New Books in Policing, Incarceration, and Reform

Shaun S. Yates, "Over-Efficiency in the Lower Criminal Courts: Understanding a Key Problem and How to Fix it" (Policy Press, 2024)

17 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In our pursuit of efficiency in the lower criminal courts, have we lost sight of quality justice? Through the critical examination of original stenogr...

Policing and White Power with Daniel Kryder and David Cunningham (JP, EF)

15 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

This June 2020 episode, originally part of a Global Policing series, was Recall this Book's first exploration of police brutality, systemic and pers...

Heather Murray, "Asylum Ways of Seeing: Psychiatric Patients, American Thought and Culture" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2022)

13 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Asylum Ways of Seeing: Psychiatric Patients, American Thought and Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) by Dr. Heather Murray is a cultura...

Anne Gray Fischer, "The Streets Belong to Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification" (UNC Press, 2022)

05 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Anne Gray Fischer speaks about her path to and through research, including how sex workers informed her analysis of policing and state violence, the...

Mitchel P. Roth and Mahmut Cengiz, "Murder by Mail: A Global History of the Letter Bomb" (Reaktion Books, 2024)

02 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Murder by Mail: A Global History of the Letter Bomb (Reaktion, 2024) by Dr. Mitchel P. Roth and Dr. Mahmut Cengiz unfolds the gripping history of wea...

Let My People Go (with Matt Osborne)

01 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

LISTENER DISCRETION IS ADVISED: The topic of today’s episode is human trafficking and crimes against children, usually sexual crimes, and sometimes ...

Bernard E. Harcourt. "Cooperation: A Political, Economic, and Social Theory" (Columbia UP, 2023)

31 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Liberal democracy is in crisis around the world, unable to address pressing problems such as climate change. There is, however, another path—coopera...

Jessica S. Henry, "Smoke But No Fire: Convicting the Innocent of Crimes that Never Happened" (U California Press, 2021)

31 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Jessica Henry's Smoke But No Fire: Convicting the Innocent of Crimes that Never Happened (U California Press, 2021) explores a shocking but all-too...

David Pozen, "The Constitution of the War on Drugs" (Oxford UP, 2024)

29 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The U.S. government's decades-long "war on drugs" is increasingly recognized as a moral travesty as well as a policy failure. The criminalization of s...

Alessandra Montalbano, "Ransom Kidnapping in Italy: Crime, Memory, and Violence" (U Toronto Press, 2023)

19 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

For over thirty years, modern Italy was plagued by ransom kidnappings perpetrated by bandits and organised crime syndicates. Nearly 700 men, women, an...

Freeman's Challenge: The Murder That Shook America's Original Prison for Profit

18 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Today’s book is: Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit (U Chicago Press, 2024), by Dr. Robin Bernste...

Kevin Leo Nadal, "Queering Law and Order: LGBTQ Communities and the Criminal Justice System" (Lexington Book, 2020)

14 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Throughout US history, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people have been pathologized, victimized, and criminalized. Reports of ...

Premal Dharia et al., "Dismantling Mass Incarceration: A Handbook for Change" (FSG Originals, 2024)

09 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In recent years, a searching national conversation has called attention to the social and racial injustices that define America’s criminal system. T...

Ailbhe O'Loughlin, "Law and Personality Disorder: Human Rights, Human Risks, and Rehabilitation" (Oxford UP, 2024)

03 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In Law and Personality Disorder: Human Rights, Human Risks, and Rehabilitation (Oxford UP, 2024), Dr Ailbhe O'Loughlin considers the controversia...

Felicia Arriaga, "Behind Crimmigration: ICE, Law Enforcement, and Resistance in America" (UNC Press, 2023)

30 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In recent years, dozens of counties in North Carolina have partnered with federal law enforcement in the criminalization of immigration--what many hav...

Alex V. Barnard, "Conservatorship: Inside California's System of Coercion and Care for Mental Illness" (Columbia UP, 2023)

18 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Is involuntary psychiatric treatment the solution to the intertwined crises of untreated mental illness, homelessness, and addiction? In recent years,...

Michele Goodwin, "Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood" (Cambridge UP, 2020)

08 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood (Cambridge University Press, 2020) a brilliant but shocking account of the cr...

Sharrona Pearl, "Do I Know You?: From Face Blindness to Super Recognition" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023)

08 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In Do I Know You? From Faceblindness to Super Recognition (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023), Dr. Sharrona Pearl explores the fascinating catego...

Aya Gruber, "The Feminist War on Crime: The Unexpected Role of Women’s Liberation in Mass Incarceration" (U California Press, 2020)

02 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Aya Gruber, a professor of law at the University of Colorado Law School, has written a history of how the women’s movement in America has shaped the...

Adam Goodman, "The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Expelling Immigrants" (Princeton UP, 2020)

02 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Many of us know that immigrants have been deported from the United States for well over a century, but has anyone ever asked how? In The Deportation M...

Anne Kim, "Poverty for Profit: How Corporations Get Rich off America’s Poor" (The New Press, 2024)

30 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Poverty is big business in America. The federal government spends about $900 billion a year on programs that directly or disproportionately impact poo...

M. Ramirez and D. Peterson, "Ignored Racism: White Animus Toward Latinos (Cambridge UP, 2020)

28 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Although Latinos are now the largest non-majority group in the United States, existing research on white attitudes toward Latinos has focused almost e...

Jan Grabowski, "On Duty: The Role of the Polish Blue and Criminal Police in the Holocaust" (Yad Vashem, 2024)

27 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

"The Polish Police, commonly called the Blue or uniformed police in order to avoid using the term “Polish,” has played a most lamentable role in t...

Jeffrey Reiman and Paul Leighton, "The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison" (Routledge, 2023)

24 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

For 40 years, this classic text has taken the issue of economic inequality seriously and asked: Why are our prisons filled with the poor? Why aren't t...

Kate Morgan, "The Walnut Tree: Women, Violence and the Law – A Hidden History" (Mudlark, 2024)

19 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

'A woman, a dog and a walnut tree, the more they are beaten, the better they’ll be.' So went the proverb quoted by a prominent MP in the Houses of P...

David Pozen, "The Constitution of the War on Drugs" (Oxford UP, 2024)

28 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

David Pozen is the Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and the author of the new book, The Constitution of the War on Drug...

Stitching Freedom: Embroidery and Incarceration

25 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Today’s book is: Stitching Freedom: Embroidery and Incarceration (Common Threads Press, 2024), by Dr. Isabella Rosner, which considers how for cen...

Ieva Jusionyte, "Exit Wounds: How America's Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border" (U California Press, 2024)

15 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

American guns have entangled the lives of people on both sides of the US-Mexico border in a vicious circle of violence. After treating wounded migrant...

Dave Mac Marquis and Moira Marquis, "Books Through Bars: Stories from the Prison Books Movement" (U Georgia Press, 2024)

31 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Co-edited by Dave Mac Marquis and Moira Marquis, two activists with deep experience in organizing prison books programs (PBPs), Books Through Bars: ...

Alke Jenss, "Selective Security in the War on Drugs: The Coloniality of State Power in Colombia and Mexico" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023)

18 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Paramilitaries, crime, and tens of thousands of disappeared persons—the so-called war on drugs has perpetuated violence in Latin America, at times p...

Caitlin Davies, "Private Inquiries: The Secret History of Female Sleuths" (The History Press, 2023)

17 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Dismissed as ‘Mrs Sherlock Holmes’ or amateurish Miss Marples, mocked as private dicks or honey trappers, they have been investigating crime since...

Mara Albrecht and Alke Jenss, "The Spatiality and Temporality of Urban Violence: Histories, Rhythms and Ruptures" (Manchester UP, 2023)

10 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The Spatiality and Temporality of Urban Violence: Histories, Rhythms and Ruptures (Manchester UP, 2023) asks how the city, with its spatial and temp...

Jack Levin and Julie B. Wiest, "Covert Violence: The Secret Weapon of the Powerless" (Bristol University Press, 2023)

23 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Covert violence occurs in all social institutions—including families and close relationships, education, workplaces, politics, mass media, and healt...

Max Ward, "Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan" (Duke UP, 2019)

21 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Max Ward’s Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan (Duke University Press, 2019) analyzes the trajectory and transformations of th...

Laurence Ralph, "Sito: An American Teenager and the City That Failed Him" (Grand Central Publishing, 2023)

21 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In September of 2019, Luis Alberto Quiñonez—known as Sito— was shot to death as he sat in his car in the Mission District of San Francisco. He wa...

Max Felker-Kantor, "DARE to Say No: Policing and the War on Drugs in Schools" (UNC Press, 2023)

17 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

With its signature "DARE to keep kids off drugs" slogan and iconic t-shirts, DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) was the most popular drug educatio...

Marisol LeBrón, "Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico" (U California Press, 2019)

14 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Marisol LeBrón’s new book, Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico (University of California Press, 2019), examines ...

Calvin John Smiley, "Purgatory Citizenship: Reentry, Race, and Abolition" (U California Press, 2023)

07 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In Purgatory Citizenship: Reentry, Race, and Abolition (University of California Press, 2023), Calvin John Smiley explores the lives of people who w...

Matthew D. Lassiter, "The Suburban Crisis: White America and the War on Drugs" (Princeton UP, 2023)

01 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Most accounts of post-1950s political history tell the story of of the war on drugs as part of a racial system of social control of urban minority pop...

Maryam Kashani, "Medina by the Bay: Scenes of Muslim Study and Survival" (Duke UP, 2023)

31 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

From the Black Power movement and state surveillance to Silicon Valley and gentrification, Medina by the Bay: Scenes of Muslim Study and Survival (D...

Damien Sojoyner, "Against the Carceral Archive: The Art of Black Liberatory Practice" (Fordham UP, 2023)

28 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Against the Carceral Archive: The Art of Black Liberatory Practice (Fordham UP, 2023) is a meditation upon what author Damien M. Sojoyner calls the “...

Leanne Trapedo Sims, "Reckoning with Restorative Justice: Hawai'i Women's Prison Writing" (Duke UP, 2023)

19 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In Reckoning with Restorative Justice Hawaii Women's Prison Writing (Duke University Press, 2023), Dr. Leanne Trapedo Sims explores the experienc...

Scott Gac, "Born in Blood: Violence and the Making of America" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

18 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Scott Gac's Born in Blood: Violence and the Making of America (Cambridge UP, 2023) investigates one of history's most violent undertakings: The Unit...

Emily Brooks, "Gotham’s War Within a War: Policing and the Birth of Law-and-Order Liberalism in World War II-Era New York City" (UNC Press, 2023)

13 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, members of the NYPD had worked to enforce partisan political power rather than focus on ...

Emma Kuby, "Political Survivors: The Resistance, the Cold War, and the Fight against Concentration Camps After 1945" (Cornell UP, 2019)

07 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Emma Kuby’s new book, Political Survivors: The Resistance, the Cold War, and the Fight against Concentration Camps After 1945 (Cornell UP, 2019) tra...

Gary Shiffman, "The Economics of Violence: How Behavioral Science Can Transform our View of Crime, Insurgency, and Terrorism" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

03 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Dr. Gary Shiffman’s book The Economics of Violence: How Behavioral Science Can Transform our View of Crime, Insurgency, and Terrorism (Cambridge U...

Justin Marceau, "Beyond Cages: Animal Law and Criminal Punishment" (Cambridge UP, 2019)

31 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

For all the diversity of views within the animal protection movement, there is a surprising consensus about the need for more severe criminal justice ...

Bryan McCann, "The Mark of Criminality: Rhetoric, Race, and Gangsta Rap in the War-on-Crime Era" (U Alabama Press, 2017)

26 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

On this episode, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Communication at SUNY Geneseo--interviews Bryan McCann (he/his)--Associate Professor of Com...

Emily Horowitz, "From Rage to Reason: Why We Need Sex Crime Laws Based on Facts, Not Fear" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

20 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In her book From Rage to Reason: Why We Need Sex Crime Laws Based on Facts, Not Fear (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), Emily Horowitz shows how current s...

Tom Buitelaar, "Assisting International Justice: Cooperation Between UN Peace Operations and the International Criminal Court in the Democratic Republic of Congo" (Oxford UP, 2023)

19 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Although the International Criminal Court (ICC) - as the only permanent international court that addresses crimes against humanity, genocide, and war ...

Julian Go, "Policing Empires: Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the US" (Oxford UP, 2023)

12 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The police response to protests erupting on America's streets in recent years has made the militarization of policing painfully transparent. Yet, prop...

Mark Munsterhjelm, "Forensic Colonialism: Genetics and the Capture of Indigenous Peoples" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2023)

10 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Forensic genetic technologies are popularly conceptualized and revered as important tools of justice. The research and development of these technologi...

The Future of Predictions: A Discussion with Christopher E. Mason

09 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Predictive algorithms are changing the world – that is the claim of Christopher E. Mason who has co-authored (with Igor Tulchinsky) the book The A...

Sinae Hyun, "Indigenizing the Cold War: The Border Patrol Police and Nation-Building in Thailand" (U Hawaii Press, 2023)

01 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Historians have tended to view the Cold War as a global ideological confrontation between an expansionist communist Soviet Union and a capitalist Unit...

Education Behind the Wall: Why and How We Teach College in Prison

30 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Why are college programs offered in some prisons? How are the students selected? Where do the professors come from? What are the logistics of preparin...

Laurence Ralph Reckons With Police Violence (EF, JP)

16 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In the third episode of our Global Policing series, Elizabeth and John spoke back in 2020 with anthropologist Laurence Ralph about The Torture Let...

Frederick V. Engram, "Black Liberation Through Action and Resistance: MOVE" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023)

30 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Black Liberation through Action and Resistance: MOVE (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) serves as a call to action for Black millennials and co-conspirator...

Nicole Nguyen, "Terrorism on Trial: Political Violence and Abolitionist Futures" (U Minnesota Press, 2023)

27 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Rather than functioning as a final arbiter of justice, U.S. domestic courts are increasingly seen as counterterrorism tools that can incapacitate terr...

Campbell F. Scribner, "A Is for Arson: A History of Vandalism in American Education" (Cornell UP, 2023)

22 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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 un...

Matthew Guariglia, "Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York" (Duke UP, 2023)

21 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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 th...

Immo Rebitschek and Aaron B. Retish, "Social Control under Stalin and Khrushchev: The Phantom of a Well-Ordered State" (U Toronto Press, 2023)

21 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

The Future of Incarceration: A Discussion with Colleen P. Eren

18 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The United States has long been associated with a very harsh criminal justice system with, in some cases, people serving long sentence for minor crime...

Orisanmi Burton, "Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt" (U California Press, 2023)

17 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt (University of California Press, 2023) boldly and compellingly arg...

Kristen Green, "The Devil's Half Acre: The Untold Story of How One Woman Liberated the South's Most Notorious Slave Jail" (Seal Press, 2022)

14 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

Kristen M. Budd and David C. Lane, "Beyond Bars: A Path Forward from 50 Years of Mass Incarceration in the United States" (Policy Press, 2023)

13 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The year 2023 marks 50 years of mass incarceration in the United States. This timely volume highlights and addresses pressing social problems associat...

Gültan Kışanak, "The Purple Color of Kurdish Politics: Women Politicians Write from Prison" (Pluto Press, 2022)

10 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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 m...

Eric B. Elbogen and Nico Verykoukis, "Violence and Mental Illness: Rethinking Risk Factors and Enhancing Public Safety" (NYU Press, 2023)

08 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Mass shootings have become a defining issue of our time. Whenever the latest act of newsworthy violence occurs, mental illness is inevitably cited as ...

Jared Davidson, "Blood and Dirt: Prison Labour and the Making of New Zealand" (Bridget Williams Books, 2023)

28 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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. M...

Laura F. Edwards, "The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South" (UNC Press, 2009)

25 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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...

Diana Rickard, "The New True Crime: How the Rise of Serialized Storytelling Is Transforming Innocence" (NYU Press, 2023)

23 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The New True Crime: How the Rise of Serialized Storytelling Is Transforming Innocence (NYU Press, 2023) by Dr. Diana Rickard examines how serialized ...

James Greenwood-Reeves, "Justifying Violent Protest: Law and Morality in Democratic States" (Routledge, 2023)

23 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Was the use of violence on January 6th Capitol attacks legitimate? Is the use of violence morally justified by members of Extinction Rebellion or Jus...

David Cunningham, January 6th and Asymmetrical Policing (JP, EF)

21 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Recall This Book first heard from the sociologist of American racism David Cunningham in Episode 36 Policing and White Power. Less than a week afte...

Tanya Maria Golash-Boza, "Before Gentrification: The Creation of DC's Racial Wealth Gap" (U California Press, 2023)

19 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

This book shows how a century of redlining, disinvestment, and the War on Drugs wreaked devastation on Black people and paved the way for gentrificati...

A Better Way to Buy Books

12 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has alre...

Asad L. Asad, "Engage and Evade: How Latino Immigrant Families Manage Surveillance in Everyday Life" (Princeton UP, 2023)

27 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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 immigran...

Andrew Johnson, "If I Give My Soul: Faith Behind Bars in Rio de Janeiro" (Oxford UP, 2017)

16 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Pentecostal Christianity is flourishing inside the prisons of Rio de Janeiro. To find out why, Andrew Johnson dug deep into the prisons themselves. He...

Michell D. Jones and Elisabeth A. Nelson, "Besides, Who Would Believe a Prisoner?: Indiana Women's Carceral Institutions, 1848-1920" (New Press, 2023)

09 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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 incarcer...

Lynsey Black, "Gender and Punishment in Ireland: Women, Murder and the Death Penalty, 1922-64" (Manchester UP, 2022)

27 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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 pun...

Ngaire Naffine, "Criminal Law and the Man Problem" (Bloomsbury, 2020)

23 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Men have always dominated the most basic precepts of the criminal legal world – its norms, its priorities and its character. Men have been the regul...

Mark R. Warren, "Willful Defiance: The Movement to Dismantle the School-to-Prison Pipeline" (Oxford UP, 2021)

07 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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...

David Churchill et al., "Historical Criminology" (Routledge, 2021)

21 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Historical Criminology (Routledge, 2022) breaks new ground by challenging researchers to question what we do, and why we do it. It draws out what cr...

Farah Godrej, "Freedom Inside?: Yoga and Meditation in the Carceral State" (Oxford UP, 2022)

18 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Are meditation and yoga offered to prisoners merely to have them acquiesce to being incarcerated and degraded? Or can they help prisoners interrogate ...

America & Democracy Ep. 3: Carol A. Stabile on the Red Scare

16 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In this series of interviews from The MIT Press Podcast, we'll be drawing on the research of various authors to reflect on some of the issues shaping...

Michelle Smirnova, "The Prescription-To-Prison Pipeline: The Medicalization and Criminalization of Pain" (Duke UP, 2023)

15 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In The Prescription-To-Prison Pipeline: The Medicalization and Criminalization of Pain (Duke UP, 2023), Michelle Smirnova argues that the ongoing o...

Anne Kaun and Fredrik Stiernstedt, "Prison Media: Incarceration and the Infrastructures of Work and Technology" (MIT Press, 2023)

13 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Prisons are not typically known for cutting-edge media technologies. Yet from photography in the nineteenth century to AI-enhanced tracking cameras to...

Kyla Sommers, "When the Smoke Cleared: The 1968 Rebellion and the Unfinished Battle for Civil Rights in the Nation's Capital" (New Press, 2023)

08 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In April 1968, following the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., a wave of uprisings swept across America. None was more visible—or resulted in more p...

Carceral Capitalism

05 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Conor Rose reads from Jackie Wang's Carceral Capitalism. This extract, taken from the opening of the book, offers insight into the Black Lives Matte...

Cedric Johnson, "After Black Lives Matter: Policing and Anti-Capitalist Struggle" (Verso, 2023)

04 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The historic uprising in the wake of the murder of George Floyd transformed the way Americans and the world think about race and policing. Why did it ...

Chad E. Pearson, "Capital's Terrorists: Klansmen, Lawmen, and Employers in the Long Nineteenth Century" (UNC Press, 2022)

02 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, employers, government officials, journalists, and powerful individuals deployed a variety o...

Deborah Bauer, "Marianne Is Watching: Intelligence, Counterintelligence, and the Origins of the French Surveillance State" (U Nebraska Press, 2021)

01 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In the wake of its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), the French Third Republic sought to rebuild its strength to avenge its defeat and secu...

Zoha Waseem, "Insecure Guardians: Enforcement, Encounters and Everyday Policing in Postcolonial Karachi" (Oxford UP, 2022)

18 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The police force is one of the most distrusted institutions in Pakistan, notorious for its corruption and brutality. In both colonial and postcolonial...

Nicholas Guyatt, "The Hated Cage: An American Tragedy in Britain's Most Terrifying Prison" (Basic Books, 2022)

18 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

After the War of 1812, more than five thousand American sailors were marooned in Dartmoor Prison on a barren English plain; the conflict was over but ...

Cristina Mejia Visperas, "Skin Theory: Visual Culture and the Postwar Prison Laboratory" (NYU, 2022)

13 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

An abolitionist approach to STS and the history of the life sciences: this is the model that Cristina Mejia Visperas offers in her book, Skin Theor...

Derek Hanley, "Photos from the Front Lines: A Year on the Streets of Alameda County" (2022)

25 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Photos from the Front Lines follows medics from Falck Alameda County ambulance during one of the most tumultuous years in recent collective memory - ...

David Houston Jones, "Visual Culture and the Forensic: Culture, Memory, Ethics" (Routledge, 2022)

22 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The relationship between images and truth has a complicated history. In the Western tradition, the Kantian settlement on aesthetic judgment as detache...

Leigh Goodmark, "Imperfect Victims: Criminalized Survivors and the Promise of Abolition Feminism" (U California Press, 2023)

22 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Leigh Goodmark’s new book, Imperfect Victims: Criminalized Survivors and the Promise of Abolition Feminism (U California Press, 2023), uses the st...

Daniel L. Hatcher, "Injustice, Inc.: How America's Justice System Commodifies Children and the Poor" (U California Press, 2023)

21 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Injustice, Inc.: How America's Justice System Commodifies Children and the Poor (U California Press, 2023) exposes the ways in which justice systems...

Marissa A. Harrison, "Just as Deadly: The Psychology of Female Serial Killers" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

20 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

You've heard of Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy. But have you heard of Amy Archer-Gilligan? Or Belle Gunness? Or Nannie Doss? Women have committed some ...

Hernán Flom, "The Informal Regulation of Criminal Markets in Latin America" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

16 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Political Scientist Hernán Flom has written a fascinating and nuanced analysis of how the criminal drug markets operate in Argentina and Brazil. Inst...

Lerone A. Martin, "The Gospel of J. Edgar Hoover: How the FBI Aided and Abetted the Rise of White Christian Nationalism" (Princeton UP, 2023)

01 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

On a Sunday morning in 1966, a group of white evangelicals dedicated a stained glass window to J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI director was not an evangelica...