New Books in Policing, Incarceration, and Reform

Rather than functioning as a final arbiter of justice, U.S. domestic courts are increasingly seen as counterterrorism tools that can incapacitate terrorists, maintain national security operations domestically, and produce certain narratives of conflict. Terrorism on Trial: Political Violence and Abolitionist Futures (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) by Dr. Nicole Nguyen examines the contempora...

In A Is for Arson: A History of Vandalism in American Education (Cornell UP, 2023), Campbell F. Scribner sifts through two centuries of debris to uncover the conditions that have prompted school vandalism and to explain why attempts at prevention have inevitably failed. Vandalism costs taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars every year, as students, parents, and even teachers wreak havoc on scho...

During the years between the Civil War and World War II, police in New York City struggled with how to control a diverse metropolis. In Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York (Duke UP, 2023), Matthew Guariglia tells the history of the New York Police Department to show how its origins were built upon and inseparably entwined with the history of race, ethnic...

How did the Soviet Union control the behaviour of its people? How did the people themselves engage with the official rules and the threat of violence in their lives? In Immo Rebitschek and Aaron B. Retish's book Social Control under Stalin and Khrushchev: The Phantom of a Well-Ordered State (U Toronto Press, 2023), the contributors examine how social control developed under Stalin and Khrushchev....

The United States has long been associated with a very harsh criminal justice system with, in some cases, people serving long sentence for minor crimes. But attempts to reform the system have proven very difficult. In her new book Reform Nation: The First Step Act and the Movement to End Mass Incarceration (Stanford UP, 2023), Colleen P. Eren explains why. Listen to her in conversation with Owen B...

Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt (University of California Press, 2023) boldly and compellingly argues that prisons are a domain of hidden warfare within US borders. With this book, Orisanmi Burton explores what he terms the Long Attica Revolt, a criminalized tradition of Black radicalism that propelled rebellions in New York prisons during the 1970...

The inspiring true story of an enslaved woman who liberated an infamous slave jail and transformed it into one of the nation’s first HBCUs. In The Devil's Half Acre: The Untold Story of How One Woman Liberated the South's Most Notorious Slave Jail (Seal Press, 2022), New York Times bestselling author Kristen Green draws on years of research to tell the extraordinary and little-known story of young...

The year 2023 marks 50 years of mass incarceration in the United States. This timely volume highlights and addresses pressing social problems associated with the US’s heavy reliance on mass imprisonment. In an atmosphere of charged political debate, including "tough on crime" rhetoric, the editors bring together scholars and experts in the criminal justice field to provide the most up-to-date scie...

The Purple Color of Kurdish Politics: Women Politicians Write from Prison (Pluto Press, 2022) is a one-of-a-kind collection of prison writings from more than 20 Kurdish women politicians. Here they reflect on their personal and collective struggles against patriarchy and anti-Kurdish repression in Turkey; on the radical feminist principles and practices through which they transformed the political...

Mass shootings have become a defining issue of our time. Whenever the latest act of newsworthy violence occurs, mental illness is inevitably cited as a preeminent cause by members of the news media and political sphere alike. Eric B. Elbogen and Nico Verykoukis's book Violence and Mental Illness: Rethinking Risk Factors and Enhancing Public Safety (NYU Press, 2023) exposes how mental illness is va...

Picture, for a minute, every artwork of colonial New Zealand you can think of. Now add a chain gang. Hard-labour men guarded by other men with guns. Men moving heavy metal. Men picking at the earth. Over and over again. This was the reality of nineteenth-century New Zealand. Forced labour haunts the streets we walk today and the spaces we take for granted. The unfree work of prisoners has shaped N...

Do individuals have the right to “keep and bear” arms? Do “the people” have any collective rights to public safety? Now that the United States Supreme Court requires each side to argue based on the “history” and “tradition” of 1791 and 1868, what do scholars tell us about legal practices and public understanding in those times? Dr. Laura F. Edwards argues that Americans in the South transformed th...

The New True Crime: How the Rise of Serialized Storytelling Is Transforming Innocence (NYU Press, 2023) by Dr. Diana Rickard examines how serialized crime shows became an American obsession. TV shows and podcasts like Making a Murderer, Serial, and Atlanta Monster have taken the cultural zeitgeist by storm, and contributed to the release of wrongly imprisoned people—such as Adnan Syed. The popular...

Was the use of violence on January 6th Capitol attacks legitimate? Is the use of violence morally justified by members of Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil campaigners? Justifying Violent Protest: Law and Morality in Democratic States (Routledge, 2023) addresses these issues head on, to make a radical, but compelling argument in favour of the legitimate use of violence in protest in liberal de...

Recall This Book first heard from the sociologist of American racism David Cunningham in Episode 36 Policing and White Power. Less than a week after the horrors of January 6th, 2021, he came back for this conversation about “asymmetrical policing” of the political right and left–and of White and Black Americans. His very first book (There’s Something Happening Here, 2004) studied the contrast betw...

This book shows how a century of redlining, disinvestment, and the War on Drugs wreaked devastation on Black people and paved the way for gentrification in Washington, DC. In Before Gentrification: The Creation of DC's Racial Wealth Gap (U California Press, 2023), Tanya Maria Golash-Boza tracks the cycles of state abandonment and punishment that have shaped the city, revealing how policies and pol...

Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book sho...

Because immigration is such a recurring-and divisive-topic in the United States, it is easy to assume that we understand what it means for an immigrant to live under the specter of surveillance and punishment. It is easy to assume, as many scholars and journalists do, that undocumented immigrants live on the run from the authorities, constantly fleeing to the margins of daily life, staying in the...

Pentecostal Christianity is flourishing inside the prisons of Rio de Janeiro. To find out why, Andrew Johnson dug deep into the prisons themselves. He began by spending two weeks living in a Brazilian prison as if he were an inmate: sleeping in the same cells as the inmates, eating the same food, and participating in the men's daily routines as if he were incarcerated. And he returned many times a...

What if prisoners were to write the history of their own prison? What might that tell them--and all of us--about the roots of the system that incarcerates so many millions of Americans?  In Besides, Who Would Believe a Prisoner?: Indiana Women's Carceral Institutions, 1848-1920 (New Press, 2023), a group of incarcerated women at the Indiana Women's Prison have assembled a chronicle of what was ori...

Dr Lynsey Black is a lecturer in criminology, in the School of Law and Criminology, Maynooth University. She researches in the areas of gender and punishment, the death penalty, historical and postcolonial criminology, and borders. In this interview she discusses her new book, Gender and Punishment in Ireland: Women, Murder and the Death Penalty, 1922-64 (Manchester UP, 2022). Gender and Punishmen...

Men have always dominated the most basic precepts of the criminal legal world – its norms, its priorities and its character. Men have been the regulators and the regulated: the main subjects and objects of criminal law and by far the more dangerous sex. And yet men, as men, are still hardly talked about as the determining force within criminal law or in its exegesis. Criminal Law and the Man Probl...

The story of how Black and Brown parents, students and members of low-income communities of color organized to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline in their local schools and built a movement that spread across the country.  In Willful Defiance: The Movement to Dismantle the School-to-Prison Pipeline (Oxford UP, 2021), Mark R. Warren documents how Black and Brown parents, students, and low-inco...

Historical Criminology (Routledge, 2022) breaks new ground by challenging researchers to question what we do, and why we do it. It draws out what criminologists can learn from historians, and examines the concept of historical criminology not as a sub-discipline, but as a core approach to doing criminology. The book questions the way that we think about time as a concept - in the past, the present...

Are meditation and yoga offered to prisoners merely to have them acquiesce to being incarcerated and degraded? Or can they help prisoners interrogate the political and social structures that incarcerate and degrade?  In Freedom Inside? Yoga and Meditation in the Carceral State (Oxford University Press, 2022), Farah Godrej explores the tension between narratives of quiet contemplation and social or...