amends for past racial injustices. Scott D. Seligman argues that the repeal of racist laws and policies must be augmented by reckoning with America’s judicial past, especially in cases in which prejudice may have tainted procedures or perverted verdicts, evidence of bias survives, and a constituency exists for a second look. Seligman illustrates the profound effects such acts of clemency have on the living and ends with a siren call for a reexamination of such cases on the national level by the Department of Justice, which officially refuses to consider them.” From Publisher’s Website.

Seeing Justice: Witnessing, Crime, and Punishment in Visual Media, by Mary Angela Bock. Oxford, UK; New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.

Seeing Justice examines the way criminal justice in the United States is presented in visual media by focusing on the grounded practices of visual journalists in relationship with law enforcement. The book extends the concept of embodied gatekeeping, the corporeal and discursive practices connected to controlling visual media production and the complex ways social actors struggle over the construction of visual messages. Based on research that includes participant observation, extended interviews, and critical discourse analysis, the book provides a detailed examination of the way these practices shape media constructions and the way digitization is altering the relationships between media, citizens, and the criminal justice system. The project looks at contemporary cases that made the headlines through a theoretical lens based on the work of Michel Foucault, Walter Fisher, Stuart Hall, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Nick Couldry, and Roland Barthes. Its cases reveal the way powerful interests are able to shape representations of justice in ways that serve their purposes, occasionally at the expense of marginalized groups. Based on cases ranging from the last US public hanging to the proliferation of “Karen-shaming” videos, this monograph offers three observations. First, visual journalism’s physicality increases its reliance on those in power, making it easy for officials in the criminal justice system to shape its image. Second, image indexicality, even while it is subject to narrative negation, remains an essential affordance in the public sphere. Finally, participation in this visual public sphere must be considered as an essential human capability if not a human right.” From Publisher’s Website.

Servants of the Devil: The Facilitators of the Criminal and Terrorist Networks, edited by Norman Bailey and Bernard Toubout. Singapore; Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific, 2021.

“Since the end of the Cold War, liberal capitalism has spread worldwide without any significant ideological rivalry, characterized by the frenetic search for an ever-increasing return on capital and constantly-increasing profits, a generalized un-concern for the moral values of liberalism, and for social inequalities and human misery.

The book, Servants of the Devil: The Facilitators of the Criminal and Terrorist Networks, shows that this evolution has been possible, thanks to legitimate actors equipped with the legal, financial, technical, and influential means to facilitate the legitimization of criminals and the justification of such a criminal economy — the “Servants of the Devil” acting as the “legitimate” facilitators of the criminal and terrorist economies.

The book aims to alert security authorities, government officials, business, professional and financial leaders, and the media that criminal and terrorist networks have thoroughly penetrated the political, economic, and social structures of the contemporary world, and they could not operate without the extensive and willing cooperation of these facilitators.

Recommendations are made in this book to alter the targets of law-enforcement forces and the justice system, by putting more emphasis on the facilitators by naming, shaming, and prosecuting them to seriously disable the criminals and terrorists. The legal structure needs to be altered, detailing procedures to be used by critical institutions, as well as the intelligence and analytic techniques to be developed to stay ahead of the criminals’ own constantly altered techniques.

The book provides a detailed account of the problem and how it is corrupting the Western society, enhancing the need for a new economic paradigm that displays a real and actual economic understanding of the world and of any individual country’s economic activity, and shifting the ways of economic analysis to bring out the actual strength and role of criminal and terrorist activities in local, regional, and international governance from the shadows.” From Publisher’s Website.

To Deter and Punish: Global Collaboration Against Terrorism in the 1970s, By Silke Zoller. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021.

“In the late 1960s and early 1970s, governments in North America and Western Europe faced a new transnational threat: militants who crossed borders with impunity to commit attacks. These violent actors cooperated in hijacking planes, taking hostages, and organizing assassinations, often in the name of national liberation movements from the decolonizing world. How did this form of political violence become what we know today as “international terrorism”—lacking in legitimacy and categorized first and foremost as a crime?

To Deter and Punish examines why and how the United States and its Western European allies came to treat nonstate “terrorists” as a key threat to their security and interests. Drawing on a multinational array of sources, Silke Zoller traces Western state officials’ attempts to control the meaning of and responses to terrorism from the first Palestinian hijacking in 1968 to Ronald Reagan’s militarization of counterterrorism in the early 1980s. She details how Western states sought to criminalize border-crossing nonstate violence—and thus delegitimized offenders’ political aspirations. U.S. and European officials pressured states around the world to join agreements requiring them to create and enforce criminal laws against alleged individual terrorists. Zoller underscores how recently decolonized states countered that only a more equitable global system capable of addressing political grievances would end the violence.

To Deter and Punish offers a new account of the emergence of modern counterterrorism that pinpoints its international dimensions—a story about diplomats and bureaucrats as well as national liberation militancy and the processes of decolonization.” From Publisher’s Website.

Twentieth-Century Influences on Twenty-First Century Policing: Continued Lessons of Police Reform, By Jonathan A. Cooper. Rev. ed. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021.

“This newly revised edition includes two new chapters exploring events in policing since the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO in 2014. More than summarizing historical events, Cooper contextualizes the subsequent riots in light of classic sociological theory and political philosophy, and offers a potential and compelling new direction for improving both police use of force and the relationship between police and communities.”From Publisher’s Website.

Urban Gun Violence: Self-Help Organization as Healing Sites, Catalysts for Change, and Collaborative Partners, by Malvin Delgado. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.

“Gun violence occurs in urban areas more than it does anywhere else, and youth of color in these areas are disproportionately impacted in the United States. How can we approach this? What can we do to stop this from happening in the first place? In addition to trying to bolster the barriers one must cross to acquire a gun, we must also focus on the communities struggling with this abuse. In this book, Melvin Delgado approaches this nationwide issue with a specific focus on the victims: detailing the primary issues surrounding gun violence, what social workers can do about it, and why it is critical for those in the field to get involved.

Delgado identifies the current strategies used by social workers, providing professionals with the tools necessary to identify key problems before they escalate enough to lead to violence. He also discusses ways to reshape the education social workers receive to make sure they keep these racial injustices in mind in their approaches. Self-help organizations can intervene and potentially reduce the number of gun-related deaths that occur in cities nationwide, but we too often do not look to them after a shooting. Urban Gun Violence presents opportunities for improvement based on the work done by urban self-help organizations in the past. Building off of these organizations from across the US–from Louis D. Brown Peace Institution in Boston to the Community Justice Reform Coalition in San Francisco–Delgado illustrates how social workers can advocate for minority communities impacted by this lethal weapon.

With chapters spanning everything from how people obtain guns–legally and illegally–to lessons from the field, the book outlines the path toward successful intervention.” From Publisher’s Website.

When Man Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault, by David M. Buss. New York: Little, Brown, 2021.

“Sexual conflict permeates ancient religions, from injunctions about thy neighbor’s wife to the permissible rape of infidels. It is etched in written laws that dictate who can and cannot have sex with whom. Its manifestations shape our sexual morality, evoking approving accolades or contemptuous condemnation. It produces sexual double standards that flourish even in the most sexually egalitarian cultures on earth. And although every person alive struggles with sexual conflict, most of us see only the tip of the iceberg: dating deception, a politician’s unsavory sexual grab, the slow crumbling of a once-happy marriage, a romantic breakup that turns nasty.

When Men Behave Badly shows that this “battle of the sexes” is deeper and far more pervasive than anyone has recognized, revealing the hidden roots of sexual conflict—roots that originated over deep evolutionary time—which define the sexual psychology we currently carry around in our 3.5-pound brains. Providing novel insights into our minds and behaviors, When Men Behave Badly presents a unifying new theory of sexual conflict, and offers practical advice for men and women seeking to avoid it.” From Publisher’s Website.

Who Killed Cock Robin? British Folk Songs of Crime and Punishment, by Stephen Sedley and Martin Carthy. London: Reaktion Books, 2021.

“At the heart of traditional song rest the concerns of ordinary people. And folk throughout the centuries have found themselves entangled with the law: abiding by it, breaking it, and being caught and punished by it. Who Killed Cock Robin? is an anthology of just such songs compiled by one of Britain’s senior judges, Stephen Sedley, and most respected and best-loved folk singers, Martin Carthy.

The songs collected here are drawn from manuscripts, broadsides, old songbooks and oral tradition. They are grouped according to the various categories of crime and punishment, from Poaching to The Gallows. Each section contains a historical introduction, and every song is presented with a melody, its lyrics and an illuminating commentary that explores its origins and sources. Together, they present a unique, sometimes comic, often tragic, and always colourful insight into the past, while preserving an important body of song for future generations.” From Publisher’s Website.

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