New at the Library

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Note: Donation.

Calmar Campus

Calmar Campus

Reviewed: PW 22 Mar. 2021 p. 75; NYT 15 May 2021 p. C1; NYT/BR 30 May 2021 p. 1; LR July 2020 p. 35.
Description: What began in spring 2020 as local protests in response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police quickly exploded into a massive nationwide movement. Millions of mostly young people defiantly flooded into the nation’s streets, demanding an end to police brutality and to the broader, systemic repression of Black people and other people of color. To many observers, the protests appeared to be without precedent in their scale and persistence. Yet, as the acclaimed historian Elizabeth Hinton demonstrates in America on Fire, the events of 2020 had clear precursors–and any attempt to understand our current crisis requires a reckoning with the recent past. Even in the aftermath of Donald Trump, many Americans consider the decades since the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s as a story of progress toward greater inclusiveness and equality. Hinton’s sweeping narrative uncovers an altogether different history, taking us on a troubling journey from Detroit in 1967 and Miami in 1980 to Los Angeles in 1992 and beyond to chart the persistence of structural racism and one of its primary consequences, the so-called urban riot. Hinton offers a critical corrective: the word riot was nothing less than a racist trope applied to events that can only be properly understood as rebellions–explosions of collective resistance to an unequal and violent order. As she suggests, if rebellion and the conditions that precipitated it never disappeared, the optimistic story of a post-Jim Crow United States no longer holds. Black rebellion, America on Fire powerfully illustrates, was born in response to poverty and exclusion, but most immediately in reaction to police violence. … The central lesson from these eruptions–that police violence invariably leads to community violence–continues to escape policymakers, who respond by further criminalizing entire groups instead of addressing underlying socioeconomic causes. The results are the hugely expanded policing and prison regimes that shape the lives of so many Americans today. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 1 Feb. 2021 p. 56.
Description: In late May 1918 in Valdosta, Georgia, ten Black men and one Black woman–Mary Turner, eight months pregnant at the time–were lynched and tortured by mobs of white citizens. Through hauntingly detailed full-color artwork and collage, Elegy for Mary Turner names those who were killed, identifies the killers, and evokes a landscape in which the NAACP investigated the crimes when the state would not and a time when white citizens baked pies and flocked to see Black corpses while Black people fought to make their lives–and their mourning–matter. Included are contributions from C. Tyrone Forehand, great-grandnephew of Mary and Hayes Turner, whose family has long campaigned for the deaths to be remembered; abolitionist activist and educator Mariame Kaba, reflecting on the violence visited on Black women’s bodies; and historian Julie Buckner Armstrong, who opens a window onto the broader scale of lynching’s terror in American history. (publ.)

All royalties from this book go to the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, GA.

Reviewed: PW 14 Mar. 2022 p. 22 (referenced); PW 7 Feb. 2022 p. 51, 54.
Description: From CSI to Forensic Files to the celebrated reputation of the FBI crime lab, forensic scientists have long been mythologized in American popular culture as infallible crime solvers. Juries put their faith in “expert witnesses” and innocent people have been executed as a result. Innocent people are still on death row today, condemned by junk science. In 2012, the Innocence Project began searching for prisoners convicted by junk science, and three men, each convicted of capital murder, became M. Chris Fabricant’s clients. This work chronicles the fights to overturn their wrongful convictions and to end the use of the “science” that destroyed their lives. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 14 Mar. 2022 p. 22 (referenced)
Description: When Valena Beety first became a federal prosecutor, her goal was to protect victims, especially women, from cycles of violence. What she discovered was that not only did prosecutions often fail to help victims, they frequently relied on false information, forensic fraud, and police and prosecutor misconduct. Seeking change, Beety began working in the Innocence Movement, helping to free factually innocent people through DNA testing and criminal justice reform. This book focuses on the shocking story of Beety’s client Leigh Stubbs–a young, queer woman in Mississippi, convicted of a horrific crime she did not commit because of her sexual orientation. Beety weaves Stubbs’s harrowing narrative through the broader story of a broken criminal justice system where defendants–including disproportionate numbers of women of color and queer individuals–are convicted due to racism, prejudice, coerced confessions, and false identifications. (publ.)

Carl Panzram wrote his autobiography for jail guard Henry Lesser at the Washington D.C. District Jail in 1928. In it, he described a life of imprisonment and torture in the reform schools, jails and prisons of early twentieth century America. Panzram also detailed 21 murders which he committed as a twisted form of revenge on society. The Panzram Papers offer keen insight into the mind of the most criminally minded man in America.

Reviewed: NYT/BR 18 Apr. 2021 p. 26.
Description: How can we be proud of a system of justice that often pressures the innocent to plead guilty? How can we claim that justice is equal when we imprison thousands of poor Black men for relatively modest crimes but rarely prosecute rich white executives who commit crimes having far greater impact? How can we applaud the Supreme Court’s ever-more-limited view of its duty to combat excesses by the president? The federal judge Jed S. Rakoff, a leading authority on white-collar crime, explores these and other puzzles. … Grounded in Rakoff’s twenty-four years as a federal trial judge in New York in addition to the many years he worked as a federal prosecutor and criminal defense lawyer, Rakoff ’s assessment of our justice system illuminates some of our most urgent legal, social, and political issues: plea deals and class-action lawsuits, corporate impunity and the death penalty, the perils of eyewitness testimony and forensic science, the war on terror and the expanding reach of the executive branch. A fundamental problem, he reveals, is that the judiciary is constraining its own constitutional powers. (publ.)

Description: Police officers are responsible for maintaining law and order to ensure everyone’s safety and well-being. In doing so, they often put their lives on the line, making it a dangerous and challenging profession. In contemporary America, police forces are criticized for disproportionately targeting people of color, offering indemnity to the small percentage of police officers that act unlawfully or otherwise irresponsibly, and using unnecessarily brutal policing practices. The viewpoints in this volume will allow readers to become more familiar with all sides of policing in America through careful examination of relevant facts and opinions. (publ.)

In this powerful true crime memoir, an award-winning identity theft expert tells the shocking story of the duplicity and betrayal that inspired her career and nearly destroyed her family. Axton Betz-Hamilton grew up in small-town Indiana in the early '90s. When she was 11 years old, her parents both had their identities stolen. Their credit ratings were ruined, and they were constantly fighting over money. Axton's family changed all of their personal information and moved to different addresses, but the identity thief followed them wherever they went. Convinced that the thief had to be someone they knew, Axton and her parents completely cut off the outside world, isolating themselves from friends and family. Years later, her parents' marriage still shaken from the theft, Axton discovered that she, too, had fallen prey to the identity thief, but by the time she realized, she was already thousands of dollars in debt and her credit was ruined. The Less People Know About Us is Axton's attempt to untangle an intricate web of lies, and to understand why and how a loved one could have inflicted such pain. Axton will present a candid, shocking, and redemptive story and reveal her courageous effort to grapple with someone close that broke the unwritten rules of love, protection, and family.

Reviewed: PW 11 May 2020 p. 87.
Description: Electronic monitoring. Locked-down drug treatment centers. House arrest. Mandated psychiatric treatment. Data-driven surveillance. Extended probation. These are some of the key alternatives held up as cost-effective substitutes for jails and prisons. But many of these so-called reforms actually widen the net, weaving in new strands of punishment and control, and bringing new populations, who would not otherwise have been subject to imprisonment, under physical control by the state. As mainstream public opinion has begun to turn against mass incarceration, political figures on both sides of the spectrum are pushing for reform. But–though they’re promoted as steps to confront high rates of imprisonment–many of these measures are transforming our homes and communities into prisons instead. Activist journalists Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law reveal the way the kinder, gentler narrative of reform can obscure agendas of social control and challenge us to question the ways we replicate the status quo when pursuing change. (publ.)

Description: The number of Americans arrested, brought to court, and incarcerated has skyrocketed in recent decades. Criminal defendants come from all races and economic walks of life, but they experience punishment in vastly different ways. This book examines how racial and class inequalities are embedded in the attorney-client relationship, providing a devastat-ing portrait of inequality and injustice within and beyond the criminal courts. Matthew Clair conducted extensive fieldwork in the Boston court system, attending criminal hearings and interviewing defendants, lawyers, judges, police officers, and probation officers. He uncovers how privilege and inequality play out in criminal court interactions. When disadvantaged defendants try to learn their legal rights and advocate for themselves, lawyers and judges often silence, coerce, and punish them. Privileged defendants, who are more likely to trust their defense attorneys, delegate authority to their lawyers, defer to judges, and are rewarded for their compliance. Clair shows how attempts to exercise legal rights often backfire on the poor and on working-class people of color, and how effective legal representation alone is no guarantee of justice. Superbly written and powerfully argued, Privilege and Punishment draws needed attention to the injustices that are perpetuated by the attorney-client relationship in today’s criminal courts, and describes the reforms needed to correct them. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 14 Mar. 2021 p. 13; PW 14 Dec. 2020 p. 90; FA May/June 2021 p. 202; TLS 16 July 2021 p. 22.
Description: In her forties, with two children, a spouse, a dog, a mortgage, and a full-time job as a tenured law professor at Georgetown University, Rosa Brooks decided to become a cop. A liberal academic and journalist with an enduring interest in law’s troubled relationship with violence, Brooks wanted the kind of insider experience that would help her understand how police officers make sense of their world–and whether that world can be changed. In 2015, against the advice of everyone she knew, she applied to become a sworn, armed reserve police officer with the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Department. Brooks recounts her experiences inside the usually closed world of policing. From street shootings and domestic violence calls to the behind-the-scenes police work during Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential inauguration, Brooks presents a revelatory account of what it’s like inside the “blue wall of silence.” She issues an urgent call for new laws and institutions, and argues that in a nation increasingly divided by race, class, ethnicity, geography, and ideology, a truly transformative approach to policing requires us to move beyond sound bites, slogans, and stereotypes. An explosive and groundbreaking investigation, Tangled Up in Blue complicates matters rather than simplifies them, and gives pause both to those who think police can do no wrong–and those who think they can do no right. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 23 Dec. 2019 p. 97.
Description: Frances Glessner Lee, born a socialite to a wealthy and influential Chicago family in the 1870s, was never meant to have a career, let alone one steeped in death and depravity. Yet she developed a fascination with the investigation of violent crimes and made it her life’s work. Best known for creating the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, a series of dioramas that appear charming-until you notice the macabre little details: an over-turned chair, a blood-spattered comforter. And then, of course, there are the bodies-splayed out on the floor, draped over chairs-clothed in garments that Lee lovingly knit with sewing pins. Lee developed a system that used the Nutshells dioramas to train law enforcement officers to investigate violent crimes, and her methods are still used today. This is the story of a woman who overcame the limitations and expectations imposed by her social status and pushed forward an entirely new branch of science that we still use today. (publ.)

It is no accident that the places in the world where we see the most instability are those in which the rights of women and girls are denied. Isha Sesay's indispensable and gripping account of the brutal abduction of Nigerian schoolgirls by Boko Haram terrorists provides a stark reminder of the great unfinished business of the 21st century: equality for girls and women around the world.

This invaluable reference text thoroughly examines the alarming epidemic of campus sexual assault, including a discussion of laws, high-profile cases, controversies, and proposed solutions. * Provides coverage of a timely topic that helps contextualize the issue by providing historical background and contemporary analysis of key events, laws, people, and controversies * Presents perspectives from individuals with firsthand experience with the issue of campus sexual assault, including a Title IX investigator, a college counselor, a sexual assault nurse, as well as community advocates and survivors * Explores strategies and changes that could serve to prevent assaults from occurring

Description: Few subjects are more controversial than capital punishment an issue that has forced Americans, and people around the world, to confront fundamental questions about morality and the role of the state. This volume of Opinions Throughout History looks at the evolution of this debate within the context of major events in the history of American criminal justice, from the nations first execution, in the famed Jamestown Colony of Virginia, to the cells of Americas modern death rows in 2018, where more than 2,700 people await state execution. Tracing this history through the courts, the legislature, and the academic, religious, and popular debates that have surrounded the issue, this volume will reveal how American ideas about execution have evolved and continue to change as the nation moves deeper into the new century. Each chapter includes a valuable introduction and conclusion, a bulleted list of topics covered, a reprint of a particularly significant primary or secondary source document, detailed analysis and commentary of that document, images and photographs, and discussion questions. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 18 Feb. 2019 p. 78.
Description: This book (the title is prison slang for a very long sentence behind bars) takes readers into a world most know little about–a maximum-security prison–and into the minds and hearts of the men who live there. These men, who are serving out life sentences for aggravated murder, join a fledgling Lifers’ Writing Group started by award-winning author Lauren Kessler. Over the course of three years, meeting twice a month, the men reveal more and more about themselves, their pasts, and the alternating drama and tedium of their incarcerated lives. As they struggle with the weight of their guilt and wonder if they should hope for a future outside prison walls, Kessler struggles with the fiercely competing ideas of rehabilitation and punishment, forgiveness and blame that are at the heart of the American penal system. (publ.)

This book offers concise, understandable coverage of all aspects of the issue, including incidence of gun violence; gun control; gun rights; government regulation, legislation, and court decisions; gun organizations (for gun control and for gun rights); gun enthusiast subcultures--for example, hunters, target shooters, and collectors; and U.S. attitudes toward guns. Many of the covered topics are placed in historical and cross-cultural perspective.

This book provides a comprehensive summary of the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and efforts to protect the United States from international terrorism.

On September 26, 2014, police in Iguala, Mexico attacked five busloads of students and a soccer team, killing six people and abducting forty-three students--now known as the Iguala 43--who have not been seen since. In a coordinated cover-up of the government's role in the massacre and forced disappearance, Mexican authorities tampered with evidence, tortured detainees, and thwarted international investigations.

Cybercrime seems invisible. Attacks arrive out of nowhere, their origins hidden by layers of sophisticated technology. Only the victims are clear. But every crime has its perpetrator--specific individuals or groups sitting somewhere behind keyboards and screens. Jonathan Lusthaus lifts the veil on the world of these cybercriminals in the most extensive account yet of the lives they lead, and the vast international industry they have created. We are long past the age of the lone adolescent hacker tapping away in his parents' basement. Cybercrime now operates like a business. Its goods and services may be illicit, but it is highly organized, complex, driven by profit, and globally interconnected.

This book explores the dangers for women and girls caught in the path of ISIS and how they're used by the group as both rewards for fighters and as warriors in their own right.

Swirling in the midst of the resurgence of neo-Nazi demonstrations, hate speech, and acts of domestic terrorism are uncomfortable questions about the limits of free speech. The United States stands apart from many other countries in that citizens have the power to say virtually anything without legal repercussions. But, in the case of white supremacy, does the First Amendment demand that we defend Nazis? In Must We Defend Nazis?, legal experts Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic argue that it should not. Updated to consider the white supremacy demonstrations and counter-protests in Charlottesville and debates about hate speech on campus and on the internet, the book offers a concise argument against total, unchecked freedom of speech.

Note: Dubuque All-Community-Reads 2019 selection.
Description: The story behind the unlikely friendship which developed between the accused rapist Ronald Cotton--who served eleven years in prison for a crime he didn't commit--and his accuser, Jennifer Thompson, raped at knifepoint by a man who broke into her apartment while she slept.

Description: Robertson and Chaney examine how the early antecedents of police brutality like plantation overseers, the lynching of African American males, early race riots, the Rodney King incident, and the Los Angeles Rampart Scandal have directly impacted the current relationship between communities of color and police. Using a phenomenological framework, they analyze how African American college students perceive police to determine how race, gender, and education create different realities among a demographic. Based on their qualitative and quantitative findings, Robertson and Chaney offer recommended policies and strategies for police and communities to improve relationships and perceptions between the two. (publ.)

Traces the history of poison in centuries of royal courts, from the intentional posionings to the unintentional side effects of commonly used makeup and medications.

Reviewed: NYT/BR 15 Sept. 2019 p. 13.
Description: Rachel Monroe interrogates the appeal of true crime through four narratives of fixation. In the 1940s, a bored heiress began creating dollhouse crime scenes depicting murders, suicides, and accidental deaths. Known as the “Mother of Forensic Science,” she revolutionized the field of what was then called legal medicine. In the aftermath of the Manson Family murders, a young woman moved into Sharon Tate’s guesthouse and, over the next two decades, entwined herself with the Tate family. In the mid-nineties, a landscape architect in Brooklyn fell in love with a convicted murderer, the supposed ringleader of the West Memphis Three, through an intense series of letters. After they married, she devoted her life to get-ting him freed from death row. And in 2015, a teenager deeply involved in the online fandom for the Columbine killers planned a mass shooting of her own. (publ.)

A stunningly written investigation of the murder of two young women--showing how a violent crime casts a shadow over an entire community. In the early evening of June 25, 1980 in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, two middle-class outsiders named Vicki Durian, 26, and Nancy Santomero, 19, were murdered in an isolated clearing. They were hitchhiking to a festival known as the Rainbow Gathering but never arrived. For thirteen years, no one was prosecuted for the "Rainbow Murders," though deep suspicion was cast on a succession of local residents in the community, depicted as poor, dangerous, and backward. In 1993, a local farmer was convicted, only to be released when a known serial killer and diagnosed schizophrenic named Joseph Paul Franklin claimed responsibility. Emma Copley Eisenberg spent years living in Pocahontas and re-investigating these brutal acts. Using the past and the present, she shows how this mysterious act of violence has loomed over all those affected for generations, shaping their fears, fates, and the stories they tell about themselves. In The Third Rainbow Girl, Eisenberg follows the threads of this crime through the complex history of Appalachia, forming a searing and wide-ranging portrait of America-its divisions of gender and class, and of its violence.

In 2013, journalist Ginger Gorman was trolled online. She received scores of hateful tweets, including a death threat. She was terrified, but once the attack subsided, she found herself curious. Who were these trolls? How and why did they coordinate such an attack? And how does someone fight back? Over the next five years, Gorman spoke to psychologists, trolling victims, law enforcement, academics and, most importantly, trolls themselves, embedding herself into their online communities and their psyches in ways she had never anticipated. She uncovered links between trolling, cyberhate and real-life crimes.

Annually, approximately 66,000 women are violently killed in countries around the world. While historically these crimes were grouped into the general category of homicide, femicide, the murder of women because of their gender, is now being recognized as a unique issue and a hate crime. However, some assert that the fact that 80 percent of murder victims are male suggests that the issue of femicide is being blown out of proportion. This volume explores the forms femicide takes around the world and potential means of combatting it, and discusses the varying perspectives on the usefulness of its categorization.

The first English-language book to document the men who emerged from the gulags to become Russia's much-feared crime class: the Vory v zakone Mark Galeotti is the go-to expert on organized crime in Russia, consulted by governments and police around the world. Now, Western readers can explore the fascinating history of the Vory v zakone, a group that has survived and thrived amid the changes brought on by Stalinism, the Cold War, the Afghan War, and the end of the Soviet experiment. The Vory--as the Russian mafia is also known--was born early in the twentieth century, largely in the Gulags and criminal camps, where they developed their unique culture.

Note: Library standing order.
Description: Since 1989, there have been over 2,200 exonerations in the United States. These have resulted from a number of factors, including the discovery of new evidence, perjury, false identification, and bad forensic evidence. Even when an individual is exonerated, is it possible to compensate them for their loss of time and money? This volume looks at the issue from varying perspectives, exploring causes of wrongful convictions, ways to increase exonerations for those who were unjustly imprisoned, strategies to decrease the number of wrongful convictions going forward, and appropriate compensation for those who have lost years of their lives. (publ.)

Reviewed: LJ June 2019 p. 110.
Description: For more than twenty years, New York Times bestselling novelist Wally Lamb has led a writing workshop for the women at the York Correctional Institution, Connecticut’s only prison for women. Their autobiographical essays challenge our assumptions about the incarcerated and the criminal justice system. The fifteen stories presented here offer an honest look at a group of women who write to confront and transcend their histories and their lives in prison, gaining valuable insight along the way. Alongside the women’s writing is Lamb’s own chapter devoted to his reunion with several of his former students–ex-offenders who discuss their lives after prison and their reentry into a world dramatically changed by technology, altered family dynamics, and cultural shifts. In discussion with Lamb, the women movingly recount their reintegration into society, the challenges of finding work, the value of family and support systems, and the ways in which their writing enhanced their rehabilitation. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Mar. 2019 vol. 56 no. 7) Top 75 books recommended for community college libraries.
Description: Examines the worst kinds of premeditated homicide in which the perpetrator plans an attack over a period of days, weeks, or months, leaving behind massive carnage and unspeakable suffering. Drawing on extensive research and interviews with murderers, sociologists Jack Levin and Julie B. Wiest help readers understand why such vicious murders occur and what we can do to minimize their incidence. Throughout the book, they examine why people engage in acts of premeditated murder–planning and implementing terrible violence against others–from the perpetrator’s viewpoint. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 18 June 2018 p. 96.
Description: In 2014, Shane Bauer was hired for 9 dollars an hour to work as an entry-level prison guard at a private prison in Winnfield, Louisiana. An award-winning investigative journalist, he used his real name; there was no meaningful background check. Four months later, his employment came to an abrupt end. But he had seen enough, and in short order he wrote an expose about his experiences that won a National Magazine Award and be-came the most-read feature in the history of the magazine Mother Jones. Still, there was much more that he needed to say. In this book, Bauer weaves a much deeper reckoning with his experiences together with a thoroughly researched history of for-profit prisons in America from their origins in the decades before the Civil War. (publ.)

Description: An exploration that tracks the legacy of crime and imprisonment in the United States, from the historical roots of the American criminal justice system to our modern state of over-incarceration, and offers a bold vision for a new future. Author Tony Platt, a recognized authority in the field of criminal justice, challenges the way we think about how and why millions of people are tracked, arrested, incarcerated, catalogued, and regulated in the United States. He traces the disturbing history of punishment and social control, revealing how the criminal justice system attempts to enforce and justify inequalities associated with class, race, gender, and sexuality. Prisons and police departments are central to this process, but other institutions–from immigration and welfare to educational and public health agencies–are equally complicit. (publ.)

Review: NYT/BR 21 Apr. 2019 p. 23; PW 28 Oct. 2019 p. 28 (Best Books 2019).
Description: A renowned investigative journalist exposes the unchecked power of the prosecutor as a driving force in America’s mass incarceration crisis, and also offers a way out. The American criminal justice system is supposed to be a contest between two equal adversaries, the prosecution and the defense, with judges ensuring a fair fight. But in fact, it is prosecutors who have the upper hand, in a contest that is far from equal. More than anyone else, prosecutors decide who goes free and who goes to prison, and even who lives and who dies. The system wasn’t designed for this kind of unchecked power, and in this book, Emily Bazelon shows that it is an underreported cause of enormous injustice–and the missing piece in the mass incarceration puzzle. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Oct. 2018 vol. 56 no. 2) Top 75 books recommended for community college libraries.
Description: In this book, Tera Agyepong explores the vital role children played in the construction of ideas of criminality in early twentieth century Chicago. For African American children, youthfulness–far from being a marker of purity or innocence–was a factor in subjecting them to particular institutional, social, and economic vulnerabilities at the hands of the juvenile justice system. At a moment when blackness was becoming a marker of criminality, their race overrode the potential protections their status as children could have provided them. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Jul. 2019 vol. 56 no. 11) Highly recommended for community college libraries.
Description: Examines the explosive history of police brutality in New York City and the black community’s long struggle to resist it. Taylor brings this story to life by exploring the institutions and the people that waged campaigns to end the mistreatment of people of color at the hands of the police, including the black church, the black press, black communists and civil rights activists. Ranging from the 1940s to the mayoralty of Bill de Blasio, Taylor describes the significant strides made in curbing police power in New York City, describing the grassroots street campaigns as well as the accomplishments achieved in the political arena and in the city’s courtrooms. Taylor challenges the belief that police reform is born out of improved relations between communities and the authorities arguing that the only real solution is radically reducing the police domination of New York's black citizens. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 10 Dec. 2018 p. 94; LJ Feb. 2019 p. 97; NYT/BR 10 Mar. 2019 p. 1.
Description: In the early 1970s, three African-American men–Wiley Bridgeman, Kwame Ajamu, and Rickey Jackson–were accused and convicted of the brutal robbery and murder of a man outside of a convenience store in Cleveland, Ohio. The prosecution’s case, which resulted in a combined 106 years in prison for the three men, rested on the more-than-questionable testimony of a pre-teen, Ed Vernon. The actual murderer was never found. Almost four decades later, Vernon recanted his testimony, and Wiley, Kwame, and Rickey were released. But while their exoneration may have ended one of American history’s most disgraceful miscarriages of justice, the corruption and decay of the city responsible for their imprisonment remain on trial. Interweaving the dramatic details of the case with Cleveland's history–one that, to this day, is fraught with systemic discrimination and racial tension–Swenson reveals how this outrage occurred and why. This is a work of astonishing empathy and insight: an immersive exploration of race in America, the struggling Midwest, and how lost lives can be recovered. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Nov. 2018 vol. 56 no. 3) Top 75 books recommended for community college libraries.
Description: America's first known system of law enforcement was established more than 350 years ago. Today law enforcement faces issues such as racial discrimination, use of force, and Body Worn Camera (BWC) scrutiny. But the birth and development of the American police can be traced to a multitude of historical, legal and political-economic conditions. This book traces how and why law enforcement agencies evolved and became permanent agencies; looking logically through history and offering potential steps forward that could make a difference without triggering unconstructive backlash. (publ.)

Review: LRB 4 Apr. 2019 p. 19; NYRB 26 Sept. 2019 p. 80.
Description: On September 26, 2014, police in Iguala, Mexico attacked five busloads of students and a soccer team, killing six people and abducting forty-three students–now known as the Iguala 43–who have not been seen since. In a coordinated cover-up of the government’s role in the massacre and forced disappearance, Mexican authorities tampered with evidence, tortured detainees, and thwarted international investigations. Within days of the atrocities, John Gibler traveled to the region and began reporting from the scene. Here he weaves the stories of survivors, eyewitnesses, and the parents of the disappeared into a tour de force of journalism, a heartbreaking account of events that reads with the momentum of a novel. A vital counter-narrative to state violence and impunity, the stories also offer a testament of hope from people who continue to demand accountability and justice. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYRB 19 July 2018 p. 16
Description: Apple orchards in bucolic Washington State. Office parks in Southern California under cover of night. The home of an elderly man in Miami. These are some of the workplaces where female workers have suffered brutal sexual assault and shocking harassment at the hands of their employers, often with little or no official recourse. In this harrowing yet often inspiring tale, investigative journalist Bernice Yeung exposes the epidemic of sexual violence levied against women farmworkers, domestic workers, and janitorial workers and charts their quest for justice in the workplace. Yeung takes readers on a journey across the country, introducing us to women who came to America to escape grinding poverty only to encounter sexual violence in the United States. … When these women find the courage to speak up, Yeung reveals, they are too often met by apathetic bosses and underresourced government agencies. But this book also tells a story of resistance, introducing a group of courageous allies who challenge dangerous and discriminatory workplace conditions alongside aggrieved workers. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 27 Aug. 2018 p. 100, 106.
Description: She was black and a woman and a prosecutor, a graduate of Smith College and the granddaughter of slaves, as dazzlingly unlikely a combination as one could imagine in the New York of the 1930s–and without the strategy she devised, Lucky Luciano, the most powerful Mafia boss in history, would never have been convicted. When special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey selected twenty lawyers to help him clean up the city’s underworld, she was the only member of his team who was not a white male. Eunice Hunton Carter, Stephen Carter’s grandmother, was raised in a world of stultifying expectations about race and gender, yet by the 1940s her professional and political successes had made her one of the most famous black women in America. But her triumphs were shadowed by prejudice and tragedy. Greatly complicating her rise was her difficult relationship with her younger brother, Alphaeus, an avowed Communist who–together with his friend Dashiell Hammett–would go to prison during the McCarthy era. Yet she remained unbowed. Moving, haunting, and as fast paced as a nov-el, this book tells the true story of a woman who often found her path blocked by the social and political expectations of her time. (publ.)

Reviewed: LR Oct. 2018 p. 43; LJ 1 Nov. 2018 p. 78; LRB 4 Apr. 2019 p. 19; NYRB 26 Sep5. 2019 p. 80.
Description: The account of the mass disappearance of 43 Mexican students and the government that tried to cover it up. On September 26, 2014, 43 male students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College went missing in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico. According to official reports, the students commandeered several buses to travel to Mexico City to commemorate the anniversary of the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre. During the journey, local police intercepted the students and a confrontation ensued. By the morning, they had disappeared without a trace. Award-winning Mexican investigative journalist Anabel Hernández reconstructs almost minute-by-minute the events of those nights in late September 2014, giving us what is surely the most complete picture available: her sources are unparalleled, since she has secured access to internal government documents that have not been made public, and to video surveillance footage the government has tried to hide and destroy. Hernández demolishes the Mexican state’s official version, which the Peña Nieto government cynically dubbed the “historic truth.” State officials at all levels, from police and prosecutors to the upper echelons of the PRI administration, conspired to put together a fake case, concealing or manipulating evidence, and arresting and torturing dozens of “suspects” who then obliged with full “confessions” that matched the official lie. In the wake of the students’ disappearances, protestors in Mexico took up the slogan “Fue el estado”–“It was the state.” (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 8 July 2018 p. 12; Economist 30 June 2018 p. 72; TLS 26 Oct. 2018.
Description: At the age of nine, Issac J. Bailey saw his hero, his eldest brother, taken away in handcuffs, not to return from prison for thirty-two years. Bailey tells the story of their relationship and of his experience living in a family suffering from guilt and shame. Drawing on sociological research as well as his expertise as a journalist, he seeks to answer the crucial question of why Moochie and many other young black men–including half of the ten boys in his own family–end up in the criminal justice system. (publ.)

Reviewed: NYT 8 May 2019 p. C4; NYT/BR 15 Dec. 2019 p. 13 ("10 Best Books of 2019"); PW 28 Oct. 2019 p. 32 (Best Books 2019).
Description: An award-winning journalist’s intimate investigation of the true scope of domestic violence, revealing how the roots of America’s most pressing social crises are buried in abuse that happens behind closed doors. … In this book, Rachel Louise Snyder gives context for what we don’t know we're seeing. She frames this urgent and immersive account of the scale of domestic violence in our country around key stories that explode the common myths–that if things were bad enough, victims would just leave; that a violent person cannot become nonviolent; that shelter is an adequate response; and, most insidiously, that violence inside the home is a private matter, sealed from the public sphere and disconnected from other forms of violence. Through the stories of victims, perpetrators, law enforcement, and reform movements from across the country, Snyder explores the real roots of private violence, its far-reaching consequences for society, and what it will take to truly address it. (publ.)

Reviewed: LJ Feb. 2019 p. 96.
Description: Every year, approximately 13 million Americans are charged with misdemeanor offenses. Those cases make up the vast majority–over 80 percent–of the US criminal system. While the crimes are typically minor, the punishments often ruin people's lives. Although we now recognize mass incarceration as a multibillion-dollar dehumanizing debacle, the misdemeanor behemoth does quieter damage on an even grander scale, making the poor poorer and widening our nation's racial divide. Presenting a profound new perspective on American criminal justice, [this book] demonstrates how our enormous misdemeanor system operates as a powerful engine of error, in-justice, and inequality. Drawing on a decade of original research, prize-winning legal scholar Alexandra Natapoff lays bare the inner workings of our massive and surprisingly harsh petty offense process. People arrested for crimes as minor as driving on a suspended license or loitering are routinely incarcerated when they can't afford bail. Defendants are rushed through courts, often without lawyers, while many judges process cases in mere minutes. Nearly everyone pleads guilty. Many of these convictions are wrongful: innocent people frequently plead guilty to crimes they did not actually commit. In the end, millions of Americans--most of them poor and people of color--are stigmatized as criminals, impoverished through fines and fees, and stripped of life's basic resources such as driver's licenses, jobs, and housing.

Reviewed: Choice (Sept. 2019 vol. 57 no. 1) Essential for community college libraries.
Description: If you’re a robber, how do you choose your victims? As a poice officer, how afraid are you of the young man you’re about to arrest? As a judge, do you think the suspect in front of you will show up in court if released from pretrial detention? As a juror, does the defendant seem guilty to you? Your answers may depend on the stereotypes you hold, and the stereotypes you believe others hold. In this book, economists Brendan O’Flaherty and Rajiv Sethi explore how stereotypes can shape the ways crimes unfold and how they contaminate the justice system through far more insidious, pervasive, and surprising paths than we have previously imagined. Crime and punishment occur under extreme uncertainty. Offenders, victims, police officers, judges, and jurors make high-stakes decisions with limited information, under severe time pressure. With compelling stories and extensive data on how people act as they try to commit, prevent, or punish crimes, O’Flaherty and Sethi reveal the extent to which we rely on stereotypes as shortcuts in our decision making. Sometimes it’s simple: Robbers tend to target those they stereotype as being more compliant. Other interactions display a complex and sometimes tragic interplay of assumptions: “If he thinks I’m dangerous, he might shoot. I’ll shoot first.” This book shows how deeply stereotypes are implicated in the most controversial criminal justice issues of our time, and how a clearer understanding of their effects can guide us toward a more just society. (publ.)

Review: NYT/BR 7 Apr. 2019 p. 13; TLS 29 Nov. 2019 p. 16 (TLS Book of the Year 2019); NYT/BR 8 Dec. 2019 p. 28 ("100 Notable Books of 2019").
Description: Nearly forty years in solitary confinement in a 6-foot by 9-foot cell for 23 hours a day for a crime he did not commit, Albert Woodfox survived and emerged with his humanity and sense of hope for the future intact. Ar-rested often as a teenager in New Orleans, inspired behind bars in his early twenties to join the Black Panther Party because of its social commitment and code of living, Woodfox was serving a 50-year sentence in Angola for armed robbery when on April 17, 1972, a white guard was killed. Albert and another member of the Panthers were accused of the crime and put in solitary confinement without a shred of actual evidence against them. Re-leased in February 2016, Woodfox turned his anger into activism and resistance. This is his chronicle of rare power and humanity that proves the better spirits of our nature can thrive against any odds. (publ.)

Reviewed: LJ 1 Oct. 2018 p. 49
Description: While nobody ever dreams they could personally be caught in a situation with mass casualties or injuries due to premeditated or random violence, this guide provides readiness techniques to help avoid becoming a victim in dangerous situations. Includes tips to boost awareness and possibly even stop a violent event before it starts. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Jan. 2019 vol. 56 no. 5) Topy 75 books highly recommended for community college libraries.
Description: Suspect Citizens offers the most comprehensive look to date at the most common form of police-citizen interactions, the routine traffic stop. Throughout the war on crime, police agencies have used traffic stops to search drivers suspected of carrying contraband. From the beginning, police agencies made it clear that very large numbers of police stops would have to occur before an officer might interdict a significant drug shipment. Unstated in that calculation was that many Americans would be subjected to police investigations so that a small number of high-level offenders might be found. The key element in this strategy, which kept it hidden from widespread public scrutiny, was that middle-class white Americans were largely exempt from its consequences. Tracking these police practices down to the officer level, this book documents the extreme rarity of drug busts and reveals sustained and troubling disparities in how racial groups are treated. (publ.)

Description: Todd Sandler, one of America’s leading scholars on the topic, provides a broad and example-rich overview of this perennially important issue. After clearly defining terrorism, he then discusses terrorism’s causes, the nature of terrorist groups, how governments seek to counter terrorism, its economic consequences, and the future of terrorism. He focuses, in particular, on the extent to which specific motivations (nationalism/separatism, left and right extremism, and religious fundamentalism) and general conditions (poverty, globalization, and regime type) affect the frequency and costs of terrorism. As he explains, researchers have never established a link between poverty and terrorism or between globalization and terrorism. He also identifies many other widely-held misconceptions. (publ.)

Review: LJ Feb. 2019 p. 97.
Description: Before daybreak on February 17, 1947, twenty-four-year-old Willie Earle, an African American man arrested for the murder of a Greenville, South Carolina, taxi driver named T. W. Brown, was abducted from his jail cell by a mob, and then beaten, stabbed, and shot to death. An investigation produced thirty-one suspects, most of them cabbies seeking revenge for one of their own. The police and FBI obtained twenty-six confessions, but, after a nine-day trial in May that attracted national press attention, the defend-ants were acquitted by an all-white jury. Emeritus professor William B. Gravely presents the most comprehensive account of the Earle lynching ever written, exploring it from background to aftermath and from multiple perspectives. Among his sources are contemporary press accounts (there was no trial transcript), extensive interviews and archival documents, and the “Greenville notebook” kept by Rebecca West, the well-known British writer who covered the trial for the New Yorker magazine. (publ.)

Review: NYT/BR 31 Mar. 2019 p. 13; LJ Mar. 2019 p. 131.
Description: After explosive protests responding to police brutality and discrimination in Baltimore, Ferguson, and a long list of other cities, the vexing question of how to reform the police and curb misconduct stokes tempers and fears on both the right and left. In the midst of this fierce debate, however, most of us have taken for granted that innovative new technologies can only help. During the early 90s, in the wake of the infamous Rodney King beating, police leaders began looking to corporations and new technologies for help. In the decades since, these technologies have, in theory, given police powerful, previously unthinkable faculties: the ability to incapacitate a suspect without firing a bullet (Tasers); the capacity to more efficiently as-sign officers to high-crime areas using computers (Compstat); and, with body cameras, a means of defending against accusations of misconduct. But in this deeply-reported book, Matt Stroud shows that these tools are overhyped and, in many cases, ineffective. Instead of wrestling with tough fundamental questions about their work, police leaders have looked to technology as a silver bullet and stood by as corporate interests have insinuated themselves ever deeper into the public institution of law enforcement. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 10 Dec. 2018 p. 93.
Description: In the eloquent tradition of Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy, an award-winning leader in the movement to end mass incarceration takes on the vexing problem of violent crime. Although over half the people incarcerated in America today have committed violent offenses, the focus of reformers has been almost entirely on nonviolent and drug offenses. Danielle Sered’s work steers directly and unapologetically into the question of violence, offering approaches that will help end mass incarceration and increase safety. Widely recognized as one of the leading proponents of a restorative approach to violent crime, Sered asks us to reconsider the purposes of incarceration and argues persuasively that the needs of survivors of violent crime are better met by asking people who commit violence to accept responsibility for their actions and make amends in ways that are meaningful to those they have hurt–none of which happens in the context of a criminal trial or a prison sentence. Sered launched and directs Common Justice, one of the few organizations offering alternatives to incarceration for people who commit serious violent crime and which has produced immensely promising results. Critically, Sered argues that the reckoning owed is not only on the part of those who have committed violence, but also by our nations over reliance on incarceration to produce safety at great cost to communities, survivors, racial equity, and the very fabric of our democracy. (publ.)

Reviewed: Choice (Nov. 2018 vol. 56 no. 3) Top 75 books highly recommended for community college libraries.
Description: For people of color who live in segregated urban neighborhoods, surviving crime and violence is a generational reality. As violence in cities like New York and Los Angeles has fallen in recent years, in many Chicago communities, it has continued at alarming rates. Meanwhile, residents of these same communities have endured decades of some of the highest rates of arrest, incarceration, and police abuse in the nation. This book argues that these trends are connected. Crime in Chicago, as in many other US cities, has been fueled by a broken approach to public safety in disadvantaged neighborhoods. For nearly forty years, public leaders have attempted to create peace through punishment, misinvesting billions of dollars toward the suppression of crime, largely into a small subset of neighborhoods on the city’s West and South Sides. Meanwhile, these neighborhoods have struggled to sustain investments into basic needs such as jobs, housing, education, and mental healthcare. When the main in-vestment in a community is policing and incarceration, rather than human and community development, that amounts to a “war on neighborhoods,” which ultimately furthers poverty and disadvantage. Longtime Chicago scholars Ryan Lugalia-Hollon and Daniel Cooper tell the story of one of those communities, a neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side that is emblematic of many majority-black neighborhoods in US cities. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 3 Sept. 2018 p. 88.
Description: Drawing on her own experience, her work with hundreds of survivors as the head of a rape crisis center in Boston, and three decades of grappling with rape as a feminist intellectual and writer, Abdulali tackles some of our thorniest questions about rape, articulating the confounding way we ac-count for who gets raped and why–and asking how we want to raise the next generation. In interviews with survivors from around the world we hear moving personal accounts of hard-earned strength, humor, and wisdom that collectively tell the larger story of what rape means and how healing can occur. (publ.)

Reviewed: PW 10 Dec. 2018 p. 46.
Description: In the era of #MeToo, we’ve become better at talking about sexual assault. But sexual assault isn’t limited to a single, terrible moment of violence: it stays with survivors, following them wherever they go. Through the voices of twelve diverse writers, this book offers a powerful look at the narrative of sexual assault not covered by the headlines–the weeks, months, and years of survival and adaptation that people live through in its aftermath. With contributions from acclaimed literary voices such as Alicia Elliott, Elisabeth de Mariaffi, Heather O’Neill, and Juliane Okot Bitek, the collection explores some of the many different forms that survival can take. (publ.)

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.)

Reviewed: Choice Mar 2017 vol. 54 no. 7 (Essential; Recommended for Community College Libraries)

Reviewed: NPR (“All Things Considered” 30 Mar. 2017): "An Exoneree Shares His Story Of Wrongful Conviction In Anatomy Of Innocence."; TLS 6 Oct. 2017 p. 3

Reviewed: PW 1 May 2017 p. 31

Reviewed: CHE 31 Mar. 2017 (new books)

Reviewed: CHE 17 Mar. 2017 (new books)

Reviewed: CHE 3 Mar. 2017 (new books)

Reviewed: TLS 3 Feb. 2017 p. 3

Reviewed: CHE 31 Mar. 2017 (new books)
Description: Drawing on an array of sources, including congressional hearings and campaign speeches, true crime classics like In Cold Blood, and films like Dead Man Walking, Daniel LaChance shows how attitudes toward the death penalty have reflected broader shifts in Americans’ thinking about the relationship between the individual and the state. (Publ.)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 4 Dec. 2016 p. 25 (100 Notable Books 2016); CHE 7 Oct. 2016 p. B12; Choice Oct 2016 vol. 54 no. 2 (Essential; Top 75 Titles Recommended for Community College Libraries; Outstanding Academic Title)

Reviewed: CHE 28 Apr. 2017 (new books)
Contents: Vol. 1: Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. – Vol. 2: The Americas and Europe.
Description: Often considered peculiarly American, lynching in fact takes place around the world. In the first book of a two-volume study, Michael J. Pfeifer collects essays that look at lynching and related forms of collective violence in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

Reviewed: CHE 30 Apr. 2017.

Reviewed: LJ 15 Nov. 2017 p. 100

Reviewed: TLS 3 Feb. 2017 p. 3

Reviewed: WSJ 13 Mar. 2017 p. A15

Reviewed: NYT/BR 16 Apr. 2017 p. 1; LRB 4 May 2017 p. 5; PW 30 Oct. 2017 (Best Books of 2017); NYT/BR 3 Dec. 2017 p. 24 (100 Notable Books 2017); NYT/BR 10 Dec. 2017 p. 10 (10 Best Books of 2017).
Description: Mass incarceration and aggressive police tactics–and their impact on people of color–are feeding outrage and a consensus that something must be done. But what if we only know half the story? Yale legal scholar and former public defender James Forman Jr. weighs the tragic role that some African Americans themselves played in escalating the war on crime. As Forman shows, the first substantial cohort of black mayors, judges, and police chiefs took office around the country amid a surge in crime. Many came to believe that tough measures–such as stringent drug and gun laws and "pretext traffic stops" in poor African American neighborhoods–were needed to secure a stable future for black communities. Some politicians and activists saw criminals as a "cancer" that had to be cut away from the rest of black America. Others supported harsh measures more reluctantly, believing they had no other choice in the face of a public safety emergency. Drawing on his experience as a public defender and focusing on Washington, D.C., Forman writes with compassion for individuals trapped in terrible dilemmas–from the young men and women he defended to officials struggling to cope with an impossible situation. The result is an original view of our justice system as well as a moving portrait of the human beings caught in its coils. (publ.)

Reviewed: Oct 2016 vol. 54 no. 2 (Essential; Recommended for Community College Libraries; Outstanding Academic Title)

Reviewed: CHE 9 Dec. 2016

Reviewed: CHE 14 Apr. 2017 (new books)

Reviewed: NYT/BR 26 Feb. 2017 p. 17; LRB 4 May 2017 p. 5
Note: “…This best seller struck the spark that would eventually light the fire of Black Lives Matter. …” (NYT); “…The New Jim Crow has exerted an influence enjoyed by few other works of social science in America, transforming the way many Americans, of all races, understand their society. …” (LRB)

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: FA 96(3) May/June 2017 p. 159

Reviewed: CHE 4 Nov. 2016

Reviewed: NYT/BR 26 Feb. 2017 p. 12; WSJ 22 Feb. 2017 p. A15.

Reviewed: NYT/BR 26 Feb. 2017 p. 12; CHE 31 Mar. 2017 (new books).

Reviewed: Choice Aug 2016 vol. 53 no. 12 (Essential; Top 75 Titles for Community College Libraries)

Reviewed: CHE 17 Mar. 2017 (new books)