The problems and controversies surrounding immigration and migrants crossing the U.S. southern border have occupied the public consciousness for a number of years now, even predating then presidential candidate Donald Trump’s 2016 call for building a wall on the U.S. Mexican border. The Shadow of the Wall: Violence and Migration on the U.S. Mexico Border, ed. by Jeremy Slack, Daniel E. Martinez, and Scott Whiteford, addresses the wall issue from the perspective of border enforcement and the criminalization of immigration. Needless to say, one of the most obvious assessments of this book and its topic is that it is timely. The reviewer says that what this book “does most successfully is to show the very complexity of the problem itself.” The various authors demonstrate that deportation, for example, is not a singular issue with a singular solution. Together, the book presents, according to the reviewer, “a practice amidst a complex assemblage of immigration practices that inflict violence – both directly and indirectly – on vulnerable populations of color…. [It] is a deeply nuanced portrait of the migrant experience and how deportation is a multifaceted form of violence.”

The Moral Witness: Trials and Testimony after Genocide, by Carolyn J. Dean, is a fascinating story of how surviving victims of mass atrocities became witnesses, “moral witnesses,” in the criminal trials of the perpetrators of those atrocities. Survivors of the Nazi concentration camps are one prime example of these moral witnesses. Our reviewer, Lynn Rapaport, describes this book as “a sophisticated and nuanced analysis of the emergence of `the witness’ as a moral symbol and pervasive icon of suffering and surviving genocide and mass atrocities.” She recommends it to students and scholars who study genocide, testimony, victimhood, and social and cultural trauma arising from such atrocities.

Retributivism, in one form or another, arguably prevails not only in philosophical discussions of criminal law, but in the real world of criminal justice as well. In her new book, Erin Kelly argues that it is a mistake to align the moral criteria of blameworthiness with the legal criteria for criminal guilt. Doing so, she says, leads to many ills in the system of criminal justice, including mass incarceration. Our reviewer, Leora Dahan Katz, finds Kelly’s book “infused with sensitivity to the plight of offenders, a sense of commitment to social justice . . . [and a] determination to not merely criticize the current state of affairs but to offer a constructive proposal for how to cure existing ills.” Nevertheless, she points out that many of the problems that Kelly identifies – including “[r]acial discrimination, excessive and degrading punishment and punishment that relegates wrongdoers to a social underclass” — are problems that are not an inevitable consequence of retributivism, and indeed are regarded by retributivists themselves as inconsistent with their theory.

Reviewer Kimberly Fairchild calls Gender, Power, and Violence: Responding to Sexual and Intimate Partner Violence in Society Today, by Angela Hattery and Earl Smith, a comprehensive book that examines some of the biggest and most influential institutions in America regarding their role in perpetuating gender-based violence. Fairchild says the authors “demonstrate that in our country’s most vaunted (military, sports world, Catholic Church) and reviled [her word] (prisons, Hollywood, politics) institutions there is a systemic misogyny that breeds, encourages, and sustains gender-based violence.” This is obviously a hard-hitting book that the reviewer concludes is well-written and accessible to a wide range of audiences.

A former dean of one of our editors used to remark that many titles of academic works suffered from what he called “titular colonitis”! In other words, there is a title, followed by an obligatory colon, and then a further subtitle describing or explaining the title! Free Speech in the Digital Age, according to our reviewer, Clay Calvert, is not one of those, although he does make some suggestions for possible subtitles. Edited by Susan J. Brison and Katharine Gelber, Free Speech in the Digital Age takes up the thorny issue of free speech and the internet. Are there and should there be restrictions? And if so, of what sort and how extensive? Calvert describes the focus of this book as the “gulf between, on the one hand, much of the early ebullient rhetoric about the supposed wonders and benefits of the internet when it comes to facilitating freedom of expression and democracy and, on the other hand, today’s often sordid reality of hate speech, trolling, non-consensual pornography (colloquially called revenge pornography), stalking and harassment that flourish on the medium and that often claim as their victims, women and minorities.”

“Can policies that propose total drug war crackdowns be viable?” This, says our    reviewer, Miguel A. Cabañas, is the hypothesis of Benjamin Lessing’s Making Peace in Drug Wars: Crackdowns and Cartels in Latin America. Lessing uses three national cases (Colombia, Brazil and Mexico) to tackle the question of the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of policies pursued as part of the war on drugs. Cabañas says the author effectively uses game theory and quantitative methods to analyze the logic of drug cartel-state conflict, and to examine the shifting role of violence in each of his case studies.

With Justice Kennedy retired, it seems likely that Chief Justice Roberts will play a pivotal role in shaping the future of the Supreme Court on several issues, including abortion, affirmative action, voting rights, and the proper place for race in setting policy goals at the federal level. Thus, students of the Court and the public in general are fortunate to have Joan Biskupic’s important book that is filled with insights into Roberts’s career and his legal philosophy. A legal conservative by nature, Roberts clerked for Justice Rehnquist, was a lawyer in the Reagan administration, and served as deputy solicitor general in the first President Bush administration.

Professor Jack Call’s thoughtful review gives readers a taste of the level of detail in the Roberts biography. As he puts it, this biography “provides a great deal of material relevant to the question of whether Roberts is likely to be the new swing Justice.” Biskupic is a “well-respected observer of the Court,” who relied in this book on “extensive sources of information” that include “interviews with a majority of the Supreme Court Justices (as well as Roberts himself).”

Professor Call notes that the biography has very little on the likely direction of the Court’s criminal justice doctrine but Call nonetheless concludes that “few observers of the Court will take issue with Biskupic’s conclusion that ‘[Roberts] is positioned in the center in every way, and the law will likely be what he says it is.’”

Less serious offenses – misdemeanors – and the particular courts that deal with them, pretty much operate below the radar of attention to criminal justice.  This is understandable on the one hand because the offenses are often mundane or at least lacking in media interest.  On the other hand, this absence of interest and attention is somewhat ironic because it is these offenses and these courts that handle the vast majority of cases that ever come before courts.  Misdemeanorland by Issa Kohler-Hausmann, tells the story of New York City’s misdemeanor courts, among the largest such systems in the country.  Our reviewer Sam Bieler concludes that readers “will come away with a view into the world of New York courts that is as detailed and nuanced as it is troubling.”

Conviction for committing a crime carries a number of consequences for the convicted — among them some form of punishment.  Punishment and what constitutes punishment are not, however, as simple as things might first appear.  It is indeed the complexity and nuance surrounding punishment that are the subjects of Beyond Punishment: A Normative Account Of The Collateral Legal Consequences Of Conviction by Zachary Hoskins.  Reviewer Douglas Husak says that Hoskins is “the first sophisticated philosopher to provide a conceptual and normative framework in which the legitimacy of … collateral consequences can be evaluated.”  Those collateral consequences of punishment include effects on employment, government housing, and state benefits, among others.  Husak’s review concludes that the book is thorough and persuasive, as well as highly readable.

There has been considerable attention in recent years to the subject of injustice in the criminal justice system – and rightfully so.  Good Kids, Bad City: A Story of Race and Wrongful Conviction in America by Kyle Swenson is a story that, as our reviewer Joshua Behl puts it, “could be described as a comedy of errors if it was not a story of great injustice for three men who spent a combined 106 years in prison for a crime they did not commit.” What is particularly disturbing about the takeaway from this book is that the story of structural discrimination and historical sins the author describes continue to play a role in the criminal justice system today.

American Cipher: Bowe Bergdahl and the U.S. Tragedy in Afghanistan is not typical of the books we have reviewed over the years.It deals with a unique form of “crime” and a unique and special justice process for handling that crime.  The crimes in question are “desertion” and “misbehavior before the enemy” by an American soldier, Bowe Bergdahl.  The system for handling these crimes is the military justice system.  The authors, Matt Farwell and Michael Ames, provide what reviewer Tung Yin calls “an exhaustive account of Bergdahl’s decision to leave his military post and his subsequent captivity with the Taliban, his parents’ and the government’s efforts to free him, and the post-release military prosecution.” The outcome of the case continues to resonate with controversy.

Lest one think that it is only in the U.S. that there are problems with the delivery of justice in criminal matters, Miscarriages of Justice: Causes, Consequences, and Remedies, by Sam Poyser, Angus Nurse, and Rebecca Milne, and reviewed for us by Jack E. Call, demonstrates that that is not the case. Poyser, et al., describe the systemic problems in the criminal justice system of the United Kingdom – problems that lead to violations of the rights of persons accused of crimes. The main culprit blamed for the wrongful convictions that are the focus of the book is the desire for speedy justice. To quote the authors, these convictions are the product “of an adversarial system that prioritizes speedy justice over rigorous examination of facts in an effort to get to the truth.” Here we have some food for thought that presents a wrinkle in the principal that “justice delayed is justice denied.”

Out-of-Control Criminal Justice: The Systems Improvement Solution for More Safety, Justice, Accountability, and Efficiency byDaniel P. Mears is one of several books in this iteration of the journal to confront the problematic messiness that seems to be endemic to the criminal justice process and the system that administers that process. Mears takes up an issue that has long been a point of discussion and debate in criminological circles about whether the criminal justice “system” is indeed a system. In doing so, he analogizes the so-called criminal justice system to the manufacturing business system — arguing that doing so exposes the former’s inherent problems and failures. According to our reviewer Doris Schartmueller, Mears presentation of concrete policy changes “makes this book a necessary addition to the libraries of lawmakers, criminal justice practitioners, researchers, or anyone interested in criminal justice reform.”

The Meaning of Life, co-authored by Marc Mauer and Ashley Nellis, along with Kelly Myers, and reviewed here by Sam Bieler, offers a strenuous and well-argued case against the use of life sentences. “What sets The Meaning of Life apart from so many other books on the justice system,” says Bieler, “is the clarity of its proposed reforms. All too often, books succeed at arguing that the status quo is bad and that something should be done.” But, says Bieler, “they stumble on what this something should be — lapsing into nebulous calls for reform. The Meaning of Life does not have that problem.” One of the many pluses of the book, according to the reviewer, is the effective manner in which it juxtaposes solid empirical information with the stories of actual lifers.

Reviewer James Windle praises Drug Control and Human Rights in International Law for what he calls three significant achievements. First, he says, the author Richard Lines “presents a new and interesting perspective on the somewhat stale international drug control regime change debate.” Second, instead of being dry and repetitive, the book is a “well written, accessible and interesting account.” And third, says Windle, Lines provides a good mix of historical perspectives, contemporary insights and legal analysis so as to “present a credible and rational approach to drug control.”

Criminal law and justice scholars have traditionally focused their attention on “serious” crimes, those that involve serious forms of criminality and leave offenders facing long prison terms or even death. A new wave of scholarship focuses on the process by which less serious misdemeanors are charged, adjudicated, and punished, a process that is shown to suffer from many of the same pathologies that afflict felony crime procedures. This new book from Alexandra Natapoff exemplifies this shift in focus. Our reviewer, Peter Grabosky, finds in it a “scathing indictment of the misdemeanor process in US courts" and of a "country accustomed to presenting itself as the leader of the free world, and a champion of the rule of law.”

Linda Martin Alcoff’s Rape and Resistance: Understanding the complexities of sexual violation, comes at a time when there is greatly increased attention to sexual misconduct of all kinds – ranging from harassment to sexual assault and rape. Whether it be in offices, TV studios, newspaper rooms, college fraternities, military installations, or religious institutions, sexual violations are being exposed and reported. Our reviewer, Jan Jordan, calls Alcoff’s book “itself a form of resistance — a protest at the myriad ways those victimised by rape have had their voices silenced, mediated, and distorted by others – responses guaranteed to mask the realities of one of our most misunderstood crimes and ensure its continuation.”

Blackwell’s Island, in New York City’s East River was, for most of the 1800s, a place of confinement for what Stacy Horn calls in Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad & Criminal in 19th-Century New York, the “sick, mad, and punishable.” It began as a “progressive” set of institutions where patients or inmates could be controlled as necessary, but above all reformed. Unfortunately, and as has been all too common in the history of similar endeavors, on Blackwell’s, disease became common, residents froze in winter and sweltered in summer, were abused by staff and other patients or inmates, and as reviewer Sara Deffendoll points out, “were often confined to their rooms, restrained, or crudely medicated to keep them manageable.” Why did this happen? Apart from the many now outdated ideas about how to deal with these populations, the simple answer is, those responsible for managing these institutions wanted to save money.

Our reviewer Colleen P. Eren calls Corruption in Commercial Enterprise: Law, Theory and Practice, edited by Liz Campbell and Nicholas Lord, “an authoritative, insightful, objective, and well-edited book that should be of benefit to a wide range of scholars, students, and practitioners in the US and UK.” Strengths of this book, according to Eren, are the multiple disciplines represented by the contributors – criminology, law, psychology, business, law enforcement, forensics – and the fact that it is comparative – looking at not only the UK, but also the U.S., Italy and Ukraine. The book demonstrates that corruption of many kinds is clearly not foreign to the so-called “developed” world.

Jonathan Lusthaus’ Industry of Anonymity: Inside the Business of Cybercrime is focused on economic crime, particularly on the criminal exploitation of commercial systems as either targets or as themselves instruments of criminality. It is reviewed here by Peter Grabosky, a noted international expert on cybercrime. Grabosky concludes that Lusthaus “has made an important contribution to the study of criminal organizations. His valuable discussion of the organization of commercial cybercrime will enhance our understanding of the problem, and will help stimulate our thinking on how best to manage it.”

The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution received scant attention until the twentieth century. One factor was the extremely small scope of federal criminal jurisdiction. Until the 1910s, there were only a handful of federal crimes. There was no FBI until 1908. But the period 1910-1930 brought a seismic change in federal criminal jurisdiction that included, of course, Prohibition. In The Prohibition Era in Policing, Wesley Oliver argues that it was Prohibition, and the invasive policing required to enforce it, that was the principal cause for judicial willingness to suppress evidence found in unreasonable searches and seizures. Reviewer Benjamin Welton finds Oliver’s book “a detail-rich, highly informative work of legal scholarship [that] lays out many convincing reasons why Prohibition’s most poisoned legacy is the legacy of exclusionary evidence.” The book also argues that exclusion of evidence is not the only, or even the best, means to regulate police conduct. Welton concludes that the book is a “must read” for those interested in the effects of Prohibition.

Timely is certainly a description of Louis P. Nelson’s and Claudrena N. Harold’s (eds.) new book, Charlottesville 2017: The Legacy of Race and Inequity. Reviewed here by Clay Calvert, the book recounts the events of August 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia – the home of the University of Virginia, from which all the authors whose work appears emanate, and whose press, not insignificantly, is the publisher. Calvert says “[t]he book provides excellent context for helping to better understand, both historically and today, how a combustible combination of forces – racism, antisemitism, free expression, violence and efforts toward equality – exploded at and around one the nation’s foremost educational institutions. The same forces, of course, could easily erupt elsewhere, so the lessons here – although grounded in a single venue – are more broadly applicable.”