Books in the Studies in Crime and Public Policy series

In lucid and engaging prose, Michael Tonry reveals the historical foundation for the current state of the American criminal justice system, while simultaneously offering a game plan for long overdue reform.

Children of the Prison Boom describes the devastating effects of America's experiment in mass incarceration for a generation of vulnerable children. Wakefield and Wildeman find that parental imprisonment leads to increased mental health and behavioral problems, infant mortality, and child homelessness which translate into large-scale increases in racial inequality.

Banished is an in-depth exploration of new and largely-ignored policing tactics that enforce zones of exclusion in many American cities. Through an exploration of the case of Seattle, Banished charts the rise of these new mechanisms of urban social control, and provides a thorough and critical assessment of their effectiveness.

Presenting a history of the rise and workings of America's first juvenile court, this work explores the fundamental question of how the law should treat the young. It reveals how children's advocates slowly built up a separate system for juveniles, all the while fighting political and legal battles to legitimate this controversial institution.

After decades of rigorous study in the United States and across the Western world, a great deal is known about the early risk factors for offending. Farrington and Welsh here lay the groundwork for change with a comprehensive national prevention strategy to save children from a life of crime.

Provides a critical examination of knowledge about gangs and major gang control programs across the nation. This book focuses on gang proliferation and crime patterns, and highlights known risk factors that lead to youths joining gangs and to gang formation within communities. It is useful for criminologists, social workers, and policy makers.

Exposes felon disenfranchisement as one of the most important, yet little known, threats to the health of American democracy. This book reveals the centrality of racial factors in the origins of these laws, and their impact on politics, election outcomes, and public policy.

Across America today gated communities sprawl out from urban centers, employers enforce mandatory drug testing, and schools screen students with metal detectors. How and when did our everyday world become dominated by fear, every citizen treated as a potential criminal?

This study aims to quantify the social costs of gun violence in order to help policy makers determine how many and which violence programmes to support. The authors offer detailed information about how the burden of gun violence is distributed in the US.

An examination of the social and legal changes that have transformed the juvenile court since the 1970s. The book explores the complex relationship between race and youth crime to explain both Supreme Court decisions and a political impetus to "get tough" on young offenders.

This title is a treatment of the politics and the impact of the "get tough" criminal sentencing legislation in the US. It includes a major empirical study of the celebrated California "three strikes" law, the law that imposed a 25-years to life imprisonment the moment of a third felony conviction.

An in-depth critique of the USA's dominant political and legal response to hate crime in the STUDIES IN CRIME AND PUBLIC POLICY series. The fallacious construction of hate crime epidemics by politicians and the media is considered, and it is argued that the laws created in response to such prejudicial views can be regarded as symbolic politics.

This is an examination of adolescent violence in the United States as both a social phenomenon and a policy problem. Franklin Zimring, a scholar of law and crime, scrutinizes criminal statistics and demographic trends in order to authoritatively address public worries.

Police departments across the USA are busily "reinventing" themselves, adopting a new style known as "community policing". Police departments that succeed in adopting this new stance have an entirely different relationship to the public that they serve. Chicago made the transition, and this book examines why it did, how it did it, and how well it worked.

Restorative Justice has become an important new way of thinking about crime, responsive regulation an influential way of thinking about business regulation. In this volume, John Braithwaite brings together his important work on restorative justive with his work on business regulation to form a sweepingly novel picture of the way society regulates itself.

This volume shows how politicians constructed crime-related problems in ways which imply the need to enhance punishment and control and, simultaneously, to end welfare as we know it.

Living in Infamy uncovers the origins of felon disfranchisement and traces the expansion of the practice to felons regardless of race and its spread beyond the South, establishing a system that affects the American electoral process today.

During 2000-1 in Afghanistan, the Taliban achieved a longtime goal of national and international drug policy agencies: a large, sudden, and unanticipated reduction in world opium production. This cutback provides an unprecedented opportunity to study the dynamics of the world opiate market and ask whether further interventions could effectively reduce the flows of drugs. Based on an extended, multi-national study, the authors construct a new model for the traffickingof drugs and revenues and offer the first account of the world market in heroin and other illicit opiates during and after the 2001 ban. The authors' broader findings demonstrate how robust production, trafficking, and consumption combine to make successful long-term interventions on the supply-siderare exceedingly difficult, though specific policies can impact the organization and behavior of markets. For reductions in both production and consumption, where the cultivation of opium is entrenched in the normal life and legitimate economy of millions of people, international agencies and foreign governments must provide adequate and long-term support to foster both alternative development policies and law enforcement programs.

Spells out how American crime policy has reached the lowpoint it has and where we can go from here. This work explains how the worst of policies can be undone and how the avoidable human suffering they produce can be diminished.

Taking another look at what is meant by "policing," Jean-Paul Brodeur offers a comprehensive and novel theory on what policing is, how it has developed, and the various forms it takes.

Making Public Places Safer is the first book to assess the effectiveness and social costs of the most important surveillance methods to prevent crime in public space: CCTV, improved street lighting, security guards, place managers, and defensible space. Importantly, the book goes beyond the question of "Does it work?" and examines the specific conditions and contexts under which these surveillance methods may have an effect on crime as well as themechanisms that bring about a reduction in crime. Making Public Places Safer is a timely and reliable guide at a time when cities need cost-effective methods to fight crime and the public gradually awakens to the burdens of sacrificing their privacy and civil rights for security.

Examines the on-the-ground practicalities of gun control, from mandatory safety locks to outright prohibition and disarmament. This book cautions against the belief that there exists some gun control solution which would substantially reduce violent crime. It presents an assessment of whether gun control can really be made to work.