Books

A focus on leading social issues of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Each title contains approximately 175 full or excerpted documents---speeches, legislation, magazine and newspaper articles, essays, memoirs, letters, interviews, novels, songs, and works of art---as well as overview information that places each document in context.

An interdisciplinary source that addresses not only law but also sociology, psychology, history and economics. Entries vary widely from abortion to rape and from family violence to wiretapping, offering a mirror of issues dominating toda.'s headlines. This edition is a complete update and revision of the previous edition that includes new essays on topics such as stalking, hate crimes, and HIV.

Examines all facets of law enforcement on the state and local, federal and national, and international stages. Includes discussions on the practice and theory of policing in an historical and contemporary framework.

The two-volume Encyclopedia of Prisons and Correctional Facilities, originally published in print format in 2004, aims to provide a critical overview of penal institutions within a historical and contemporary framework.

Contains new and updated original articles covering recent concepts (i.e. adoption, race, the Constitution, birthright citizenship) and court cases since 1992 offering comprehensive coverage of all aspects of constitutional law, as well as biographies of people who have had an impact on our government's legal framework (Supreme Court Justices, Presidents, Cabinet Members, Lawyers, and more). Also covers judicial decisions handed down by the Supreme Court.

Covers the history of white-collar and corporate crime. Serves as a general and non-technical resource for criminology and history students, librarians, and professors to understand the development of white-collar and corporate crime in the U. S. as well as internationally; to appreciate the business forces that can affect daily life; and to initiate educational discussion brought forth by the specific historical and topical articles presented in the work.

Provides current information on more than 5,000 legal topics. Includes completely revised articles covering important issues, biographies, definitions of legal terms and more. Covers such high-profile topics as the Americans with Disabilities Act, capital punishment, domestic violence, gay and lesbian rights, and physician-assisted suicide.

This systematic application of rational-choice theory to white-collar crime problems distinguishes ordinary and upperworld white-collar crime and presents reasons theoretically for believing that both have increased substantially over time. Reasons for the increase include the growing supply of white-collar lure and non-credible oversight. The book argues that measures and approaches used in the war on street crime have greater promise for reducing white-collar crime. Concluding with reasons for believing that problems of white-collar crime will continue unchecked in the increasingly global economy, it calls for strengthened citizen movements to rein in the increases.

Today, questions about how and why societies punish are deeply emotive and hotly contested. In Crime and Punishment in Contemporary Culture, Claire Valier argues that criminal justice is a key site for the negotiation of new collective identities and modes of belonging. Exploring both popular cultural forms and changes in crime policies and criminal law, Valier elaborates new forms of critical engagement with the politics of crime and punishment. In doing so, the book discusses: teletechnologies, punishment and new collectivites; the cultural politics of victims rights; discourses on foreigners, crime and diaspora; terror, the death penalty and the spectacle of violence.

Compared with other developed nations, the United States is unique in its high rates of both gun ownership and murder. Although widespread gun ownership does not have much effect on the overall crime rate, gun use does make criminal violence more lethal and has a unique capacity to terrorize the public. Gun crime accounts for most of the costs of gun violence in the United States, which are on the order of $100 billion per year.

But that is not the whole story. Guns also provide recreational benefits and sometimes are used virtuously in fending off or forestalling criminal attacks.

Given that guns may be used for both good and ill, the goal of gun policy in the United States has been to reduce the flow of guns to the highest-risk groups while preserving access for most people. There is no lack of opinions on policies to regulate gun commerce, possession, and use, and most policy proposals spark intense controversy. Whether the current system achieves the proper balance between preserving access and preventing misuse remains the subject of considerable debate.

Evaluating Gun Policy provides guidance for a pragmatic approach to gun policy using good empirical research to help resolve conflicting assertions about the effects of guns, gun control, and law enforcement. The chapters in this volume do not conform neatly to the claims of any one political position.

The book is divided into five parts. In the first section, contributors analyze the connections between rates of gun ownership and two outcomes of particular interest to society—suicide and burglary.

Regulating ownership is the focus of the second section, where contributors investigate the consequences a large-scale combined gun ban and buy-back program in Australia, as well as the impact of state laws that prohibit gun ownership to those with histories of domestic violence.

The third section focuses on efforts to restrict gun carrying and includes a critical examination of efforts in Pittsburgh to patrol illegal gun traffic and a re-examination of the effects of permissive state gun-carrying laws. This section also features the first rigorous—and critical—analysis of Richmond’s Project Exile, which serves as one model for the national Project Safe Neighborhoods program.

The fourth section focuses on efforts to facilitate research on gun violence, including a database on state gun laws and the ongoing development of a nationwide violent-death reporting system. The book concludes with an examination of the policy process.

Differences in opinion about gun policy flourish partly because of the lack of sound evidence in this area. The contributors to this volume demonstrate that skilled and dispassionate analysis of the evidence is attainable, even in an area as contentious as firearm policy. For pragmatists who wish to reduce the social burden of gun violence, there is no acceptable alternative.

Callanan tests the link between individuals' media habits and punitive attitudes toward criminals, finding that the more crime-related television people watch, the more fearful they become, and the more supportive of three strikes sentencing. Although there are some differences between forms of crime-related media consumption across race/ethnicity, the link with punitiveness still holds. The test provides evidence for Gerbner's cultivation hypothesis of a "mean world" view. Heavy consumers of crime-related media are more fearful of crime, more likely to believe crime is increasing, more likely to rate crimes seriously, more likely to believe the world is "just," less likely to support rehabilitation, and much more likely to support three strikes sentencing.

What circumstances lead someone to commit murder, rape, or acts of child molestation? Why does society have such a deep-seated wish for vengeance against perpetrators of heinous crimes? Can those found guilty of such crimes ever be rehabilitated? What are the long-term consequences of incarceration, for inmates and society?

Officials of the criminal justice system, politicians, and ordinary citizens argue about possible answers to these controversial and vital questions, with little agreement. Violent crime and overflowing prisons continue to be unfortunate aspects of our society as the criminal justice system struggles to develop a coherent strategy to deal with heinous crimes.

This book offers innovative perspectives on the difficult issues concerning a civilized society's response to offenders guilty of heinous crimes. It considers specific cases and the chilling accounts of victims and the criminals themselves. In providing detailed strategies for prevention and rehabilitation, Frederic G. Reamer draws on his extensive experience as a member of the Rhode Island Parole Board, where he has heard more than 13,000 cases, and as a social worker in correctional facilities. He examines the psychological and social factors that lead individuals to commit reprehensible crimes, arguing that a fuller understanding of different criminal types is crucial to developing successful answers to the problem of heinous crimes. Closely looking at various criminal typologies, Reamer examines the effectiveness and rationale of various responses, including revenge and retribution, imprisonment for public safety, rehabilitation, and restorative justice.

In Race, Law, and American Society: 1607 to Present Gloria Browne-Marshall traces the history of racial discrimination in American law from colonial times to the present, analyzing the key court cases that established Americas racial system and showing their impact on American society. Throughout, she places advocates for freedom and equality at the center, moving from their struggle for physical freedom in the slavery era to more recent battles for equal rights and economic equality. From the colonial period to the present, this book examines education, property ownership, voting rights, criminal justice, and the military as well as internationalism and civil liberties. Race, Law, and American Society is highly accessible and thorough in its depiction of the role race has played, with the sanction of the U.S. Supreme Court, in shaping virtually every major American social institution.

Based on extensive research initiated by the UK Home Office, Reducing Crime offers an objective look at the effectiveness of criminal justice interventions in the reduction of crime. Bringing together information about where, for whom and at what cost these interventions are effective, the book examines alcohol prevention and drug treatment studies; courts, sentencing and police interventions; probation and prison interventions; and situational burglary and housing interventions. In addition to a cost/benefits analysis of each intervention, the book also discusses future research and policy directions.

The problem remains: students in schools across the United States are not only bullying each other but are killing each other. This book provides a foundation for the study of school violence, beginning with an analysis of the shootings at Columbine and going on to discuss all forms of aggression in schools. The authors provide a history of school violence in America, theories to explain bullying, and teachers' perceptions of this violence-and suggest ways that teachers and other school personnel can predict, control, and prevent outbursts of violence. Also included are discussions on the effects of the media on school violence, as well as the criminal justice system's responses. This book is an excellent resource for courses in criminal justice, teacher education, and all youth workers and counselors in schools and the community.

Politicians and pundits frequently talk about the costs to crime and society, but few ever define their terms or clarify their statistics. So how does a society measure economic loss due to criminal activity?

In The Costs of Crime and Justice, Mark Cohen presents a comprehensive view of the financial setbacks of criminal behavior. Victims of crime might incur medical costs, lost wages and property damage; while for some crimes pain, suffering and reduced quality of life suffered by victims far exceeds any physical damage. The government also incurs costs as the provider of mental health services, police, courts and prisons.

Cohen argues that understanding the costs of crime can lead to important insights and policy conclusions - both in terms of criminal justice policy but also in terms of other social ills that compete with crime for government funding. This book systematically discusses the numerous methodological approaches and tallies up what is known about the costsof crime

A must-read for anyone involved in public policy, The Costs of Crime and Justice consolidates the diverse research in this area but also makes one of the most valuable contributions to date to the study of the economics of criminal behavior.

Violent crime in America shot up sharply in the mid-1980s and continued to climb until 1991, after which something unprecedented occurred. The crime level declined to a level not seen since the 1960s. This revised edition of The Crime Drop in America focuses first on the dramatic drop in crime rates in America in the 1990s, and then, in a new epilogue, on the patterns since 2000. The separate chapters written by distinguished experts cover the many factors affecting crime rates: policing, incarceration, drug markets, gun control, economics, and demographics. Detailed analyses emphasize the mutual effects of changes in crack markets, a major focus of youth violence, and the drop in rates of violence following decline in demand for crack. The contrasts between the crime-drop period of the 1990s and the period since 2000 are explored in the new epilogue, which also reviews major new developments in thinking about the causes and control of crime.

How does the way we think and feel about the world around us affect the existence and administration of the death penalty? What role does capital punishment play in defining our political and cultural identity?

After centuries during which capital punishment was a normal and self-evident part of criminal punishment, it has now taken on a life of its own in various arenas far beyond the limits of the penal sphere. In this volume, the authors argue that in order to understand the death penalty, we need to know more about the "cultural lives"—past and present—of the state’s ultimate sanction.

They undertake this “cultural voyage” comparatively—examining the dynamics of the death penalty in Mexico, the United States, Poland, Kyrgyzstan, India, Israel, Palestine, Japan, China, Singapore, and South Korea—arguing that we need to look beyond the United States to see how capital punishment “lives” or “dies” in the rest of the world, how images of state killing are produced and consumed elsewhere, and how they are reflected, back and forth, in the emerging international judicial and political discourse on the penalty of death and its abolition.

Widely acclaimed as a publishing milestone, The Torture Papers (Cambridge, 2005) constitutes the definitive book of public record detailing the Bush Administration's policies on torture and political prisoners. In the process of assembling the documents, memoranda, and reports that comprise the material in The Torture Papers, a vital question arose: What was the rationale behind the Bush Administration's decision to condone the use of coercive techniques in the interrogation of detainees suspected of terrorist connections? The use of these techniques at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo has sparked an intense debate in America. The Torture Debate in America captures the arguments on torture that have been put forth by legislators, human rights activists, and others. It raises the key moral, legal, and historical questions that have led to current considerations on the use of torture. Divided into three sections, the contributions cover all sides of the debate, from absolute prohibition of torture to its use as a viable option in the War on Terror.

The California Three Strikes law was passed in 1994 as a wave of “strike” laws swept the United States. California’s law was unique, however, because people convicted of possession of a small amount of narcotics or who committed petty crimes like shoplifting were receiving life sentences. Kieso studies prosecutorial discretion, judicial discretion, jury discretion with a focus on the inconsistencies in California’s usage of its Three Strikes law. Contrary to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2003 decision, Ewing v. California, which upheld the law and to public perception, Kieso demonstrates that many unjust cases result from flaws in California’s political system.

Stucky argues, using insights from political resource theory, that the local political context (form of government, city council structure and partisanship of elections) affects the ability of citizens to make their concerns heard in local government and, consequently, their ability to organize against crime. Additionally, he argues that local political systems that are more susceptible to citizen pressure will have relatively more police. These hypotheses are tested on U.S. cities with 25,000 or more residents in 1991. Results suggest that the effect of social disorganization on crime rates depends on the local political system. Results also suggest that the relative size of police departments in 1991 varies by local political context.

Hughes analyzes the occurrence and resolution of dispute-related incidents involving black and white youth street gangs in Chicago. Quantitative analysis involves assessing situational variables suggested by the literature as relevant to the occurrence of violence. When possible, interaction sequences also are examined. Qualitative analysis emphasizes themes related to the conditions under which disputes are likely to emerge and either escalate into violence or be "squashed." The result is a conceptual scheme that is useful for understanding how factors and processes operating at the micro-social level contribute to the occurrence of disputes and impact the decision to engage in violence or to back down.