New Books in Policing, Incarceration, and Reform
Episodes
Who Gets Believed? When the Truth Isn't Enough
28 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Why are people judged on whether or not they are compelling? Why isn’t telling the truth enough? What are people really listening for when others sh...
Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud, "Pegasus: How a Spy in Your Pocket Threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity, and Democracy" (Henry Holt, 2023)
18 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Pegasus: How a Spy in Your Pocket Threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity, and Democracy (Henry Holt, 2023) is the inside story of a worldwide investi...
Lisa Hajjar, "The War in Court: Inside the Long Fight Against Torture" (U California Press, 2022)
18 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The War in Court: Inside the Long Fight against Torture (University of California Press, 2022) by Dr. Lisa Hajjar examines how hundreds of lawyers mo...
Nicole von Germeten, "The Enlightened Patrolman: Early Law Enforcement in Mexico City" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)
31 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
When late eighteenth-century New Spanish viceregal administrators installed public lamps in the streets of central Mexico City, they illuminated the b...
Lisa Biggs, "The Healing Stage: Black Women, Incarceration, and the Art of Transformation" (Ohio State UP, 2022)
16 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Over the last five decades, Black women have been one of the fastest-growing segments of the global prison population, thanks to changes in policies t...
James M. Deem, "The Prisoners of Breendonk: Personal Histories from a World War II Concentration Camp" (Mariner Books, 2020)
16 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Fort Breendonk was built in the early 1900s to protect Antwerp, Belgium, from possible German invasion. Damaged at the start of World War I, it fell i...
Eric A. Stanley, "Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable" (Duke UP, 2021)
16 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Content note: This episode contains discussions of suicide, as well as allusions to graphic anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-Black violence Advances in LGBTQ r...
Tommie Shelby, "The Idea of Prison Abolition" (Princeton UP, 2022)
30 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
By any reasonable metric, prisons as they exist in the United States and in many other countries are normatively unacceptable. What is the proper mora...
Michael Ayers Trotti, "The End of Public Execution: Race, Religion, and Punishment in the American South" (UNC Press, 2022)
23 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Michael Ayers Trotti's The End of Public Execution: Race, Religion and Punishment in the American South (The University of North Carolina Press, 202...
Zvi Preigerzon, "Memoirs of a Jewish Prisoner of the Gulag" (Cherry Orchard Books, 2022)
20 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Today I talked to Alex Lahav about his edition and translation Memoirs of a Jewish Prisoner of the Gulag (Cherry Orchard Books, 2022). Zvi Preigerz...
Brian Daldorph, "Words Is a Powerful Thing: Twenty Years of Teaching Creative Writing at Douglas County Jail" (UP of Kansas, 2021)
11 Dec 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Brian Daldorph first entered the Douglas County Jail classroom in Lawrence, Kansas, to teach a writing class on Christmas Eve 2001. His last class at ...
Lyndsie Bourgon, "Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in North America's Woods" (Little, Brown Spark, 2022)
22 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
There's a strong chance that chair you are sitting on was made from stolen lumber. In Tree Thieves: Crime And Survival In North America's Woods (Lit...
Deiter Reinisch, "Learning behind Bars: How IRA Prisoners Shaped the Peace Process in Ireland" (U Toronto Press, 2022)
18 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Dieter Reinisch is a Government of Ireland Irish Research Council Fellow in the School of Political Science and Sociology, University of Galway, and a...
Jeffrey Bellin, "Mass Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became Addicted to Prisons and Jails and How it Can Recover" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
15 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The United States imprisons a higher proportion of its population than any other nation. Mass Incarceration Nation offers a novel, in-the-trenches per...
The Future of Money Laundering: A Discussion with Oliver Bullough
01 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
How can you hide and spend billions of dollars? Many people hoping to do that go to London which is today considered the money laundering capital of t...
Alejandro Anaya-Muñoz and Barbara Frey, "Mexico's Human Rights Crisis" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2019)
31 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Lawless elements are ascendant in Mexico, as evidenced by the operations of criminal cartels engaged in human and drug trafficking, often with the act...
Jennifer Lillian Lodine-Chaffey, "A Weak Woman in a Strong Battle: Women and Public Execution in Early Modern England" (U Alabama Press, 2022)
25 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Content Warning: discussion of execution gets a bit gruesome. Jennifer Lodine-Chaffey, A Weak Woman in a Strong Battle: Women and Public Execution ...
Rachel Schreiber, "Elaine Black Yoneda: Jewish Immigration, Labor Activism, and Japanese American Exclusion and Incarceration" (Temple UP, 2021)
25 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
During World War II, Elaine Black Yoneda, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, spent eight months in a concentration camp--not in Europe, but in...
Lucy Series, "Deprivation of Liberty in the Shadows of the Institution" (Bristol UP, 2022)
24 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Dr Lucy Series Deprivations of Liberty in The Shadows of the Institution (Bristol University Press, 2022) is one that I have long been looking forw...
Deniz Yonucu, "Police, Provocation, Politics: Counterinsurgency in Istanbul" (Cornell UP, 2022)
13 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Police, Provocation, Politics: Counterinsurgency in Istanbul (Cornell University Press, 2022), Deniz Yonucu presents a counterintuitive analysis ...
P. E. Caquet, "Opium's Orphans: The 200-Year History of the War on Drugs" (Reaktion Books, 2022)
12 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The global war on drugs began some 150 years before US President Richard Nixon launched the current chapter of America’s drug war in 1971. In Opium...
Emerald Garner, "Finding My Voice" (Haymarket, 2022)
07 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this unforgetable memoir, Emerald Garner recounts her father's cruel and unjust murder, the immense pain that followed, the pressures of an exploit...
Mark Neocleous, "A Critical Theory of Police Power: The Fabrication of the Social Order" (Verso, 2021)
05 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
A Critical Theory of Police Power: The Fabrication of Social Order (Verso, 2021) offers a critical look at policing and the power of the state, exa...
Sarah Colvin, "Shadowland: The Story of Germany Told by Its Prisoners" (Reaktion Books, 2022)
03 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Shadowland: The Story of Germany Told by Its Prisoners (Reaktion Books, 2022) is a history of modern Germany told not through the lives of its lea...
Jonas Kreienbaum, "A Sad Fiasco: Colonial Concentration Camps in Southern Africa, 1900–1908" (Berghahn Books, 2019)
29 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Holocaust and Genocide historians have spent much time and effort recently considering the connections between the experiences and ideas of colonialis...
Keri Blakinger, "Corrections in Ink: A Memoir" (St. Martin's Press, 2022)
22 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Corrections in Ink (St. Martin's Press, 2022) is an electric and unforgettable memoir about a young woman's journey-from the ice rink, to addiction a...
Ethan Czuy Levine, "Rape by the Numbers: Producing and Contesting Scientific Knowledge about Sexual Violence" (Rutgers UP, 2021)
13 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Science plays a substantial, though under-acknowledged, role in shaping popular understandings of rape. Statistical figures like “1 in 4 women have ...
Josh Chin and Liza Lin, "Surveillance State: Inside China's Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control" (St. Martin's Press, 2022)
09 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
As we build the AI-powered digital economy, how far do we want to go? Surveillance State: Inside China's Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control ...
This is Your Brain on Trial
31 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Imagine reading or watching The Minority Report and thinking of that as a model for the criminal justice system. Well, plenty of forensic types are ...
Jillian Peterson and James Densley, "The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic" (Harry N. Abrams, 2021)
31 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Using data from the writers' groundbreaking research on mass shooters, including first-person accounts from the perpetrators themselves, The Violence...
Pathological: The Work of Dr. Charles Smith
30 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Dr. Charles Smith performed autopsies at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, ON. The cops kept turning to him with new corpses, and he kept cla...
Derailed: The Crisis of Forensic Expertise
29 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
When it comes to complex social problems, us “sensible” types turn to the experts, but what if they don’t actually know what they’re talking a...
The Journal of Higher Education in Prison
18 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about: How both of today’s guests became involved in higher education in prison. Why t...
Ronald Meester and Klaas Slooten, "Probability and Forensic Evidence: Theory, Philosophy, and Applications" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
09 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Probability and Forensic Evidence: Theory, Philosophy, and Applications (Cambridge UP, 2021), Ronald Meester and Klaas Slooten address the role ...
Exiled in America: About the Lives of Registered Sex Offenders
22 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Before Darts and Letters there was a documentary series called Cited. This is one of those documentaries. This episode is about the lives of sex offen...
Prison Notebooks: Thinking (and Writing) about Incarceration
21 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
I can point you to mountains of research about prisons. I can also recommend at least a dozen Netflix documentaries, and highlight a handful of radica...
Tara Watson and Kalee Thompson, "The Border Within: The Economics of Immigration in an Age of Fear" (U Chicago Press, 2021)
19 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
For decades, immigration has been one of the most divisive, contentious topics in American politics. And for decades, urgent calls for its policy refo...
Willem Bart de Lint, "Blurring Intelligence Crime: A Critical Forensics" (Springer, 2022)
15 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Willem Bart de Lint's Blurring Intelligence Crime: A Critical Forensics (Springer, 2022) explores the conundrum that political fortune is dependent...
Hugh Ryan, "The Women's House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison" (Bold Type Books, 2022)
14 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Women’s House of Detention stood in New York City’s Greenwich Village from 1929 to 1974. Throughout its history, it was a nexus for tens of th...
Jason D. Spraitz and Kendra N. Bowen, "Institutional Sexual Abuse in the #metoo Era" (Southern Illinois UP, 2021)
01 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Institutional Sexual Abuse in the #metoo Era (Southern Illinois UP, 2021), editors Jason D. Spraitz and Kendra N. Bowen bring together the work o...
Anna Sergi et al., "Ports, Crime and Security: Governing and Policing Seaports in a Changing World" (Bristol UP, 2021)
01 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The COVID-19 pandemic, Brexit and the US-China trade dispute have heightened interest in the geopolitics and security of modern ports. Ports are whe...
Seán William Gannon, "The Irish Imperial Service: Policing Palestine and Administering the Empire, 1922–1966" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)
28 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Seán William Gannon's book The Irish Imperial Service: Policing Palestine and Administering the Empire, 1922–1966 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) exp...
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, "Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation" (Verso, 2022)
27 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Gathering together Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s work from over three decades, Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation (Verso, 2022) presents her si...
Joni Schwartz and John R. Chaney, "Gifts from the Dark: Learning from the Incarceration Experience" (Lexington Books, 2022)
24 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
While in no way supporting the systemic injustices and disparities of mass incarceration, in Gifts from the Dark: Learning from the Incarceration Exp...
Francesca Lessa, "The Condor Trials: Transnational Repression and Human Rights in South America" (Yale UP, 2022)
24 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Natalie Lira, "Laboratory of Deficiency: Sterilization and Confinement in California, 1900-1950s" (U California Press, 2021)
22 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Mirelsie Velázquez (Associate Professor & Rainbolt Family Endowed Presidential Professor, University of Oklahoma) speaks with Natalie Lira (Associate...
Judah Schept, "Coal, Cages, Crisis: The Rise of the Prison Economy in Central Appalachia" (NYU Press, 2022)
17 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
As the United States began the project of mass incarceration, rural communities turned to building prisons as a strategy for economic development. Mor...
Mikaela Rabinowitz, "Incarceration without Conviction: Pretrial Detention and the Erosion of Innocence in American Criminal Justice" (Routledge, 2021)
17 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Mikaela Rabinowitz’s Incarceration without Conviction: Pretrial Detention and the Erosion of Innocence in American Criminal Justice (Routledge, 20...
Rizwaan Sabir, "The Suspect: Counterterrorism, Islam and the Security State" (Pluto Press, 2022)
16 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
What impact has two decades' worth of policing and counterterrorism had on the state of mind of Muslims in Britain? In The Suspect: Counterterrorism,...
Gian Maria Campedelli, "Machine Learning for Criminology and Crime Research: At the Crossroads" (Routledge, 2022)
14 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Machine Learning for Criminology and Crime Research: At the Crossroads (Routledge, 2022) reviews the roots of the intersection between machine learn...
Ralph Hope, "The Grey Men: Pursuing the Stasi into the Present" (Oneworld, 2021)
10 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 m...
Brandon T. Jett, "Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South" (Louisiana State UP, 2021)
27 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this groundbreaking work, Professor Brandon T. Jett unearths how police departments evolved with the urbanization of the Jim Crow South, to targ...
Sean J. Drake, "Academic Apartheid: Race and the Criminalization of Failure in an American Suburb" (U California Press, 2022)
25 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Academic Apartheid: Race and the Criminalization of Failure in an American Suburb (U California Press, 2022), sociologist Sean J. Drake addresses...
Christopher Carothers, "Corruption Control in Authoritarian Regimes: Lessons from East Asia" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
17 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Political corruption remains … one of the most intriguing and challenging issues in social science research and public policy, perhaps because altho...
Mark Neocleous, "The Politics of Immunity: Security and the Policing of Bodies" (Verso, 2022)
12 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Our contemporary political condition is obsessed with immunity. The immunity of bodies and the body politic; personal immunity and herd immunity; how ...
Michael G. Flaherty and K. C. Carceral, "The Cage of Days: Time and Temporal Experience in Prison" (Columbia UP, 2022)
12 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Prisons operate according to the clockwork logic of our criminal justice system: we punish people by making them “serve” time. The Cage of Days: ...
Helen Steel et al., "Deep Deception: The Story of the Spycop Network, by the Women Who Uncovered the Shocking Truth" (Ebury, 2022)
09 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In Deep Deception: The Story of the Spycop Network, by the Women Who Uncovered the Shocking Truth (Ebury, 2022), five women discuss their experience...
Anthony Hatch, "Silent Cells: The Secret Drugging of Captive America" (U Minnesota Press, 2019)
28 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Suzanne E. Scoggins, "Policing China: Street-Level Cops in the Shadow of Protest" (Cornell UP, 2021)
25 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
China has the reputation for being a strong security state. After the pro-democracy Tiananmen protests, the Chinese government moved to increase stabi...
Kristin Henning, "The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth" (Pantheon Books, 2021)
25 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Drawing upon twenty-five years of experience representing Black youth in Washington, D.C.'s juvenile courts, Kristin Henning confronts America's i...
David H. Ucko, "The Insurgent's Dilemma: A Struggle to Prevail" (Oxford UP, 2022)
20 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Despite attracting headlines and hype, insurgents rarely win. Even when they claim territory and threaten governmental writ, they typically face a mil...
Caits Meissner, ed., "The Sentences That Create Us: Crafting a Writer's Life in Prison" (Haymarket Books, 2022)
14 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Sentences That Create Us: Crafting a Writer’s Life in Prison (Haymarket Books, 2022) is an expansive resource for incarcerated writers. With o...
Todd R. Clear and Natasha A. Frost, "The Punishment Imperative: The Rise and Failure of Mass Incarceration in America" (NYU Press, 2015)
07 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Sherzod Muminov, "Eleven Winters of Discontent: The Siberian Internment and the Making of a New Japan" (Harvard UP, 2022)
31 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 fin...
Marie Muschalek, "Violence as Usual: Policing and the Colonial State in German Southwest Africa" (Cornell UP, 2019)
31 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 beginn...
Heather R. Hlavka and Sameena Mulla, "Bodies in Evidence: Race, Gender, and Science in Sexual Assault Adjudication" (NYU Press, 2021)
24 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Scholars Heather Hlavka (Marquette University) and Sameena Mulla (Emory University) have written a new book that examines and interrogates the place a...
K. Stephen Prince, "The Ballad of Robert Charles: Searching for the New Orleans Riot Of 1900" (UNC Press, 2021)
17 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 poli...
Michael Silvestri, "Policing ‘Bengali Terrorism’ in India and the World: Imperial Intelligence and Revolutionary Nationalism, 1905-1939" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)
08 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Policing ‘Bengali Terrorism’ in India and the World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) by Michael Silvestri examines the development of imperial intellig...
Sarah Brayne, "Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing" (Oxford UP, 2020)
04 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Police use of advanced data collection and analysis technologies—or, "big data policing"—continues to receive both positive and negative attention...
Gaye T. Lansdell et al., "Neurodisability and the Criminal Justice System: Comparative and Therapeutic Responses" (Edward Elgar, 2021)
23 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Neurodisability and the Criminal Justice System: Comparative and Therapeutic Responses (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2021) delves into an under-researche...
Craig J. Reynolds, "Power, Protection and Magic in Thailand: The Cosmos of a Southern Policeman" (ANU Press, 2019)
15 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of New Books in Southeast Asian Studies we travel with Craig J. Reynolds to the mid-south of Thailand in the first half of the twe...
A Conversation with the Director of the Emerson Prison Initiative
10 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about: The Emerson College Prison Initiative The Bard Prison Initiative How students ap...
Sydney A. Halpern, "Dangerous Medicine: The Story Behind Human Experiments with Hepatitis" (Yale UP, 2021)
09 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
From 1942 through 1972, American biomedical researchers deliberately infected people with hepatitis. Government-sponsored researchers were attempting ...
Michel Foucault, "Intolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group (1970-1980)" (U of Minnesota Press, 2021)
20 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Intolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group (1970-1980) (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), edited by Kevin Thomp...
Mia Bay, "Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance" (Harvard UP, 2021)
09 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Mobility has been central to the American identity—think of the automobile, the perceived freedom that comes with it, the open road—but Black Amer...
J. Ryan Stackhouse, "Enemies of the People: Hitler's Critics and the Gestapo" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
07 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
How do terror and popularity merge under a dictatorship? How did the Gestapo deal with critics of Nazism? Based on hundreds of secret police case file...
Nicole Nguyen, "Suspect Communities: Anti-Muslim Racism and the Domestic War on Terror" (U Minnesota Press, 2019)
03 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Suspect Communities: Anti-Muslim Racism and the Domestic War on Terror (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) is a powerful reassessment of the U.S. g...
James Kapaló and Kinga Povedák, "The Secret Police and the Religious Underground in Communist and Post-Communist Eastern Europe" (Routledge, 2021)
01 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
This new book by James Kapaló and Kinga Povedák explores the complex intersection of secret police operations and the formation of the religious und...
Radha Kumar, "Police Matters: The Everyday State and Caste Politics in South India, 1900–1975" (Cornell UP, 2021)
23 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Police Matters: The Everyday State and Caste Politics in South India, 1900–1975 (Cornell UP, 2021) moves beyond the city to examine the intertwined...
Vlad Solomon, "State Surveillance, Political Policing and Counter-Terrorism in Britain, 1880-1914" (Boydell Press, 2021)
22 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In 1850 Charles Dickens wrote that Great Britain had “no political police,” adding that “the most rabid demagogue” could speak out “without ...
Simon Egbert and Matthias Leese, "Criminal Futures: Predictive Policing and Everyday Police Work" (Routledge, 2020)
12 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Simon Egbert and Matthias Leese's Criminal Futures: Predictive Policing and Everyday Police Work (Routledge, 2020) explores how predictive policing...
Jennifer Carlson, "Policing the Second Amendment: Guns, Law Enforcement, and the Politics of Race" (Princeton UP, 2020)
08 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
When Americans talk about guns, they often use terms like “gun rights” or “gun control.” They also tend to separate gun politics and the polit...
Doing an Ethnography of Policing: In Conversation with Sarah Brayne
04 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
How has the use of big data and algorithms changed policing and police surveillance? On this episode, we speak with Dr. Sarah Brayne, Assistant Profes...
Julian Roberts, “Criminal Justice: An Examination” (Open Agenda, 2021)
21 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Criminal Justice: An Examination is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Julian Roberts, Professor of Criminology at th...
Rebecca L. Stein, "Screen Shots: State Violence on Camera in Israel and Palestine" (Stanford UP, 2021)
20 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In the last two decades, amid the global spread of smartphones, state killings of civilians have increasingly been captured on the cameras of both bys...
Jaime Lowe, "Breathing Fire: Female Inmate Firefighters on the Front Line of California's Wildfires" (MCD, 2021)
06 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
A dramatic, revelatory account of the female inmate firefighters who battle California wildfires for less than a dollar an hour On February 23, 2016, ...
Sarah J. Young, "Writing Resistance: Revolutionary Memoirs of Shlissel’burg Prison" (UCL Press, 2021)
20 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In 1884, sixty-eight prisoners convicted of terrorism and revolutionary activity were transferred to a new maximum-security prison at Shlissel'burg Fo...
Yoosun Park, "Facilitating Injustice: The Complicity of Social Workers in the Forced Removal and Incarceration of Japanese Americans, 1941-1946" (Oxford UP, 2019)
15 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Between 1942 and 1945, the United States government forcibly removed approximately 120,000 people "of Japanese ancestry" from their homes and into sel...
Judith Levine and Erica Meiners, "The Feminist and the Sex Offender: Confronting Sexual Harm, Ending State Violence" (Verso, 2020)
01 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
There are two problems that are typically siloed in the era of #MeToo and mass incarceration: sexual and gender violence, on the one hand, and the sta...
Ruth Streicher, "Uneasy Military Encounters: The Imperial Politics of Counterinsurgency in Southern Thailand" (Cornell UP, 2020)
02 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Since 2004 the Malay-Muslim majority provinces in the border region of southern Thailand have been wracked by a violent insurgency. Over 7000 people h...
David Scott, "For Abolition: Essays on Prisons and Socialist Ethics" (Waterside Press, 2020)
20 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
According to Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) 'Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.' Connecting the ...
Violence, Gender, and Policing in Colombia: In Conversation with Dr. Jon Gordon
16 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In today’s interview, we speak with Dr. Jon Gordon, incoming Assistant Professor of Sociology at Appalachian State University, who tells us about hi...
Elizabeth Hinton, "America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since The 1960s" (Liveright, 2021)
06 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellions since the 1960s (Liveright, 2021) Dr. Elizabeth Hinton asserts the s...
Clarence Jefferson Hall Jr, "A Prison in the Woods: Environment and Incarceration in New York’s North Country" (U Massachusetts Press, 2020)
16 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Since the mid-nineteenth century, Americans have known the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York as a site of industrial production, a place to hea...
David Skarbek, "The Puzzle of Prison Order: Why Life Behind Bars Varies Around the World" (Oxford UP, 2020)
09 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Many people think prisons are all the same-rows of cells filled with violent men who officials rule with an iron fist. Yet, life behind bars varies in...
Julia Laite, "The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey: A true story of sex, crime and the meaning of justice" (Profile Books, 2021)
31 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Lydia Harvey was meant to disappear. She was young and working class; she'd walked the streets, worked in brothels, and had no money of her own. In 19...
Katarzyna Person, "Warsaw Ghetto Police: The Jewish Order Service During the Nazi Occupation" (Cornell UP, 2021)
28 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In Warsaw Ghetto Police: The Jewish Order Service during the Nazi Occupation (Cornell University Press/US Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2021) , Katar...
Tom Barker, "Aggressors in Blue: Exposing Police Sexual Misconduct" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)
26 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Aggressors in Blue: Exposing Police Sexual Misconduct (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) presents a powerful and thorough investigation into police deviance ...
Jessica Ordaz, "The Shadow of El Centro: A History of Migrant Incarceration and Solidarity" (UNC Press, 2021)
24 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Bounded by desert and mountains, El Centro, California, is isolated and difficult to reach. However, its location close to the border between San Dieg...
Aaron Shapiro, "Design, Control, Predict: Logistical Governance in the Smart City" (U Minnesota Press, 2020)
19 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The “smart” city of today looks little like what experts of yesteryear expected them to. In this book, Aaron Shapiro, Ph.D. takes readers on a b...