New Books in Policing, Incarceration, and Reform

The mass incarceration of Japanese Americans in the Pacific West is one of the most shameful episodes in our nation’s history. As the United States waged war against fascism, it removed tens of thousands of American citizens and their families from their homes. The First to Cry Down Injustice?: Western Jews and Japanese Removal during WWII (Lexington Books, 2008) invites us into a community in the...

Siam’s New Detectives: Visualizing Crime and Conspiracy in Modern Thailand (University of Hawaii Press, 2016) is a rewarding, multilayered study of how Thailand became the Kingdom of Crime, and its police, masters of simulation and representation. While working towards an account of the visual culture of criminality, Samson Lim carefully documents the establishment and growth of the police force i...

Jen Manion is an associate professor of history at Amherst College. Her book Liberty’s Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) offers a detailed examination of how the reform regimen of incarceration developed as the new American nation was experiencing deep social and political transformation. The place of women, African-Americans, immigrants and the...

In Border Contraband: A History of Smuggling Across the Rio Grande (University of Texas Press, 2015) Professor George T. Diaz examines a subject that has received scant attention by historians, but one that is at the heart of contemporary debates over U.S.-Mexico immigration and border enforcement. Focusing on trans-border communities, like Laredo/Nuevo Laredo, Diaz details the interplay between s...

In 1971, prisoners took over Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York. The uprising followed a wave of protests in prisons and jails across the state and nation. Prisoners sought to draw public attention to years of mistreatment and abuse as they held prison employees hostage and invited the media into the facility. Four days after the takeover, state officials ended talks abruptly and ret...

When I first read Foucault’s Discipline and Punish as an undergrad, I remember wondering, “What does this look like, though? How might the disciplining of the body play out in different places?” Greg Eghigian, author of The Corrigible and the Incorrigible: Science, Medicine, and the Convict in Twentieth-Century Germany (University of Michigan Press, 2015) and Associate Professor of History at Penn...

Peter K. Enns is the author of Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became the Most Punitive Democracy in the World (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Enns is Associate Professor in the Department of Government and Executive Director of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University. The rise of mass incarceration in the United States is one of the most critical outcome...

In Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps (Harvard University Press, 2015), Kim Wunschmann, DAAD Lecturer in Modern European History and a Member of the Centre for German-Jewish Studies at the University of Sussex, tells the relatively unknown story of the Nazi pre-war concentration camps. From 1933 to 1939, these sites of terror isolated, ostracized, and excluded Jew...

How to best increase police effectiveness in controlling crime rates is perennially controversial. Still, law enforcement has been in the news a lot lately. From criticism surrounding police use of force against unarmed African Americans to controversy surrounding broken windows policing or stop and frisk policies to suggestions of more community policing, we are in the midst of a national debate...

Is it ok–practically and ethically–to feel sympathetic toward the guards of concentration camps? Today’s interview marks the conclusion of my summer-long series of podcasts on the concentration camps and ghettos of Nazi Germany, its satellite states and the regions it controlled. Earlier this summer I talked with Geoff Megargee about the Holocaust Museums’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, Sarah...

Today’s podcast is the second in our summer series of interviews about the concentration camps in and around Nazi Germany. Earlier this summer I talked with Geoff Megargee about the US Holocaust Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos and Sarah Helm about her book on Ravensbruc. Later, I’ll talk with Dan Stone and Shelly Cline. Today I had the great pleasure to chat with Nikolaus Wachsmann abou...

Today’s podcast is the second in our summer series of interviews about the concentration camps in and around Nazi Germany. Earlier this summer I talked with Geoff Megargee about the US Holocaust Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos. Later, I’ll talk with Nik Wachsmann, Dan Stone and Shelly Cline. Today, however, I got the chance to talk with Sarah Helm. Sarah has written a tremendous book ti...

As patterns of religiosity have changed in the United States, chaplains have come to occupy an increasingly important place in the nation’s public institutions, especially its prisons, hospitals and military. In her newest book, A Ministry of Presence: Chaplaincy, Spiritual Care and the Law (University of Chicago Press, 2014), Winnifred F. Sullivan offers a comprehensive study of contemporary chap...

Mark Standen was a hero to drug enforcement police. Not only was he a great guy but he was an extremely effective police officer. Unfortunately, he also became a partner in the illicit drug industry. Deception is a book that tells the story of how Standen turned to the dark side and how the Australian Federal Police were able to catch him. In his new book Deception: The True Story of the Internati...

Daniel DiSalvo is the author ofGovernment against Itself: Public Union Power and Its Consequences (Oxford University Press, 2015). DiSalvo is associate professor of political science at the City College of New York, CUNY, and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. It is rare that an academic book attracts attention and stokes real controversy, but look to DiSalvo as the first of 2015 to set t...

Cathy L. Schneider is the author of Police Power and Race Riots: Urban Unrest in Paris and New York (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). She is associate professor in the School of International Service at American University. Timeliness is not something that every scholarly book can claim, but Cathy Schneider has published a book of the moment. With protests occurring across the country in r...

I am old enough to realise that we have entered a science fiction world in which the old systems of the market place are being sidestepped by new technology. We who follow the tried and true methods are missing out of the brave new world. The changes are particularly true for the middle men whose services are no longer needed as the web allows customers to deal directly with producers. This also a...

In almost every prison movie you see, there is a group of fanatically religious inmates. They are almost always led by a charismatic leader, an outsized father-figure who is loved by his acolytes and feared by nearly everyone else. They’re usually black Muslims, but you also see the occasional born-again Christian gang. They promise salvation and, of course, protection. And they are scary. But wha...

Jarrod Gilbert is very lucky that he comes from a country the size of New Zealand. With only 4 million people he could carry out a project that would be beyond the abilities of someone from a large nation and beyond the scope of a single book, namely, the history of all the gangs in a country. Patched: The History of Gangs in New Zealand (Auckland UP, 2013) is, as you will hear in the interview, p...

Why is it that the United States continues to enforce the death penalty when the rest of the Western world abolished its use a little over three decades ago? That question, along with many other equally important questions, is at the heart of Dr. David Garland‘s recent book Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition (Harvard University Press, 2010). His provocative study...

Anyone who studies police corruption will be aware of the Knapp Commission that examined allegations of police corruption in New York City in the 1970s. Not only was this famous because of the movie Serpico, but also most of the terminology used in corruption studies of police came from the report of the commission. Michael F. Armstrong was the chief counsel to the commission and this book is a hi...

Christopher Browning is one of the giants in the field of Holocaust Studies. He has contributed vitally to at least two of the basic debates in the field: the intentionalist/functionalist discussion about when, why and how the Germans decided to annihilate the Jews of Europe, and the question of why individual perpetrators killed. His new book, then, seems like something of a departure. Rememberin...

The American penitentiary model began as not merely a physical construct, but as a philosophical and religious one. Prisoners were to use their time in silence and isolation to contemplate their crimes/sins and to pursue God’s grace. Alexis de Tocqueville’s trip to America began not as a study of American democracy, but of its prisons, though he would go on to write about both arguing that arguing...

In 1971, President Richard Nixon declared a “War on Drugs.” We are still fighting that war today. According to many people, we’ve lost but don’t know it. Rates of drug use in the US remain, by historical standards, high and our prisons are full of people–many of whom are hardly drug kingpins–who have violated drug laws. And, of course, it all costs a fortune. What to do? In her book The War on Dru...

Gangster Squad (St. Martin’s Press, 2012) the book is not Gangster Squad the movie. One is a detailed and thoroughly researched account of organized crime in Los Angeles and the other is a movie. If you are really interested in organized crime then you should read the book. Paul Lieberman has produced an excellent story of the gangsters and the police who tried to close them down. He presents both...