New Books in Policing, Incarceration, and Reform
Episodes
Matthew Clair, "Privilege and Punishment: How Race and Class Matter in Criminal Court" (Princeton UP, 2020)
18 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Privilege and Punishment: How Race and Class Matter in Criminal Court (Princeton UP, 2020) by Matthew Clair is a powerful ethnographic study of the ...
David Alan Sklansky, "A Pattern of Violence: How the Law Classifies Crimes and What it Means for Justice" (Harvard UP, 2020)
07 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In the wake of the George Floyd killing, many Americans are engaging in a renewed debate about the role violence and especially police violence, plays...
Katie Cruz, "The Work of Sex Work: Prostitution, Unfreedom and Criminality at Work" (2020)
30 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Dr Katie Cruz contributed a chapter titled "The Work of Sex Work: Prostitution, Unfreedom and Criminality at Work" to the book Criminality at Work ...
Oksana Kis, "Survival As Victory: Ukrainian Women in the Gulag" (Harvard UP, 2021)
14 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Oksana Kis’s Survival as Victory: Ukrainian Women in the Gulag (Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies, Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard Univers...
Anand A. Yang, "Empire of Convicts: Indian Penal Labor in Colonial Southeast Asia" (U California Press, 2021)
08 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Empire of Convicts: Indian Penal Labor in Colonial Southeast Asia (University of California Press, 2021) (University of California Press, 2021) focus...
Bertram Levine and Grande Lum, "America's Peacemakers: The Community Relations Service and Civil Rights" (U Missouri Press, 2020)
08 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The Community Relations Service (CRS) came into being alongside the Voting Rights Act—as part of the Act itself. And this organization was integrate...
Siobhán Hearne, "Policing Prostitution: Regulating the Lower Classes in Late Imperial Russia" (Oxford UP, 2021)
07 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Siobhán Hearne's Policing Prostitution: Regulating the Lower Classes in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford UP, 2021) examines the complex world of commer...
Stephen Snelders, "Drug Smuggler Nation: Narcotics and the Netherlands, 1920-95" (Manchester UP, 2021)
31 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Why did the international drug regulatory regime of the twentieth century fail to stop an explosive increase in trade and consumption of illegal drugs...
Sarah Kovner, "Prisoners of the Empire: Inside Japanese POW Camps" (Harvard UP, 2020)
24 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Sarah Kovner’s Prisoners of the Empire: Inside Japanese POW Camps (Harvard UP, 2020) is a nuanced look at the experiences, narratives―and the po...
Aaron Griffith, "God’s Law and Order: The Politics of Punishment in Evangelical America" (Harvard UP, 2020)
19 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The rise of Neo-Evangelicalism as a social and political American movement accompanied shifting attitudes in broader American criminal justice policie...
Police Reform in Argentina: A Discussion with Leslie MacColman
17 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
This episode of Ethnographic Marginalia features Dr. Leslie MacColman, a Postdoctoral Scholar in Sociology at The Ohio State University who studies cr...
Liat Ben-Moshe, "Decarcerating Disability: Deinstitutionalization and Prison Abolition" (U Minnesota Press, 2020)
12 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Prison abolition and decarceration are increasingly debated, but it is often without taking into account the largest exodus of people from carceral fa...
Bradford Pearson, "The Eagles of Heart Mountain: A True Story of Football, Incarceration and Resistance in World War II America" (Atria, 2021)
01 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Many scholars have interrogated the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese-Americans during WWII – with an eye to understanding the particular type of ra...
Fiona Greenland, "Ruling Culture: Art Police, Tomb Raiders, and the Rise of Cultural Power in Italy" (U of Chicago Press, 2021)
26 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Today we are joined by Fiona Greenland, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, to talk about her new book, Ruling Culture: ...
49 The Capitol Insurrection and Asymmetrical Policing: David Cunningham (EF, JP)
21 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
We 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 ...
T. Maschi and K. Morgen, "Aging Behind Prison Walls: Studies in Trauma and Resilience" (Columbia UP, 2020)
12 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Today, more than 200,000 men and women over age fifty are languishing in prisons around the United States. It is projected that by 2030, one-third of ...
Jodi Rios, "Black Lives and Spatial Matters: Policing Blackness and Practicing Freedom in Suburban St. Louis" (Cornell UP, 2020)
05 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In Black Lives and Spatial Matters: Policing Blackness and Practicing Freedom in Suburban St. Louis (Cornell University Press, 2020), Dr. Jodi Rios ...
Anna Hájková, "The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt" (Oxford UP, 2020)
30 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Anna Hájková's new book The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt (Oxford UP, 2020) is the first in-depth analytical history of a pri...
Ashley E. Lucas, "Prison Theatre and the Global Crisis of Incarceration" (Bloomsbury, 2020)
08 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The world of theater performances is often thought of as being composed of wealthy persons who received elite educations at art institutions all so th...
Jinee Lokaneeta, "The Truth Machines: Policing, Violence, and Scientific Interrogations in India" (U Michigan Press, 2020)
30 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Using case studies and the results of extensive fieldwork, this book considers the nature of state power and legal violence in liberal democracies by ...
Julius Margolin, "Journey Into the Land of the Zeks and Back: A Memoir of the Gulag" (Oxford UP, 2020)
12 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Julius Margolin was a Polish Jew caught between the twin 1939 invasions of Poland by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. He spent the years 1940-1945 in S...
Kevin Leo Nadal, "Queering Law and Order: LGBTQ Communities and the Criminal Justice System" (Lexington Book, 2020)
10 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Throughout US history, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people have been pathologized, victimized, and criminalized. Reports of ...
Erica Marat, "The Politics of Police Reform: Society against the State in Post-Soviet Countries" (Oxford UP, 2018)
05 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In her book, The Politics of Police Reform: Society against the State in Post-Soviet Countries (Oxford University Press, 2018), Erica Marat provides a...
45 Global Policing 3 Laurence Ralph: Reckoning with Police Violence
29 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Mentioned in this episode: Laurence Ralph, Renegade Dreams: Living through Injury in Gangland Chicago James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time Ta-Nehisi Coat...
Felicia Angeja Viator, "To Live and Defy in LA: How Gangsta Rap Changed America" (Harvard UP, 2020)
26 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 1985, Greg Mack, a DJ working for Los Angeles radio station KDAY, played a song that sounded like nothing else on West Coast airwaves: Toddy Tee’...
Hannah L. Walker, "Mobilized by Injustice: Criminal Justice Contact, Political Participation, and Race" (Oxford UP, 2020)
08 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Hannah Walker’s new book, Mobilized by Injustice: Criminal Justice Contact, Political Participation, and Race (Oxford UP, 2020), brings together the...
Michele Goodwin, "Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
30 Sep 2020
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...
Jennifer Cobbina, "Hands Up, Don’t Shoot: Why the Protests in Ferguson and Baltimore Matter, and How They Changed America" (NYU Press, 2019)
24 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Following the high-profile deaths of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and twenty-five-year-old Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryla...
M. Ramirez and D. Peterson, "Ignored Racism: White Animus Toward Latinos (Cambridge UP, 2020)
15 Sep 2020
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...
Philip Thai, "China's War on Smuggling: Law, Illicit Markets, and State Power on the China Coast" (Columbia UP, 2018)
24 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Siobhan talks with Philip Thai about his book, China's War on Smuggling: Law, Illicit Markets, and State Power on the China Coast (C...
Joy Knoblauch, "The Architecture of Good Behavior" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2020)
21 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Inspired by the rise of environmental psychology and increasing support for behavioral research after the Second World War, new initiatives at the fed...
David A. Harris, "A City Divided: Race, Fear and the Law in Police Confrontations" (Anthem Press, 2020)
30 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
How do we move police forces from a warrior culture to connecting better with communities they serve? Today I talked to David A. Harris about his new ...
M. C. Stevenson et al. (eds.), "The Legacy of Racism for Children: Psychology, Law and Public Policy" (Oxford UP, 2020)
28 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
When children become entangled with the law, their lives can be disrupted irrevocably. When those children are underrepresented minorities, the potent...
Andrew S. Baer, "Beyond the Usual Beating" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
23 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1970s and 1980s, a group of Chicago police officers routinely tortured criminal suspects in their custody, while fellow cops, state attorneys a...
Walter Johnson, "The Broken Heart of America" (Basic Books, 2020)
17 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
St. Louis, Missouri is the city with the highest rate of police shootings in the United States. It’s the city with an 18 year difference in life exp...
40 Global Policing 1: Hayal Akarsu on Turkish Community Policing (EF, JP)
17 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The Black Lives Matter movement and the policing-related deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and others have struck a nerve worldwid...
Mark Vincent, "Criminal Subculture in the Gulag" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020)
30 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Most Gulag scholarship focuses on political prisoners and, as a result, our knowledge of the camps as a lived experience remains relatively incomplete...
Adam Goodman, "The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Expelling Immigrants" (Princeton UP, 2020)
29 Jun 2020
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...
Robert T. Chase, "We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners’ Rights in Postwar America" (UNC Press, 2020)
24 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, Siobhan talks with Robert T. Chase about his book, We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners’ Rights in Postw...
36 Policing and White Power: (EF, JP) Global Policing Series
17 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Black lives matter. Yet for decades or centuries in America that basic truth has been ignored, denied, violently suppressed. Many of the mechanisms th...
Micol Seigel, "Violence Work: State Violence and the Limits of Police" (Duke UP, 2018)
17 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Recent calls for the defunding or abolition of police raise important questions about the legitimacy of state violence and the functions that police a...
Garrett Felber, "Those Who Know Don't Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State" (UNC Press, 2020)
12 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Challenging incarceration and policing was central to the post-war Black Freedom Movement. In his new book Those Who Know Don't Say: The Nation of Isl...
Carl Suddler, "Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York" (NYU Press, 2019)
28 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
A stark disparity exists between black and white youth experiences in the justice system today. Black youths are perceived to be older and less innoce...
Mary Fraser, "Policing the Home Front, 1914-1918: The Control of the British Population at War" (Routledge, 2018)
26 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
When Britain went to war in 1914, policemen throughout Great Britain found themselves called upon to perform an ever-increasing range of new tasks tha...
Virginia Eubanks, "Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor" (St. Martin's, 2018)
20 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The State of Indiana denies one million applications for healthcare, foodstamps and cash benefits in three years―because a new computer system inter...
Daniel Mattingly, "The Art of Political Control in China" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
04 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Tocqueville and Putnam insist that civil society helps individuals flourish and resist authority, but Daniel C. Mattingly’s decade of research in ru...
SpearIt, “American Prisons: A Critical Primer on Culture and Conversion to Islam” (First Edition Design, 2017)
31 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
America has the largest incarcerated population in the world. This staggering and troubling fact has driven a great deal of scholarship. Much of this ...
Talitha LeFlouria, "Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South" (UNC Press, 2016)
20 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Professor Talitha LeFlouria, a fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia, discusses her book, Chained in Silence: Black ...
Taylor Pendergrass, "Six by Ten: Stories from Solitary" (Haymarket Books, 2018)
18 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Long-term solitary confinement meets the legal definition of torture, and yet solitary confinement is used in every state in the United States. People...
Stuart Schrader, "Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing" (U California Press, 2019)
05 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Following World War II, in the midst of global decolonization and intensifying freedom struggles within its borders, the United States developed a wor...
Andrea Pitzer, "One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps" (Little, Brown and Company, 2017)
25 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Andrea Pitzer talks about her book One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps (Little, Brown and Company, 2017), one of Smithsonian Magaz...
Vladimir Dzuro, "The Investigator: Demons of the Balkan War" (U Nebraska Press, 2019)
22 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In his new book, The Investigator: Demons of the Balkan War (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), Vladimir Dzuro, a retired Czech police commissioner,...
Joshua Tallis, "The War for Muddy Waters: Pirates, Terrorists, Traffickers, and Maritime Security" (Naval Institute Press, 2019)
15 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In his new book The War for Muddy Waters: Pirates, Terrorists, Traffickers, and Maritime Security (Naval Institute Press, 2019), Joshua Tallis uses th...
Simon Balto, "Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago From Red Summer to Black Power" (UNC Press, 2019)
22 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Recent scholarship locates the origins of mass incarceration in national anticrime policy from 1960 to 1990, and has drastically reframed the “punit...
Max Ward, "Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan" (Duke UP, 2019)
22 Aug 2019
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...
Emma Kuby, "Political Survivors: The Resistance, the Cold War, and the Fight against Concentration Camps After 1945" (Cornell UP, 2019)
16 Aug 2019
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...
Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, "Getting Tough: Welfare and Imprisonment in 1970s America" (Princeton UP, 2017)
07 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In 1970s America, politicians began "getting tough" on drugs, crime, and welfare. These campaigns helped expand the nation's penal system, discredit w...
Jaime Alves, "Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil (U Minnesota Press, 2018)
02 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The 2018 election of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil has brought the issues of police violence, racial discrimination, and misogyny to th...
Sarah Seo, "Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom" (Harvard UP, 2019)
01 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
How the rise of the car, the symbol of American personal freedom, inadvertently led to ever more intrusive policing-with disastrous consequences for r...
Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi, "This Is Really War: The Incredible True Story of a Navy Nurse POW in the Occupied Philippines" (Chicago Review Press, 2019)
19 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In her new book, This Is Really War: The Incredible True Story of a Navy Nurse POW in the Occupied Philippines (Chicago Review Press, 2019), Emilie Le...
Marisol LeBrón, "Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico" (U California Press, 2019)
18 Jun 2019
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 ...
Sandra Mendiola García, "Street Democracy: Vendors, Violence, and Public Space in Late Twentieth-Century Mexico" (U Nebraska Press, 2017)
23 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In Street Democracy: Vendors, Violence, and Public Space in Late Twentieth-Century Mexico (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), Sandra C. Mendiola Gar...
Max Felker-Kantor, "Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD" (UNC Press, 2018)
09 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In recent years, the treatment of African Americans by police departments around the country has come under increased public scrutiny. As any student ...
Marcia Morgan, "Black Women Prison Employees: The Intersectionality of Gender and Race" (Edwin Mellen Press, 2018)
23 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
With prison reform a topic of international conversation and debate, Marica Morgan’s Black Women Prison Employees: The Intersectionality of Gender a...
Clarence Taylor, "Fight the Power: African Americans and the Long History of Police Brutality in New York City" (NYU Press, 2018)
18 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In his most new book Fight the Power: African Americans and the Long History of Police Brutality in New York City (NYU Press, 2018), Clarence Taylor, ...
Joe Street, "Dirty Harry’s America: Clint Eastwood, Harry Callahan, and the Conservative Backlash" (UP of Florida, 2016)
07 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
When "Dirty Harry" first premiered in 1971, it was both praised and condemned for its portrayal of a rogue policeman fighting crime by ignoring many o...
Adam Malka, "The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation" (UNC Press, 2018)
04 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Criminal justice, policing, and mass incarceration have gained significant political attention recently, and the problems of these systems have drawn ...
Connie Chiang, “Nature Behind Barbed Wire: An Environmental History of the Japanese American Incarceration” (Oxford UP, 2018)
31 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The history of Japanese American incarceration during World War II is a well-known topic in American history and has been the subject of countess book...
Sara J. Brenneis, “Spaniards in Mauthausen: Representations of a Nazi Concentration Camp, 1940-2015” (U Toronto, 2018)
10 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
To be quite honest, I had no idea there were any Spanish prisoners at Mauthausen. That’s perhaps an unusual way to begin a blog post. But it reflec...
Heather Schoenfeld, “Building the Prison State: Race and the Politics of Mass Incarceration” (U Chicago Press, 2018)
08 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
How did prisons become a tool of racial inequality? Using historical data, Heather Schoenfeld’s new book Building the Prison State: Race and the P...
Lynne Viola, “Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial: Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine” (Oxford UP, 2017)
16 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
What happened inside NKVD interrogation rooms during the Great Terror? How did the perpetrators feel when the Soviet state turned on them in 1938 duri...
Frank R. Baumgartner, “Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us about Policing and Race” (Cambridge UP, 2018)
04 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
We recently marked the 50th Anniversary of Terry vs. Ohio, the US Supreme Court case that dramatically expanded the scope under which agents of the st...
Linda Ross Meyer, “Sentencing in Time” (Amherst College Press, 2017)
03 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
If you look at the history of punishment (at least in the West), what you’ll see is that we’ve gone from a penal regime that used (inter alia) phy...
Lauren-Brooke Eisen, “Inside Private Prisons: An American Dilemma in the Age of Mass Incarceration” (Columbia UP, 2017)
25 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Who benefits from mass incarceration in the U.S.? In her new book Inside Private Prisons: An American Dilemma in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Colu...
Patrick Lopez-Aguado, “Stick Together and Come Back Home: Racial Sorting and the Spillover of Carceral Identity” (U California Press)
31 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
How do systems of incarceration influence racial sorting inside and outside of prisons? And how do the social structures within prisons spill out into...
Pablo Piccato, “A History of Infamy: Crime, Truth, and Justice in Mexico” (U California Press, 2017)
27 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
A History of Infamy: Crime, Truth, and Justice in Mexico (University of California Press, 2017) explores the definitive changes that the justice syst...
Aidan Forth, “Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain’s Empire of Camps, 1876-1903” (U California Press, 2017)
24 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In his new book, Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain’s Empire of Camps, 1876-1903 (University of California Press, 2017), Aidan Forth employs a compar...
Greg Berman and Julian Adler, “Start Here: A Roadmap to Reducing Mass Incarceration” (The New Press, 2018)
23 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The United States leads the world in incarceration. That’s a problem, especially the disproportionate impact of “mass incarceration” on low-inco...
Alexandra Cox, “Trapped in a Vice: The Consequences of Confinement for Young People” (Rutgers UP, 2018)
16 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
How does the juvenile justice system impact the lives of the young people that go through it? In her new book, Trapped in a Vice: The Consequences of ...
Jimmy Patino, “Raza Si, Migra No: Chicano Movement Struggles for Immigrant Rights in San Diego” (UNC Press, 2017)
05 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
As immigration from Mexico to the United States grew through the 1970s and 1980s, the Border Patrol, police, and other state agents exerted increasing...
Anna Muller, “If the Walls Could Speak: Inside a Women’s Prison in Communist Poland (Oxford University Press, 2017)
22 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Today we talked to Dr. Anna Muller about her latest book, If the Walls Could Speak: Inside a Women’s Prison in Communist Poland (Oxford University P...
Christina Twomey, “The Battle Within: POWs in Postwar Australia” (NewSouth Books, 2018)
13 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In her new book, The Battle Within: POWs in Postwar Australia (NewSouth Books, 2018), Christina Twomey, Professor of History at Monash University, exp...
Policing and Political Division with Alex Vitale
08 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Alex Vitale is a Professor of Sociology and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College. He has written for a number of...
Jerry Flores, “Caught Up: Girls, Surveillance, and Wrap-Around Incarceration” (U California Press, 2016)
23 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
What are the lives of young incarcerated Latinas like? And what were their lives like before and after their incarceration? In his new book, Caught Up...
Claire Schmidt, “If You Don’t Laugh, You’ll Cry: The Occupational Humor of White Wisconsin Prison Workers” (U Wisconsin Press, 2017)
08 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Claire Schmidt is not a prison worker, rather she is a folklorist and an Assistant Professor at Missouri Valley College. However, many members of her ...
Omer Bartov, “Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz” (Simon and Schuster, 2018)
30 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
One of the most important developments in Holocaust Studies over the past couple decades has been one of scale. Rather than focus on decision making a...
Padraic Kenney, “Dance in Chains: Political Imprisonment in the Modern World” (Oxford UP, 2017)
07 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
The idea of being a “political prisoner” may seem timeless. If someone was imprisoned for his or her political beliefs, then that person is in som...
Carolyn Sufrin, “Jailcare: Finding the Safety Net for Women behind Bars” (U. Cal Press, 2017)
01 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In 1976, the landmark supreme court case Estelle v. Gamble, established that under the Eighth Amendment “deliberate indifference” to the health ne...
James Forman Jr., “Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America” (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2017)
17 Oct 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In this podcast I talk with James Forman Jr. about his book Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017...
Lisa M. Corrigan, “Prison Power: How Prison Influenced the Movement for Black Liberation” (U. Press of Mississippi, 2016)
16 Oct 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In the black liberation movement, imprisonment emerged as a key rhetorical, theoretical, and media resource. Imprisoned activists developed tactics an...
Sarah Haley, “No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity” (UNC Press, 2016)
15 Sep 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Recent popular and scholarly interest has highlighted the complex and brutal system of mass incarceration in the United States. Much of this interest ...
Travis Linnemann, “Meth Wars: Police, Media, Power” (NYU Press, 2016)
15 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
If all you knew about methamphetamines came from popular culture (“Breaking Bad”) or government anti-drug campaigns (“Faces of Meth”), then yo...
Christopher Lowen Agee, “The Streets of San Francisco: Policing and the Creation of a Cosmopolitan Liberal Politics, 1950-1972” (U. Chicago Press, 2014)
09 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Policing tactics have recently been the subject of lively political debates and the target of protest groups like the Black Lives Matter movement. Pol...
Mitchel Roth, “Convict Cowboys: The Untold History of the Texas Prison Rodeo” (U. North Texas Press, 2016)
01 Feb 2017
Contributed by Lukas
For more than 50 years, Huntsville prison put on an annual rodeo throughout the month of October to entertain prisoners, locals, and visitors from acr...
Ellen Eisenberg, “The First to Cry Down Injustice?: Western Jews and Japanese Removal during WWII” (Lexington Books, 2008)
27 Jan 2017
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Samson Lim, “Siam’s New Detectives: Visualizing Crime and Conspiracy in Modern Thailand” (U of Hawaii Press, 2016)
21 Jan 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Siam’s New Detectives: Visualizing Crime and Conspiracy in Modern Thailand (University of Hawaii Press, 2016) is a rewarding, multilayered study of ...
Jen Manion, “Liberty’s Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America” (U. Pennsylvania Press, 2016)
19 Dec 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Jen Manion is an associate professor of history at Amherst College. Her book Liberty’s Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America (University of P...
George T. Diaz, “Border Contraband: A History of Smuggling Across the Rio Grande” (U. of Texas Press, 2015)
08 Nov 2016
Contributed by Lukas
In Border Contraband: A History of Smuggling Across the Rio Grande (University of Texas Press, 2015) Professor George T. Diaz examines a subject that ...
Heather Ann Thompson, “Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy” (Pantheon, 2016)
01 Nov 2016
Contributed by Lukas
In 1971, prisoners took over Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York. The uprising followed a wave of protests in prisons and jails across th...
Greg Eghigian, “The Corrigible and the Incorrigible: Science, Medicine, and the Convict in Twentieth-Century Germany” (U. of Michigan Press, 2015)
09 Sep 2016
Contributed by Lukas
When I first read Foucault’s Discipline and Punish as an undergrad, I remember wondering, “What does this look like, though? How might the discipl...