New Books in Policing, Incarceration, and Reform
Episodes
Peter K. Enns, “Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became the Most Punitive Democracy in the World” (Cambridge UP, 2016)
02 May 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Peter K. Enns is the author of Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became the Most Punitive Democracy in the World (Cambridge University Press...
Kim Wunschmann, “Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps” (Harvard University Press 2015)
12 Dec 2015
Contributed by Lukas
In Before Auschwitz: Jewish Prisoners in the Prewar Concentration Camps (Harvard University Press, 2015), Kim Wunschmann, DAAD Lecturer in Modern Euro...
Sam Mitrani, “The Rise of the Chicago Police Department: Class and Conflict, 1850-1894” (U of Illinois Press, 2013)
03 Nov 2015
Contributed by Lukas
How to best increase police effectiveness in controlling crime rates is perennially controversial. Still, law enforcement has been in the news a lot l...
Shelly Cline, “Women at Work: The SS Aufseherin and the Gendered Perpetration of the Holocaust” (Ph. D. Diss, U of Kansas, 2014)
22 Sep 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Is it ok–practically and ethically–to feel sympathetic toward the guards of concentration camps? Today’s interview marks the conclusion of my su...
Nikolaus Wachsmann, “KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps” (FSG, 2015)
10 Aug 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Today’s podcast is the second in our summer series of interviews about the concentration camps in and around Nazi Germany. Earlier this summer I tal...
Sarah Helm, “Ravensbruck: Life and Death in Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women” (Nan A. Talese, 2015)
01 Aug 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Today’s podcast is the second in our summer series of interviews about the concentration camps in and around Nazi Germany. Earlier this summer I tal...
Winnifred F. Sullivan, “A Ministry of Presence: Chaplaincy, Spiritual Care and the Law” (University of Chicago Press, 2014)
12 Jul 2015
Contributed by Lukas
As patterns of religiosity have changed in the United States, chaplains have come to occupy an increasingly important place in the nation’s public i...
Charles Miranda, “Deception” (Allen and Urwin, 2012)
13 Feb 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Mark Standen was a hero to drug enforcement police. Not only was he a great guy but he was an extremely effective police officer. Unfortunately, he al...
Daniel DiSalvo, “Government against Itself: Public Union Power and Its Consequences” (Oxford UP, 2015)
09 Feb 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Daniel DiSalvo is the author ofGovernment against Itself: Public Union Power and Its Consequences (Oxford University Press, 2015). DiSalvo is associat...
Cathy L. Schneider, “Police Power and Race Riots: Urban Unrest in Paris and New York” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014)
08 Dec 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Cathy L. Schneider is the author of Police Power and Race Riots: Urban Unrest in Paris and New York (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). She is a...
James Martin, “Drugs on the Dark Net: How Cryptomarkets are Transforming the Global Trade in Illicit Drugs” (Palgrave, 2014)
09 Oct 2014
Contributed by Lukas
I am old enough to realise that we have entered a science fiction world in which the old systems of the market place are being sidestepped by new tech...
Joshua Dubler, “Down in the Chapel: Religious Life in an American Prison” (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013)
19 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
In almost every prison movie you see, there is a group of fanatically religious inmates. They are almost always led by a charismatic leader, an outsiz...
Jarrod Gilbert, “Patched: The History of Gangs in New Zealand” (Auckland UP, 2013)
06 Feb 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Jarrod Gilbert is very lucky that he comes from a country the size of New Zealand. With only 4 million people he could carry out a project that would ...
David Garland, “Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition” (Harvard UP, 2010)
05 Aug 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Why is it that the United States continues to enforce the death penalty when the rest of the Western world abolished its use a little over three decad...
Michael F. Armstrong, “They Wished they were Honest: The Knapp Commission and New York City Police Corruption” (Columbia Press, 2012)
19 Jun 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Anyone who studies police corruption will be aware of the Knapp Commission that examined allegations of police corruption in New York City in the 1970...
Christopher Browning, “Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave Labor Camp” (W. W. Norton, 2010)
18 Jun 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Christopher Browning is one of the giants in the field of Holocaust Studies. He has contributed vitally to at least two of the basic debates in the fi...
Marc Mauer, “Race to Incarcerate” (New Press, 2013)
18 Jun 2013
Contributed by Lukas
The American penitentiary model began as not merely a physical construct, but as a philosophical and religious one. Prisoners were to use their time i...
Kathleen J. Frydl, “The War on Drugs in America, 1940-1973” (Cambridge UP, 2013)
09 May 2013
Contributed by Lukas
In 1971, President Richard Nixon declared a “War on Drugs.” We are still fighting that war today. According to many people, we’ve lost but don’...
Paul Lieberman, “Gangster Squad: Covert Cops, the Mob, and the Battle for Los Angeles” (St. Martin’s Press, 2012)
17 Apr 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Gangster Squad (St. Martin’s Press, 2012) the book is not Gangster Squad the movie. One is a detailed and thoroughly researched account of organize...
Patrick Dunleavy, “The Fertile Soil of Jihad: Terrorism’s Prison Connection” (Potomac Books, 2011 )
28 Mar 2013
Contributed by Lukas
Patrick Dunleavy is the author of The Fertile Soil of Jihad: Terrorism’s Prison Connection (Potomac Books, 2011). He provides us with a fascinating ...
Paul Kan, “Cartels at War: Mexico’s Drug-Fueled Violence and the Threat to US National Security” (Potomac Books, 2012)
07 Mar 2013
Contributed by Lukas
The violence in Mexico is receiving a lot of media attention internationally. Paul Rexton Kan has produced a book that provides us with a comprehensiv...
David Chura, “I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup” (Beacon Press, 2010)
25 Oct 2012
Contributed by Lukas
It is easy to dismiss juveniles in prison as “bad seeds”, as people with which we have nothing in common, and of which we want only distance. Davi...
Maurice Punch, “State Violence, Collusion and the Troubles: Counter Insurgency, Government Deviance and Northern Ireland” (Pluto Press, 2012)
16 Oct 2012
Contributed by Lukas
Today we spoke to Maurice Punch about his new book: State Violence, Collusion and the Troubles: Counter Insurgency, Government Deviance and Northern I...
Geoff Dean et al., “Organized Crime: Policing Illegal Business Entrepreneurialism” (Oxford UP, 2010)
30 Mar 2012
Contributed by Lukas
This week we have Geoff Dean on the show to talk about his new book Organised Crime: Policing Illegal Business Entrepreneurialism (Oxford University P...
Steven Barnes, “Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society” (Princeton UP, 2011)
23 Sep 2011
Contributed by Lukas
Most Westerners know about the Gulag (aka “Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies”) thanks to Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s eloq...
Miriam Dobson, “Khrushchev’s Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform After Stalin” (Cornell UP, 2009)
15 Mar 2011
Contributed by Lukas
Examinations of the Soviet gulag are a cottage industry in Russian studies. Since 1991, a torrent of books have been published examining the gulag’s...
Gregory J. W. Urwin, “Victory in Defeat: The Wake Island Defenders in Captivity” (Naval Institute Press, 2010)
03 Mar 2011
Contributed by Lukas
Gregory J. W. Urwin’s Victory in Defeat: The Wake Island Defenders in Captivity (Naval Institute Press, 2010) tells the story of the Americans captu...
David Shearer, “Policing Stalin’s Socialism: Repression and Social Order in the Soviet Union, 1924-1953” (Yale UP, 2010)
10 Dec 2010
Contributed by Lukas
The question as to why the leaders of the Soviet Union murdered hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens during the Great Purges is one of the most im...
Deborah Kaple, “Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir” (Oxford UP, 2010)
24 Nov 2010
Contributed by Lukas
Here’s something remarkable: at some point in the future, something you believe to be just fine will be utterly disdained by the greater part of hum...
Gary Bruce, “The Firm: The Inside Story of the Stasi” (Oxford UP, 2010)
29 Jul 2010
Contributed by Lukas
I have a good friend who grew up in East Germany in the bad old days. The East German authorities suspected that her family would try to immigrate to ...
Edwin Burrows, “Forgotten Patriots: The Untold Story of American Prisoners During the Revolutionary War” (Basic Books, 2008)
15 Nov 2008
Contributed by Lukas
While researching his Pulitzer-Prize-winning Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (with Mike Wallace; Oxford UP 1999), Edwin Burrows uncovered t...