Books in the Issues in Crime and Justice series

The Culture of Urban Control: Jail Overcrowding in the Crime Control Era explores and analyzes the growth and expansion of the United States' largest single-site urban jail system. Through an analysis of a United States Federal Court initiated consent decree this research provides a narrative of criminal justice policy, politics and legal maneuvering between the years of 1993 and 2003 associated with overcrowding within the Cook County Jail. As a result of increased policing presence and subsequent arrests during the crime control era of the 1990's, the Cook County Department of Corrections experienced a continually overcrowded correctional facility resulting in pre-trial and post-convicted inmates sleeping on floors in overcrowded and dilapidated facilities. Beginning in the early 1990's and under the supervision of the federal court, Chicago and Cook County, Illinois undertook the largest expansion of local level incarceration and correctional control in their history. The disputing process between local, state and federal level claims-makers within the legal arena and through media representations are analyzed in conjunction with infrastructure growth, changing correctional populations, community level expansion of correctional programming and the social reality of the inmate experience. How local level corrections and federal interdiction were shaped by local level politics and criminal justice systems are examined.

Theft of a Nation is a powerful criminological examination of Wall Street's recent financial meltdown. Through the lenses of white collar crime and victimology, the book presents a critical assessment of the economic and political elites who were responsible, shows how Americans were victimized, and assesses the resulting regulation.

This book is a critical examination of mainstream research on racial profiling. Through qualitative analysis of interviews with people of color who have experienced racial profiling, it offers an alternative understanding of racialized law and the traffic stop as the manifestation of racialized law enforcement.

Effigy examines the images of a capital defendant portrayed, by the defense attorneys and the prosecutor, during the guilt and penalty phases of capital trial, the trial tactics used to impart these images, and the consequences that result from the jury's attempt to reconcile contradictory images to place one in permanent record as a verdict. These images are starkly contrasted against the backdrop of a brutal murder in which the stereotypes of American fear are realized: Donta Page, the defendant, is an African-American male from a low-income segment of society while Peyton Tuthill, the victim, was a Caucasian female from a middle-income suburb. The prosecuting attorneys depict the defendant as a 'savage beast,' juxtaposing their image against that of a 'troubled youth' as Page is portrayed by the defense attorneys. Slowly and methodically developed as figures with diametrically opposed features, none of which overlap or congeal, both the images are portrayed as real (buttressed by the testimony of witnesses) rather than constructed. The jury is expected to render a verdict that accepts one and rejects the other: there is no middle ground.

State crimes are historically and contemporarily ubiquitous and result in more injury and death than traditional street crimes such as robbery, theft, and assault. Consider that genocide during the 20th century in Germany, Rwanda, Darfur, Albania, Turkey, Ukraine, Cambodia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and other regions claimed the lives of tens of millions and rendered many more homeless, imprisoned, and psychologically and physically damaged. Despite the gravity of crimes committed by states and political leaders, until recently these harms have been understudied relative to conventional street crimes in the field of criminology. Over the past two decades, a growing number of criminologists have conducted rigorous research on state crime and have tried to disseminate it widely including attempts to develop courses that specifically address crimes of the state. Referencing a broad range of cases of state crime and international institutions of control, State Criminality provides a general framework and survey-style discussion of the field for teaching undergraduate and graduate students, and serves as a useful general reference point for scholars of state crime.

Drawing on twenty-five years of teaching prison college and volunteer classes in eleven Michigan and California prisons, The Prisoners' World strives to make the 'prisoners' voice' come alive for regular college students. The book starts off by tracing shifts in social definitions of criminality, and lays out the premises of the U.S. incarceration binge in the 1986 War on Drugs laws and subsequent mandatory sentencing and policing. Later chapters discuss issues such as leaving home, cell life, correctional officers and treatment, the homosexual prisoner, and drugs. Furthermore, the book discusses the teachers' experiences via author narrative essays that draw the reader into prisoner student and prisoner teacher interaction, and what it is like inside prison college classes where both young and older black prisoner students describe growing up in the inner cities. The book also draws upon over sixty prisoner essays that provide insight on prisoner life and self-concept with insights on pathways to prison, drug selling, the inner city and guns. There is also a strong focus on the 'inside' experiences of entering prison and orientation, daily work routine, correctional officers and surreptitious activities like cell cooking and contraband. These essays are capped by prisoner critiques of prison life from those still in the system. The Prisoners' World serves as a successful supplemental book whose material has proven useful in undergraduate criminal justice classes. As college students themselves, on-campus students in these classes will identify with the prisoner-student voices who share their experiences but in a radically different environment.

The Complexities of Police Corruption provides a comprehensive examination of the role of gender as it relates to police corruption, crime control, and policing as an institution. The book examines different forms of corruption, police culture towards misconduct, corruption risks, and why significantly fewer women are involved in police abuses.

Murder Stories engages with the current theoretical debate in death penalty research on the role of cultural commitments to ';American' ideologies in the retention of capital punishment. The central aim of the study is to illuminate the elusive yet powerful role of ideology in legal discourses. Through analyzing the content and processes of death penalty narratives, this research illuminates the covert life of ';the American Creed,' (a nexus of ideologiesliberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism, and laissez fairesaid to be unique to the United States) in the law. Murder Stories draws on the entire record of California death sentence resulting trials from three large and diverse California counties for the years 1996 2004, as well as interviews with 26 capital caseworkers (attorneys, judges, and investigators) from the same counties. Employing the theoretical framework proposed by Ewick and Silbey (1995) to study hegemonic and subversive narratives, and also the ethnographic approach advocated by Amsterdam and Hertz (1992) to study the producers and processes of constructing legal narratives, this book traces the ideological content carried within the stories told by everyday practitioners of capital punishment by investigating the content, process, and ideological implications of these narratives.The central theoretical finding is that the narratives constructed by both prosecutors and defenders tend to instantiate rather than subvert the ideological tenets of the American Creed.

Threat Perceptions: The Policing of Dangers from Eugenics to the War on Terrorism is a study of the legal, scientific and social constructions of danger and risk of crime in the United States since the late nineteenth century. Governance of risk has emerged as an intrinsic part of the legislative and administrative processes of contemporary societies. While institutional practices of risk management are more prevalent in contemporary times, the rationality of controlling or eliminating potential risks is not necessarily new in history. Specific aspects of contemporary risk-management techniques were present in certain early twentieth-century crime control policies. Some of the earliest instances were the defective delinquency laws directed at controlling the peril of the so-called 'feebleminded' criminals. Similarly, policing of political dissent before and after the advent of McCarthyism contained elements of techniques that have been revised and expanded in the contemporary era of the PATRIOT Act. The very idea of 'risk' is contingent on, and produced through the intersection of various social processes. Prevailing social conditions and political trends influence the production of risk perceptions, just as legislations and judicial precedents institutionalize the calculation and control of risk by criminal justice and security apparatuses of a nation. Simultaneously, the prediction of risk is established by scientific discourses and practices, as psychological profiles, statistical models, and other measures of risk factors render the future calculable-hence, predictable. Thus, a comprehensive understanding of risk management and security practices necessitates the analysis of these processes that essentially transforms a possibility into reality, which then forms the basis of public policies and governmental processes.