Showing 1-20 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. 
 

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Race and Police

The Origin of Our Peculiar Institutions

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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.
 

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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.
 

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.
 

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Chronicles of a Radical Criminologist

Working the Margins of Law, Power, and Justice

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. 

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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.

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Colonialism Is Crime

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.

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Dangerous Masculinity

Fatherhood, Race, and Security Inside America's Prisons

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.

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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.  

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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.  
 

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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.
 

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When Riot Cops Are Not Enough

The Policing and Repression of Occupy Oakland

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.  
 

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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.   

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