Showing 1-50 of 60 items.
Imprisoned Minds
Lost Boys, Trapped Men, and Solutions from Within the Prison
Rutgers University Press
Imprisoned Minds tells the stories of men in prison that few people ever hear. Six gripping, first-person narratives of unimaginable childhood trauma and neglect set the men on a pathway for prison or death. We finally hear their stories because the author is in prison alongside them—incarcerated for life at the age of 21.
Race and Police
The Origin of Our Peculiar Institutions
By Ben Brucato
Rutgers University Press
In the United States, race and police were founded along with a capitalist economy dependent on the enslavement of workers of African descent. Race and Police builds a critical theory of American policing by analyzing a heterodox history of policing, drawn from the historiography of slavery and slave patrols. Beginning by tracing the historical origins of the police mandate in British colonial America, the book shows that the peculiar institution of racialized chattel slavery originated along with a novel, binary conception of race. On one side, for the first time Europeans from various nationalities were united in a single racial category. Inclusion in this category was necessary for citizenship. On the other, Blacks were branded as slaves, cast as social enemies, and assumed to be threats to the social order.
Policing Victimhood
Human Trafficking, Frontline Work, and the Carceral State
Rutgers University Press
Policing Victimhood analyzes semi-structured interviews with 54 service providers in the Midwestern US, a region that, though colloquially understood as “flyover country,” regularly positions itself as a leader in state-level anti-trafficking policies and collaborative networks. These frontline workers’ perceptions and narratives are informed by their interpersonal, day-to-day encounters with exploited or trafficked persons. Their insights underscore how anti-trafficking policies are put into practice and influenced by specific ideologies and stereotypes. Extending the reach of street-level bureaucracy theory to anti-trafficking initiatives, Corinne Schwarz demonstrates how frontline workers are uniquely positioned to perpetuate or radically counter punitive anti-trafficking efforts.
Murder Town, USA
Homicide, Structural Violence, and Activism in Wilmington
Rutgers University Press
Far too many poor Black communities struggle with gun violence and homicide. The result has been the unnatural contortion of Black families and the inter-generational perpetuation of social chaos and untimely death. Young people are repeatedly ripped away from life by violence, while many men are locked away in prisons. In neighborhoods like those of Wilmington, Delaware, residents routinely face the pressures of violence, death, and incarceration. Murder Town, USA is thus a timely ethnography with an innovative structure: the authors helped organize fifteen residents formerly involved with the streets and/or the criminal justice system to document the relationship between structural opportunity and experiences with violence in Wilmington's Eastside and Southbridge neighborhoods.
When Are You Coming Home?
How Young Children Cope When Parents Go to Jail
Rutgers University Press
When Are You Coming Home? answers questions about how young children cope when parents go to jail. Told through the real stories of children, caregivers, and parents navigating parental incarceration, this book delves into the nuances that comprise children’s well-being and family relationships. In doing so, it calls out contextual vulnerabilities while emphasizing resilience processes that shape how children make sense of being separated from parents and await their likely reunification.
Way Down in the Hole
Race, Intimacy, and the Reproduction of Racial Ideologies in Solitary Confinement
Rutgers University Press
Based on ethnographic observations and interviews with inmates, correctional officers, and civilian staff that conducted in solitary confinement units, Way Down in the Hole explores the myriad ways in which daily, intimate interactions between those locked up twenty-four hours a day and the correctional officers charged with their care, custody, and control produce and reproduce hegemonic racial ideologies.
Shattered Justice
Crime Victims' Experiences with Wrongful Convictions and Exonerations
Rutgers University Press
Shattered Justice presents original crime victims’ experiences with violent crime, investigations and trials, and later exonerations in their cases. Cook reveals how homicide victims’ family members and rape survivors describe the painful impact of the primary trauma, the secondary trauma of the investigations and trials, and then the tertiary trauma associated with wrongful convictions and exonerations.
Cultures of Resistance
Collective Action and Rationality in the Anti-Terror Age
Rutgers University Press
Cultures of Resistance brings new insight to a key question: do government efforts to repress social movements effectively repress dissent, or do they spur mobilization? Through analyses of activists’ experiences of repression and resistance, the book uncovers processes that shape how individuals understand the risks of participating in collective action. Reynolds-Stenson demonstrates how individual rationality is collectively constructed.
Rape by the Numbers
Producing and Contesting Scientific Knowledge about Sexual Violence
Rutgers University Press
Rape by the Numbers explores scientists’ approaches to studying rape over more than forty years in the United States and Canada. In addition to investigating how scientists come to know the scope, causes, and consequences of rape, this book delves into the politics of rape research. Scholars who study rape often face a range of social pressures and resource constraints, including some that are unique to feminized and politicized fields of inquiry. Collectively, these matters have far-reaching consequences.
Out of the Red
My Life of Gangs, Prison, and Redemption
Rutgers University Press
A pathbreaking story of how social forces and personal choices thrust a boy into gangs, prison, and the long path of redemption as a felon in an unforgiving society. Brilliantly told through a sociological lens, Bolden’s story is vulnerable, honest, and leaves readers enlightened and moved to action.
Social Justice
Theories, Issues, and Movements (Revised and Expanded Edition)
Rutgers University Press
Drawing on contemporary issues ranging from globalization and neoliberalism to the environment, this essential textbook - ideal for course use - encourages readers to question the limits of the law in its present state in order to develop fairer systems at the local, national, and global levels.
Chronicles of a Radical Criminologist
Working the Margins of Law, Power, and Justice
By Gregg Barak
Rutgers University Press
Prominent criminologist Gregg Barak's new book, Chronicles of a Radical Criminologist, while remaining scholarly in its intent, departs from the typical academic format. This book is a a first-person account that examines the linkages between one scholar's experiences as a criminologist from the late 1960s to the present and the emergence and evolution of radical criminology as a challenge to developments in mainstream criminology.
Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes
By Ronald C. Kramer; Foreword by Rob White
Rutgers University Press
Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes analyzes climate change from a criminological perspective. Four state-corporate crimes are examined: continued extraction of fossil fuels and rising carbon emissions; political omission related to the mitigation of emissions; socially organized denial; and climate crimes of empire. The final chapter reviews policies to achieve climate justice.
Colonialism Is Crime
By Marianne Nielsen and Linda M. Robyn
Rutgers University Press
There is powerful evidence that the colonization of Indigenous people was and is a crime, and that that crime is on-going. In this book Nielsen and Robyn present an analysis of the relationship between these colonial crimes and their continuing criminal and socially injurious consequences that exist today.
Dangerous Masculinity
Fatherhood, Race, and Security Inside America's Prisons
By Anna Curtis
Rutgers University Press
For incarcerated fathers, prison rather than work mediates access to their families. Incarcerated men negotiate expectations of gender performance and their relationships with the mothers of their children during incarceration.These negotiations around masculinity and fatherhood inside prison provide insight into gender inequity, racism, and ideological underpinnings of security practices.
Trapped in a Vice
The Consequences of Confinement for Young People
Rutgers University Press
Trapped in a Vice explores the lives of the young people in the criminal justice system, revealing the ways that they struggle to manage the expectations of that system; these stories from the ground level of the justice system demonstrate the complex exchange of policy and practice.
Addicted to Rehab
Race, Gender, and Drugs in the Era of Mass Incarceration
Rutgers University Press
Sociologist Allison McKim gives an in-depth and innovative ethnographic account of two women’s rehab programs, one located in the criminal justice system and one located in the private healthcare system—two very different ways of defining and treating addiction. Her study ultimately reveals a two-tiered system, bifurcated by race and class.
Everyday Desistance
The Transition to Adulthood Among Formerly Incarcerated Youth
Rutgers University Press
In Everyday Desistance, the authors examine the transition to adulthood among twenty-five formerly incarcerated young men and women in Los Angeles, California. They describe their day-to-day experiences, focusing on their attempts to surmount the challenges of adulthood, resist the temptations of criminal activity, and formulate their long-term goals for a secure adult future.
When Riot Cops Are Not Enough
The Policing and Repression of Occupy Oakland
By Mike King
Rutgers University Press
In When Riot Cops Are Not Enough, sociologist Mike King examines the policing, and broader political repression, of the Occupy Oakland movement. King’s active and daily participation in that movement provides a unique insider perspective to illustrate how the Oakland police and city administrators lost the ability to effectively control the movement.
Sex Offenders, Stigma, and Social Control
Rutgers University Press
Rickard provides the reader with an in-depth view of six sex offenders, exploring how they manage to cope with their highly stigmatized role as social outcasts. Placing their stories within the context of the current culture of mass incarceration and zero-tolerance, Rickard provides a deeper understanding of the complex relationship between public policy and lived experience.
The Methamphetamine Industry in America
Transnational Cartels and Local Entrepreneurs
Rutgers University Press
The result of a study stretching from small-town America to Mexican cartels, and from law enforcement officers and drug treatment workers to local dealers and users, this book tells the story of how methamphetamine markets evolved in the United States—and thrived, despite vigorous legal and law enforcement challenges. Through the eyes and words of dealers, users, police officers, and treatment workers, the authors produce a complex picture of the social operation, organization, and meaning of the meth industry in America.
Police, Power, and the Production of Racial Boundaries
By Ana Muñiz
Rutgers University Press
Based on five years of ethnography, archival research, census data analysis, and interviews, Police, Power, and the Production of Racial Boundaries reveals how the LAPD, city prosecutors, and business owners struggled to control who should be considered “dangerous” and how they should be policed in Los Angeles. Ana Muñiz shows how this influential group used policies and everyday procedures to criminalize behaviors commonly associated with blacks and Latinos and to promote an exceedingly aggressive form of policing.
Prison and Social Death
Rutgers University Press
A compelling blend of solidarity, civil rights activism, and social research, Prison and Social Death offers a unique look at the American prison and the excessive and unnecessary damage it inflicts on convicts and parolees. Joshua M. Price documents the “social death” that convicts suffer while incarcerated and afterward, drawing upon hundreds of often harrowing interviews conducted with prisoners, parolees, and their families.
The Forgotten Men
Serving a Life without Parole Sentence
Rutgers University Press
In The Forgotten Men, criminologist Margaret E. Leigey provides an insightful account of a group of inmates sentenced to life without parole. Imprisoned for at least twenty years, with virtually no chance of release, these men make up one of the most marginalized segments of the U.S. prison population. Drawing on in-depth interviews with twenty-five such prisoners, Leigey describes how they struggle to construct meaningful lives and provides a much-needed analysis of the policies behind life-without-parole sentencing.
Reading Prisoners
Literature, Literacy, and the Transformation of American Punishment, 1700–1845
By Jodi Schorb
Rutgers University Press
Shining new light on early American prison literature, Reading Prisoners weaves together insights about the rise of the early American penitentiary, the history of early American literacy instruction, and the transformation of crime writing in the “long” eighteenth century. Jodi Schorb overturns much conventional wisdom as she illuminates how prisoners first entered print as readers and writers, from the colonial American jail to the early national penitentiary.
Mean Lives, Mean Laws
Oklahoma's Women Prisoners
Rutgers University Press
Oklahoma has long held the dubious honor of having the highest female incarceration rate in the country, nearly twice the national average. Mean Lives, Mean Laws puts a human face on this alarming statistic, revealing the troubled backgrounds and harsh laws that lead so many Oklahoman women to commit crimes. Drawn from over a decade of first-hand research, the book provides a rigorous analysis of the criminal justice system, yet also gives voice to the women locked within it.
The Methamphetamine Industry in America
Transnational Cartels and Local Entrepreneurs
Rutgers University Press
The result of a study stretching from small-town America to Mexican cartels, and from law enforcement officers and drug treatment workers to local dealers and users, this book tells the story of how methamphetamine markets evolved in the United States—and thrived, despite vigorous legal and law enforcement challenges. Through the eyes and words of dealers, users, police officers, and treatment workers, the authors produce a complex picture of the social operation, organization, and meaning of the meth industry in America.
The Ex-Prisoner's Dilemma
How Women Negotiate Competing Narratives of Reentry and Desistance
Rutgers University Press
Drawing on repeated interviews with forty-nine women newly released from prison, Leverentz explores the conflicting messages these women receive about who they are and who they should be—from prison staff, workers at halfway houses and drug treatment programs, family members, and friends. These messages, she shows, shape the narratives the women create to explain their past records and guide their future behavior.
Tough on Hate?
The Cultural Politics of Hate Crimes
Rutgers University Press
Tough on Hate is the first book to examine the cultural politics of hate crimes both within and beyond the law. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including personal interviews, unarchived documents, television news broadcasts, legislative debates, and presidential speeches, the book challenges readers to reconsider their understanding of hate crimes and raises startling questions about the trajectory of civil and minority rights.
Tough on Hate?
The Cultural Politics of Hate Crimes
Rutgers University Press
Tough on Hate is the first book to examine the cultural politics of hate crimes both within and beyond the law. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including personal interviews, unarchived documents, television news broadcasts, legislative debates, and presidential speeches, the book challenges readers to reconsider their understanding of hate crimes and raises startling questions about the trajectory of civil and minority rights.
Why We Harm
By Lois Presser
Rutgers University Press
This timely book scrutinizes accounts of acts as diverse as genocide, environmental degradation, war, torture, terrorism, homicide, rape, and meat-eating in order to develop an original theoretical framework with which to consider harmful actions and their causes. Chapter by chapter, it examines statements made by perpetrators of a wide variety of harmful actions, identifying the logics they share that motivate, legitimize, and sustain them and mapping out strategies for reducing harm.
Falling Back
Incarceration and Transitions to Adulthood among Urban Youth
Rutgers University Press
Falling Back documents the transition to adulthood for young inner-city men of color who have, by the age of eighteen, already been imprisoned. It is based on over three years of ethnographic research with black and Latino males on the cusp of adulthood and incarcerated at a rural reform school. The book portrays the complexities of human decision-making as these men strove to “fall back,” or avoid reoffending and become productive adults.
The Globalization of Supermax Prisons
Edited by Jeffrey Ian Ross; Foreword by Loïc Wacquant
Rutgers University Press
“Supermax” prisons are typically reserved for convicted political criminals such as terrorists and spies and for other inmates who are considered to pose a serious ongoing threat to the wider community, to the security of correctional institutions, or to the safety of the people within. The Globalization of Supermax Prisons examines why nine prominent advanced industrialized countries have adopted the supermax prototype, paying particular attention to the economic, social, and political processes that have affected each nation.
The Globalization of Supermax Prisons
Edited by Jeffrey Ian Ross; Foreword by Loïc Wacquant
Rutgers University Press
“Supermax” prisons are typically reserved for convicted political criminals such as terrorists and spies and for other inmates who are considered to pose a serious ongoing threat to the wider community, to the security of correctional institutions, or to the safety of the people within. The Globalization of Supermax Prisons examines why nine prominent advanced industrialized countries have adopted the supermax prototype, paying particular attention to the economic, social, and political processes that have affected each nation.
Compassionate Confinement
A Year in the Life of Unit C
Rutgers University Press
This ethnographic text brings to light the challenges and complexities inherent in the U.S. system of juvenile corrections. Building on over a year of field work at a boys’ residential facility, the authors provide a context for contemporary institutions and highlight some of the system’s most troubling tensions. The book provides narratives, observations, case examples, and recommendations for rehabilitating the system. A detailed appendix on conducting field research is useful for individuals in the social sciences and helping professions.
Women on Ice
Methamphetamine Use among Suburban Women
By Miriam Boeri
Rutgers University Press
Women on Ice is the first book to study exclusively the lives of women who use methamphetamine (ice, speed, crystal, shards) and the effects of its use on their families. In-depth interviews with women in the suburban counties of one of the largest metropolitan areas in the U.S. chronicle the details of their initiation into methamphetamine, the turning points into problematic drug use, and, for a few, their escape from lives veering out of control.
Life after Death Row
Exonerees' Search for Community and Identity
Rutgers University Press
Life after Death Row examines the post-incarceration struggles of individuals who have been wrongly convicted of capital crimes, sentenced to death, and subsequently exonerated. Drawing upon research on trauma, recovery, coping, and stigma, the authors weave a nuanced fabric of grief, loss, resilience, hope, despair, and meaning to provide the richest account to date of the struggles faced by people striving to reclaim their lives in contemporary American society after years of wrongful incarceration.
Real Gangstas
Legitimacy, Reputation, and Violence in the Intergang Environment
Rutgers University Press
Real Gangstas relies on the tradition of urban ethnography to provide a unique and intimate look at the lives of street gang members in Indianapolis, IN. For eighteen months, Timothy R. Lauger interviewed and observed a mix of fifty-five gang members, former gang members, and non-gang street offenders, many from the “Down for Whatever Boyz.” Through this research, Lauger is able to understand and explain the reasons for gang membership, including a chaotic family life, poverty, and the need for violent self-assertion in order to foster the creation of a personal identity.
Discretionary Justice
Looking Inside a Juvenile Drug Court
By Leslie Paik
Rutgers University Press
While these courts largely focus on holding youths responsible for their actions, this book underscores the social factors that shape how staff members view progress in the court. Paik also emphasizes the perspectives of children and parents. Given the growing emphasis on individual responsibility in other settings, such as schools and public welfare agencies, Paik's findings are relevant outside the juvenile justice system.
The Last Neighborhood Cops
The Rise and Fall of Community Policing in New York Public Housing
By Fritz Umbach
Rutgers University Press
The Last Neighborhood Cops reveals the forgotten history of the residents and cops who forged community policing in the public housing complexes of New York City during the second half of the twentieth century. Through a combination of poignant storytelling and historical analysis, Fritz Umbach draws on buried and confidential police records and voices of retired officers and older residents to help explore the rise and fall of the HAPD's community-based strategy, while questioning its tactical effectiveness. The result is a unique perspective on contemporary debates of community policing and historical developments chronicling the influence of poor and working-class populations on public policy making.
State Crime
Current Perspectives
Edited by Dawn Rothe and Christopher Mullins; Introduction by M. Cherif Bassiouni; Foreword by William Chambliss
Rutgers University Press
Through a collection of essays by leading scholars in the field, State Crime offers a set of cases exemplifying state criminality along with various methods for controlling governmental transgressions.
State Crime
Current Perspectives
Edited by Dawn Rothe and Christopher Mullins; Introduction by M. Cherif Bassiouni; Foreword by William Chambliss
Rutgers University Press
Through a collection of essays by leading scholars in the field, State Crime offers a set of cases exemplifying state criminality along with various methods for controlling governmental transgressions.
Mass Deception
Moral Panic and the U.S. War on Iraq
By Scott A. Bonn; Foreword by Michael Welch
Rutgers University Press
The attacks of 9/11 led to a war on Iraq, although there was neither tangible evidence that Saddam Hussein was linked to Osama bin Laden nor proof of weapons of mass destruction. Why, then, did the Iraq war garner so much acceptance in the United States during its primary stages? Mass Deception argues that the George W. Bush administration manufactured public support for the war on Iraq, introducing a unique, integrated, and interdisciplinary theory called "critical communication" to explain how and why political elites and the news media periodically create public panics that benefit both parties.
Surveillance in the Time of Insecurity
Rutgers University Press
Surveillance in the Time of Insecurity fuses advanced theoretical accounts of state power and neoliberalism with original research from the social settings in which insecurity dynamics play out in the new century. It explores the counterterrorism-themed show 24, Rapture fiction, traffic control centers, security conferences, public housing, and gated communities, and examines how each manifests complex relationships of inequality, insecurity, and surveillance. Alleviating insecurity requires that we confront its mythic dimensions, the politics inherent in new configurations of security provision, and the structural obstacles to achieving equality in societies.
Surveillance in the Time of Insecurity
Rutgers University Press
Surveillance in the Time of Insecurity fuses advanced theoretical accounts of state power and neoliberalism with original research from the social settings in which insecurity dynamics play out in the new century. It explores the counterterrorism-themed show 24, Rapture fiction, traffic control centers, security conferences, public housing, and gated communities, and examines how each manifests complex relationships of inequality, insecurity, and surveillance. Alleviating insecurity requires that we confront its mythic dimensions, the politics inherent in new configurations of security provision, and the structural obstacles to achieving equality in societies.
Schools Under Surveillance
Cultures of Control in Public Education
Edited by Torin Monahan and Rodolfo D Torres
Rutgers University Press
Schools under Surveillance gathers together some of the very best researchers studying surveillance and discipline in contemporary public schools. Surveillance is not simply about monitoring or tracking individuals and their dataùit is about the structuring of power relations through human, technical, or hybrid control mechanisms.
Dangerous Exits
Escaping Abusive Relationships in Rural America
Rutgers University Press
Strikingly, scant attention has focused on the victimization of women who want to leave their hostile partners. This groundbreaking work challenges the perception that rural communities are safe havens from the brutality of urban living. Identifying hidden crimes of economic blackmail and psychological mistreatment, and the complex relationship between patriarchy and abuse, Walter S. DeKeseredy and Martin D. Schwartz propose concrete and effective solutions, giving voice to women who have often suffered in silence.
The Child Savers
The Invention of Delinquency
By Anthony M. Platt; Introduction by Miroslava Chávez-García
Rutgers University Press
Hailed as a definitive analytical and historical study of the juvenile justice system, this 40th anniversary edition of The Child Savers features a new essay by Anthony M. Platt that highlights recent directions in the field, as well as a critique of his original text. Platt's argues that the "child savers" movement was not altruistic but, instead, a punitive and intrusive attempt to control the lives of working-class urban adolescents. This edition places it in historical context and features an essay by Miroslava Chávez-García examining how Platt's study has impacted many of the central arguments social scientists and historians face today.
Crimes of Power & States of Impunity
The U.S. Response to Terror
Rutgers University Press
Since 9/11, a new configuration of power situated at the core of the executive branch of the U.S. government has taken hold. In Crimes of Power & States of Impunity, Michael Welch takes a close look at the key historical, political, and economic forces shaping the country's response to terror.
Crime, Punishment, and Mental Illness
Law and the Behavioral Sciences in Conflict
By Patricia Erickson and Steven Erickson
Rutgers University Press
In Crime, Punishment, and Mental Illness, Patricia E. Erickson and Steven K. Erickson explore how societal beliefs about free will and moral responsibility have shaped current policies and they identify the differences among the goals, ethos, and actions of the legal and health care systems. Drawing on high-profile cases, the authors provide a critical analysis of topics, including legal standards for competency, insanity versus mental illness, sex offenders, psychologically disturbed juveniles, the injury and death rates of mentally ill prisoners due to the inappropriate use of force, the high level of suicide, and the release of mentally ill individuals from jails and prisons who have received little or no treatment.
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