New Books at PEOSTA

Reviewed: CHE 28 July 2017 (new books)
Description: Although much has been written about Al Capone, there has not been–until now–a complete history of organized crime in Chicago during Prohibition. This exhaustively researched book covers the entire period from 1920 to 1933. …A major focus is how the Capone gang–one of twelve major bootlegging mobs in Chicago at the start of Prohibition–gained a virtual monopoly over organized crime in northern Illinois and beyond. Binder also describes the fight by federal and local authorities, as well as citizens’ groups, against organized crime. In the process, he refutes numerous myths and misconceptions related to the Capone gang, other criminal groups, the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, and gangland killings. (publ.)

Reviewed: WSJ 13 June 2017 p. A15
Description: In 2011, a twenty-six-year-old libertarian programmer named Ross Ulbricht launched the ultimate free market: the Silk Road, a clandestine Web site where anyone could trade anything – drugs, hacking soft-ware, forged passports, counterfeit cash, poisons – free of the government’s watchful eye. It wasn't long before the media got wind of the new Web site where anyone – not just teenagers and weed dealers but terrorists and black hat hackers – could buy and sell contraband detection-free. Spurred by a public outcry, the federal government launched an epic two-year man-hunt for the site’s elusive proprietor, with no leads, no witnesses, and no clear jurisdiction. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 6 May 2018 p. 12; NPR (Book Review 4/24/2018)
Description: In December 1957, the wife of a Florida citrus baron is raped in her home while her husband is away. She claims a “husky Negro” did it, and the sheriff, the infamous racist Willis McCall, does not hesitate to round up a herd of suspects. But within days, McCall turns his sights on Jesse Daniels, a gentle, mentally impaired white nineteen-year-old. Soon Jesse is railroaded up to the state hospital for the insane, and locked away without trial. Crusading journalist Mabel Norris Reese cannot stop fretting over the case and its baffling outcome. Who is protecting whom, or what? She pursues the story for years, chasing down leads, hitting dead ends, winning unlikely allies. Bit by bit, the unspeakable truths behind a conspiracy that shocked a community into silence come to the surface. (publ.)

Reviewed: Economist 16 Dec. 2017 p. 77.
Description: Drawing upon both psychological research and stories from his own career, Godsey shares how innate psychological flaws and the “tough on crime” political environment can cause investigations to go awry, leading to the conviction of innocent people. He not only sheds light on unintentional yet routine injustices but also recommends structural and procedural changes to restore justice to the criminal justice system. (Publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 1 Apr. 2018 p. 8; Economist 14 Apr. 2018 p. 77.
Description: An account of the persistent plague of institutional racism and junk forensic science in our criminal justice system, and its devastating effect on innocent lives. After two three-year-old girls were raped and murdered in rural Mississippi, law enforcement pursued and convicted two innocent men: Kennedy Brewer and Levon Brooks. Together they spent a combined thirty years in prison before finally being exonerated in 2008. Meanwhile, the real killer remained free. [This book] recounts the story of how the criminal justice system allowed this to happen, and of how two men, Dr. Steven Hayne and Dr. Michael West, built successful careers on the back of that structure. For nearly two decades, Hayne, a medical examiner, performed the vast majority of Mississippi's autopsies, while his friend Dr. West, a local dentist, pitched himself as a forensic jack-of-all-trades. Together they became the go-to experts for prosecutors and helped put countless Mississippians in prison. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 27 Apr. 2018 p. 3.
Description: Cops, politicians, and ordinary people are afraid of black men. The result is the Chokehold: laws and practices that treat every African American man like a thug. In this explosive new book, an African American former federal prosecutor shows that the system is working exactly the way it's supposed to. Black men are always under watch, and police violence is widespread--all with the support of judges and politicians. (publ.)

Reviewed: CHE 28 July 2017 (new books)
Description: There have been many heroes and victims in the battle to abolish the death penalty, and Marie Deans fits into both of those categories. A South Carolina native who yearned to be a fiction writer, Marie was thrust by a combination of circumstances, including the murder of her beloved mother-in-law, into a world much stranger than fiction, a world in which minorities and the poor were selected to be sacrificed to what Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun called the “machinery of death.” Marie found herself fighting to bring justice to the legal process and to bring humanity not only to prisoners on death row but to the guards and wardens as well. (publ.)

Reviewed: CHE 20 Apr. 2018 (New Books)
Description: The special legal status of Native Americans and the highly complex jurisdictional issues resulting from colonial ideologies have become deeply embedded into federal law and policy. Nevertheless, Indigenous people in the United States are often invisible in discussions of criminal and social justice. … The contributors to this volume reflect on issues in three key areas: crime, social justice, and community responses to crime and justice issues. Topics include stalking, involuntary sterilization of Indigenous women, border-town violence, Indian gaming, child welfare, and juvenile justice. These issues are all rooted in colonization; however, the contributors demonstrate how Indigenous communities are finding their own solutions for social justice, sovereignty, and self-determination. Thanks to its focus on community responses that exemplify Indigenous resilience, persistence, and innovation, this volume will be valuable to those on the ground working with Indigenous communities in public and legal arenas, as well as scholars and students. (publ.)

Note: Library standing order.

Reviewed: CHE 29 Sept. 2017 (new books)
Description: Provides a overview of the American juvenile justice systems development and change over the past century. Noted law professor and criminologist Barry C. Feld places special emphasis on changes over the last 25 years, the ascendance of get tough crime policies, and the more recent Supreme Court recognition that children are different. …Ultimately, Feld argues, providing justice for children requires structural changes to reduce social and economic inequality concentrated poverty in segregated urban areas, that disproportionately expose children of color to juvenile courts punitive policies. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 15 Jan. 2018 p. 52
Description: The vast majority of the law enforcement officers in this country perform their very difficult jobs with respect for their communities and in compliance with the law. Even so, there have been incidents in which this was not the case. Police brutality and misconduct has been under the microscope for the last several years, and Loretta Prater brings these issues to light through research reports and numerous examples of cases, including the personal case of her son. On January 2, 2004, Leslie Vaughn Prater, Loretta Prater’s unarmed son, was a homicide victim in Chattanooga, Tennessee. His death resulted from an altercation with four police officers. This book is the account of an African American family’s personal experience with police brutality and misconduct, the behind the scene dynamics, as well as the personal emotional trauma experienced by victims’ families. (publ.)

Reviewed: CHE 9 June 2017 (new books); Choice Nov. 2017 vol. 55 no. 3 (Highly Recommended)
Description: Provides the first in-depth look at the history of this movement through interviews with key leaders such as Barry Scheck and Rob Warden as well as archival and field research into the major cases that brought awareness to wrongful convictions in the United States. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 7 July 2017 p. 30
Description: “This is an imperfect book, which would matter less if it were less good. The book’s conceptual resolution—the ‘legal incoherence’ that reveals an ‘elegant human beauty’—lies with the jury. …” (TLS) The child of two lawyers, Marzano-Lesnevich is staunchly anti-death penalty. But the moment convicted murderer Ricky Langley’s face flashes on the screen as she reviews old tapes – the moment she hears him speak of his crimes – she is overcome with the feeling of wanting him to die. Shocked by her reaction, she digs deeper and deeper into the case. Despite their vastly different circumstances, something in his story is unsettlingly, uncannily familiar. Crime, even the darkest and most unsayable acts, can happen to any one of us. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 20 Nov. 2017 p. 82
Description: “… Closely examining how rape is investigated and tried in the U.S., including the development of the rape kit in the 1970s and the origins of the ‘Hale Warning’ (an instruction to jurors in rape trials to be wary of false accusations), the book shines a critical light on an urgent and timely subject.” (PW)

Reviewed: LJ 15 Nov. 2017 p. 92
Description: Found guilty of the rape and murder of a woman he had never met, Nick Yarris was sentenced to death. With appeal after appeal failing, he spent 22 years waiting to die. This is the true and amazing story of how he survived death row. (publ.)

Description: The explosive rise in the U.S. incarceration rate in the second half of the twentieth century, and the racial transformation of the prison population from mostly white at mid-century to sixty-five percent black and Latino in the present day, is a trend that cannot easily be ignored. Many believe that this shift began with the “tough on crime” policies advocated by Republicans and southern Democrats beginning in the late 1960s, which sought longer prison sentences, more frequent use of the death penalty, and the explicit or implicit targeting of politically marginalized people. In The First Civil Right, Naomi Murakawa inverts the conventional wisdom by arguing that the expansion of the federal carceral state–a system that disproportionately imprisons blacks and Latinos–was, in fact, rooted in the civil-rights liberalism of the 1940s and early 1960s, not in the period after. (publ.)

Reviewed: NPR 13 Aug. 2017 (book review); LJ December 2017 p. 22 (Best Books 2017)
Description: When the final gavel clapped in a rural southern courtroom in the summer of 1988, Willie J. Grimes, a gentle spirit with no record of violence, was shocked and devastated to be convicted of first-degree rape and sentenced to life imprisonment. Here is the story of this everyman and his extraordinary quarter-century-long journey to freedom, told in breathtaking and sympathetic detail, from the botched evidence and suspect testimony that led to his incarceration to the tireless efforts to prove his innocence and the identity of the true perpetrator. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Dec. 2018 vol. 56 no. 4); Outstanding Academic title; Essential for community college libraries.
Description: In the era of mass incarceration, over 600,000 people are released from federal or state prison each year, with many returning to chaotic living environments rife with violence. In these circumstances, how do former prisoners navigate reentering society? Sociologist Bruce Western examines the tumultuous first year after release from prison. Drawing from in-depth interviews with over one hundred individuals, he describes the lives of the formerly incarcerated and demonstrates how poverty, racial inequality, and failures of social support trap many in a cycle of vulnerability despite their efforts to rejoin society. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 27 April 2018 p. 3
Description: On July 17, 2014, a forty-three-year-old black man died in New York City after a police officer put him in what has been described as a chokehold during an arrest for selling loosies, or single cigarettes. The final moments of his life were captured on video and seen by millions, sparking an international series of protests that built into the transformative Black Lives Matter movement. Matt Taibbi ... tells the full story of the man who inspired a movement–neither villain nor victim, but a fiercely proud individual determined to do the best he could for his family. Featuring ... vignettes of life on the street, this ... narrative of urban America is a ... scathing indictment of law enforcement in the twenty-first century. (publ.)

Reviewed: LJ 1 June 2018 p. 102; NYRB 25 Oct. 20218 p. 37; NYT/BR 27 May 2018 p. 11; Economist 10 Aug. 2019 p. 21 (referenced).
Description: America has made mental illness a crime. Jails in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago each house more people with mental illnesses than any hospital. As many as half of all people in America’s jails and prisons have a psychiatric disorder. One in four fatal police shootings involves a person with such disorders. In this book, journalist Alisa Roth goes deep inside the criminal justice system to show how and why it has become a warehouse where inmates are denied proper treatment, abused, and punished in ways that make them sicker. (publ.)

Reviewed: Economist 16 Dec. 2017 p. 77
Description: When the tough-on-crime politics of the 1980s overcrowded state prisons, private companies saw potential profit in building and operating correctional facilities. Today more than a hundred thousand of the 1.5 million incarcerated Americans are held in private prisons in twenty-nine states and federal corrections. Private prisons are criticized for making money off mass incarceration—to the tune of $5 billion in annual revenue. Based on Lauren-Brooke Eisen’s work as a prosecutor, journalist, and attorney at policy think tanks, Inside Private Prisons blends investigative reportage and quantitative and historical research to analyze privatized corrections in America. (publ.)

Reviewed: Economist 14 Apr. 2018 p. 77.
Description: In the early 1990s in a small disadvantaged community in rural Mississippi, Levon Brooks and Kennedy Brewer were wrongfully convicted in separate trials of capital murder. Brooks, despite an alibi, was sentenced to life and was imprisoned for 18 years. A few years later Brewer was convicted and sentenced to death. He was incarcerated for 15. In 2008 the Innocence Project in New York exonerated both men. Vanessa Potkin, longtime attorney at the Innocence Project, along with co-founder of the Innocence Project, Peter Neufeld, spent years investigating the two cases, and discovered a link between them that subsequent DNA testing substantiated. The results of that testing led authorities to the real perpetrator who was responsible for both murders and then to the exonerations of Brooks and Brewer. Without the work of the Innocence Project, Potkin, Neufeld, and a host of others, these photographs–of lives lost, forgotten, and then regained–would not have been possible. (publ.)

Description: In spite of America’s identity as a liberal democracy, the vile act of lynching happened frequently in the Southern United States over the course of the nation’s history. Indeed, lynchings were very public events, and were even advertised in newspapers, begging the question of how such brazen disregard for the law could have occurred so freely and openly. This book seeks to explain the seemingly paradoxical relationship between the American liberal regime and the illiberal act of lynching. Drawing on legal cases, congressional documents, presidential correspondence, and newspaper reports, Daniel Kato explores the federal government's pattern of nonintervention regarding lynchings of African Americans from the late nineteenth century through the 1960s. Although popular belief holds that the federal government was unable to address racial violence in the South, this book argues that the actions and decisions of the federal government from the 1870s through the 1960s reveal that federal inaction was not primarily a consequence of institutional or legal incapacities, but rather a decision that was supported and maintained by all three branches of government. Inaction stemmed from the decision not to intervene, not from the powerlessness of the federal government. (publ.)

Reviewed: TLS 12 Jan. 2018 p. 25
Description: Today, mafias operate across the globe, with hundreds of thousands of members and billions of pounds in revenue. From Hong Kong to New York, these vast organizations spread their tentacles into politics, finance and everyday life. But what is it like to belong to the Mafia? How do you join? What does it do to your loved ones? How do you make it to the top? And what happens if you break the rules? Criminologist Federico Varese draws on a lifetime’s research to give us access to some of the world’s most secretive societies. Mixing reportage with case studies and historical insights, this is the story of mafia as it really is: filled with boredom and drama, death and disaster, ambition and betrayal. Infiltrating initiation ceremonies from Russia to England, visiting exclusive gambling clubs in Macau and Mafia summits in Dubai luxury hotels, Varese builds up a unique picture of life in the mafia from the inside. (publ.)

Note: Library standing order.

Reviewed: CHE 27 Apr. 2018 (New Books)
Description: Drawing on three years of fieldwork inside and outside of the courtroom, in-depth interviews, and analysis of trends in arrests and dispositions of misdemeanors going back three decades, Issa Kohler-Hausmann argues that lower courts have largely abandoned the adjudicative model of criminal law administration in which questions of factual guilt and legal punishment drive case outcomes. Due to the sheer volume of arrests, lower courts have adopted a managerial model--and the implications are troubling. … Revealing and innovative, this book shows how the lower reaches of our criminal justice system operate as a form of social control and surveillance, often without adjudicating cases or imposing formal punishment. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 8 Jan. 2018 p. 55
Description: One August night in 1931, on a secluded mountain ridge overlooking Birmingham, Alabama, three young white women were brutally at-tacked. The sole survivor, Nell Williams, age eighteen, said a black man had held the women captive for four hours before shooting them and disappearing into the woods. That same night, a reign of terror was unleashed on Birmingham’s black community: black businesses were set ablaze, posses of armed white men roamed the streets, and dozens of black men were arrested in the largest manhunt in Jefferson County history. Weeks later, Nell identified Willie Peterson as the attacker who killed her sister Augusta and their friend Jenny Wood. With the exception of being black, Peterson bore little resemblance to the description Nell gave the police. An all-white jury convicted Peterson of murder and sentenced him to death. (publ.)

Reviewed: LJ Dec. 2017 p. 114
Description: Policing Black Bodies Angela J. Hattery and Earl Smith make a compelling case that the policing of Black bodies goes far beyond these individual stories of brutality. They connect the regulation of African American people in many settings, including the public education system and the criminal justice system, into a powerful narrative about the myriad ways Black bodies are policed. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 1 May 2017 p. 51; NYT/BR 30 July 2017 p. 13.
Description: A comprehensive, readable analysis of the key issues of the Black Lives Matter movement, this thought-provoking and compelling anthology features essays by some of the nation's most influential and respected criminal justice experts and legal scholars. Policing the Black Man explores and critiques the many ways the criminal justice system impacts the lives of African American boys and men at every stage of the criminal process, from arrest through sentencing. Essays range from an explication of the historical roots of racism in the criminal justice system to an examination of modern-day police killings of unarmed black men. The contributors discuss and explain racial profiling, the power and discretion of police and prosecutors, the role of implicit bias, the racial impact of police and prosecutorial decisions, the disproportionate imprisonment of black men, the collateral consequences of mass incarceration, and the Supreme Court's failure to provide meaningful remedies for the injustices in the criminal justice system. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 11 Dec. 2018 p. 164
Description: Explores the history and foundation of mass incarceration and examines Christianity’ role in its evolution and expansion. Shows how Christians can pursue justice that restores and reconciles, and offers creative solutions and innovative interventions to help bring authentic rehabilitation, lasting transformation, and healthy reintegration to America’s broken criminal justice system. (publ.)

Reviewed: CHE 28 July 2017 (new books)
Description: The United States incarcerates far more people than any other country in the world, at rates nearly ten times higher than other liberal democracies. Indeed, while the U.S. is home to 5 percent of the world's population, it contains nearly 25 percent of its prisoners. But the extent of American cruelty goes beyond simply locking people up. At every stage of the criminal justice process–plea bargaining, sentencing, prison conditions, rehabilitation, parole, and societal reentry–the U.S. is harsher and more punitive than other comparable countries. (publ.)

Reviewed: LJ Jan. 2018 p. 123
Description: Providing a timely and much-needed investigation of how U.S. law enforcement carries out its public safety and crime fighting mandates, this book is an invaluable resource for students, educators, and concerned citizens. Provides a single-volume, go-to source for insight into police-citizen relations in the United States, from the 17th century through to today. Documents major turning points and historical events influencing the evolution of police power. Provides both supportive and critical perspectives on contemporary trends in law enforcement activities, attitudes, and practices. Enables a fuller comprehension of law enforcement in an era of significant political and social upheaval, much of which is tied to racial, ethnic, or economic factors. (publ.)