New Books in Policing, Incarceration, and Reform

In this episode of the New Books in Latin America Studies podcast, Kenneth Sánchez spoke with Dr Francesca Lessa about her interesting new book The Condor Trials: Transnational Repression and Human Rights in South America published in 2022 by the Yale University Press. Stories of transnational terror and justice illuminate the past and present of South America's struggles for human rights. Through...

While in no way supporting the systemic injustices and disparities of mass incarceration, in Gifts from the Dark: Learning from the Incarceration Experience (Lexington Books, 2021), Joni Schwartz and John Chaney argue that we have much to learn from those who have been and are in prison. Schwartz and Chaney profile the contributions of literary giants, social activists, entrepreneurs, and other ta...

Mirelsie Velázquez (Associate Professor & Rainbolt Family Endowed Presidential Professor, University of Oklahoma) speaks with Natalie Lira (Associate Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) about Lira’s recent book, Laboratory of Deficiency: Sterilization and Confinement in California, 1900-1950s (University of California Press, 2021). Over 20,000 residents of California were steril...

Mikaela Rabinowitz’s Incarceration without Conviction: Pretrial Detention and the Erosion of Innocence in American Criminal Justice (Routledge, 2021) addresses an understudied fairness flaw in the US criminal justice system: namely, the significant impact of pretrial detention on the millions of Americans held in local jails. On any given day, approximately 500,000 Americans are held in pretrial d...

As the United States began the project of mass incarceration, rural communities turned to building prisons as a strategy for economic development. More than 350 prisons have been built in the U.S. since 1980, with certain regions of the country accounting for large shares of this dramatic growth. Central Appalachia is one such region there are eight prisons alone in Eastern Kentucky. If Kentucky w...

What impact has two decades' worth of policing and counterterrorism had on the state of mind of Muslims in Britain? In The Suspect: Counterterrorism, Islam, and the Security State (Pluto Press, 2022), Rizwaan Sabir writes compellingly about his own experiences of wrongful arrest, detention and subsequent surveillance, placing these in the broader context of 21st century British counterterrorism pr...

Machine Learning for Criminology and Crime Research: At the Crossroads (Routledge, 2022) reviews the roots of the intersection between machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and research on crime; examines the current state of the art in this area of scholarly inquiry; and discusses future perspectives that may emerge from this relationship. As machine learning and AI approaches become in...

By 1990 the Berlin Wall had fallen and the East German state security service folded. For forty years, they had amassed more than a billion pages in manila files detailing the lives of their citizens. Almost a hundred thousand Stasi employees, many of them experienced officers with access to highly personal information, found themselves unemployed overnight. Ralph Hope’s The Grey Men: Pursuing the...

In this groundbreaking work, Professor Brandon T. Jett unearths how police departments evolved with the urbanization of the Jim Crow South, to target African Americans through a variety of mechanisms of control and violence, such as violent interactions, unjust arrests, and the enforcement of segregation laws and customs. Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South, published by Louisiana Stat...

In Academic Apartheid: Race and the Criminalization of Failure in an American Suburb (U California Press, 2022), sociologist Sean J. Drake addresses long-standing problems of educational inequality from a nuanced perspective, looking at how race and class intersect to affect modern school segregation. Drawing on more than two years of ethnographic observation and dozens of interviews at two distin...

Political corruption remains … one of the most intriguing and challenging issues in social science research and public policy, perhaps because although it occurs in virtually all polities, its causes, patterns, and consequences often seem unique to each circumstance. – Cadres and Corruption by Xiaobo Lu (2000) Corruption is rampant in many authoritarian regimes, leading most observers to assume th...

Prisons operate according to the clockwork logic of our criminal justice system: we punish people by making them “serve” time. The Cage of Days: Time and Temporal Experience in Prison (Columbia UP, 2022) combines the perspectives of K. C. Carceral, a formerly incarcerated convict criminologist, and Michael G. Flaherty, a sociologist who studies temporal experience. Drawing from Carceral’s field no...

Our contemporary political condition is obsessed with immunity. The immunity of bodies and the body politic; personal immunity and herd immunity; how to immunize the social system against breakdown. The obsession intensifies with every new crisis and the mobilization of yet more powers of war and police, from quarantine to border closures and from vaccination certificates to immunological surveill...

In Deep Deception: The Story of the Spycop Network, by the Women Who Uncovered the Shocking Truth (Ebury, 2022), five women discuss their experiences of being manipulated into serious long-term relationships with undercover police officers. Through detective work and campaigning, these ‘spycops’ victims uncovered a hitherto-unknown practice whereby police officers were deployed for multiple years...

It’s no secret that the United States has the most expansive prison system of any nation in the world. And the US carceral system overwhelmingly and unjustly impacts Black and Brown individuals and communities. With postwar efforts to dismantle Jim Crow policies, our era of mass incarceration reproduced the old logics of white supremacism that uphold racist capitalism in this new setting. These ar...

Drawing upon twenty-five years of experience rep­resenting Black youth in Washington, D.C.'s juve­nile courts, Kristin Henning confronts America's irrational, manufactured fears of these young peo­ple and makes a powerfully compelling case that the crisis in racist American policing begins with its relationship to Black children. Henning explains how discriminatory and aggressive policing has soci...

China has the reputation for being a strong security state. After the pro-democracy Tiananmen protests, the Chinese government moved to increase stability maintenance – and that approach is reflected in today’s suppression of social unrest in Xinjiang where somewhere between 800,000-2 million members of the Uighur minority have been interned in camps. Throughout the country, the government has mai...

Despite attracting headlines and hype, insurgents rarely win. Even when they claim territory and threaten governmental writ, they typically face a military backlash too powerful to withstand. States struggle with addressing the political roots of such movements, and their military efforts mostly just ‘mow the grass’; yet, for the insurgent, the grass is nonetheless mowed–and the armed project must...

The Sentences That Create Us: Crafting a Writer’s Life in Prison (Haymarket Books, 2022) is an expansive resource for incarcerated writers. With over 50 contributors like Reginald Dwayne Betts, Randall Horton, and Nicole Shawan Junior, this resource provides the foundations for crafting a vibrant literary life with the carceral state. The guide offers advice including editing, publishing works, an...

Over the last 40 years, the US penal system has grown at an unprecedented rate―five times larger than in the past and grossly out of scale with the rest of the world. In The Punishment Imperative: The Rise and Failure of Mass Incarceration in America (New York University Press, 2013), criminologists Todd Clear and Natasha Frost argue that America’s move to mass incarceration from the 1960s to the...

Slaps in the face, kicks, beatings, and other forms of run-of-the-mill violence were a quotidian part of life in German Southwest Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century. Unearthing this culture of normalized violence in a settler colony, Violence as Usual: Policing and the Colonial State in German Southwest Africa (Cornell UP, 2019) uncovers the workings of a powerful state that was buil...

At the end of the Second World War, about 600,000 Japanese soldiers were taken prisoner after the Soviet Union swept through Manchuria in the very final days of the war. Instead of returning them to Japan, the Soviet Union held them in prison camps in the Russian Far East for over a decade. The last group was released in 1956, eleven years after the Japanese surrender. Those eleven years are the s...

Scholars Heather Hlavka (Marquette University) and Sameena Mulla (Emory University) have written a new book that examines and interrogates the place and space of the courtroom, the use of expertise, especially scientific expertise, in the adjudicative process, and how this all intersects with race and gender in cases of sexual assault. Bodies in Evidence: Race, Gender, and Science in Sexual Assaul...

For a brief moment in the summer of 1900, Robert Charles was arguably the most infamous black man in the United States. After an altercation with police on a New Orleans street, Charles killed two police officers and fled. During a manhunt that extended for days, violent white mobs roamed the city, assaulting African Americans and killing at least half a dozen. When authorities located Charles, he...

Policing ‘Bengali Terrorism’ in India and the World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) by Michael Silvestri examines the development of imperial intelligence and policing directed against revolutionaries in the Indian province of Bengal from the first decade of the twentieth century through the beginning of the Second World War. The book advances research on the imperial origins of British intelligence in...