New Books in Policing, Incarceration, and Reform

Over two million Americans are currently in prison or jail. Another 4.5 million are on probation or parole. And nearly one in two Americans have a family member who is or has been incarcerated. Writing for those new to activism as well as seasoned organizers, celebrated criminal justice activist Raj Jayadev introduces readers to the groundbreaking idea of participatory defense, a community organizing model for families and communities aimed at bettering the outcome of cases involving their loved ones and transforming the landscape of power in the courts. Participatory defense has led to acquittals, dismissed and reduced charges, prison terms changed to rehabilitation programs, and life sentences taken off the table. Drawing on years of organizing to offer a radical vision of community intervention, Protect Your People: How Ordinary Families Are Using Participatory Defense to Challenge Mass Incarceration (New Press, 2023) features stories from across the country, highlighting the most effective strategies of this groundbreaking approach, including how to get loved ones released from bail hearings, arraignments, and post-conviction; how to take on deportation cases; how to prevent youth from being transferred to adult court, and more. A radical new argument for the era of mass incarceration, Protect Your People shows that real change is possible when people step into America's courtrooms and get involved. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In our pursuit of efficiency in the lower criminal courts, have we lost sight of quality justice? Through the critical examination of original stenographic data, Over-Efficiency in the Lower Criminal Courts: Understanding a Key Problem and How to Fix it (Policy Press, 2024) by Dr. Shaun Yates demonstrates how an English Magistrates' courthouse often pursued managerial efficiency to the detriment of social justice and procedural due process values. Given that these courts process more than 95% of all criminal cases, this ‘over-efficiency’ problem has the capacity to cause significant social harm. Dr. Yates’ work concludes by providing socio-legal and criminological readers with ways to fix this over-efficiency problem. This accessible work is of value to policy makers and post-graduate students alike. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This June 2020 episode, originally part of a Global Policing series, was Recall this Book's first exploration of police brutality, systemic and personal racism and Black Lives Matter. Elizabeth and John were lucky to be joined by Daniel Kryder and David Cunningham, two scholars who have worked on these questions for decades. Many of the mechanisms that create an oppressed and subordinated American community of color can seem subtle and indirect, despite the insidious ways they pervade housing law (The Color of Law), education (Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together, Savage Inequalities) and the carceral state (The Condemnation of Blackness, The New Jim Crow, Locking Up Our Own). Although there is plenty of subtle racism in policing as well, there can be a brutally frontal quality to white-power policing: just look at the racial disparity in the stubbornly astronomically number of fatal shootings by police. David and Daniel ask how much of the current system of racial and class disparity can be traced back to slavery or to subsequent 19th century racial logic, and howw much arises from the confluence of other forces. The conversation notes the widespread white participation in 2020 protests–did we ever expect to hear Mitt Romney chanting “Black Lives Matter”?– and what this might suggest about the possibilities for actual change. It also touches on the roles of the media and institutions such as police unions and the erosion of federal oversight of local police departments. Mentioned in this episode: Klansville, USA (cf. the PBS show of the same name that drew heavily on the book; and an interview David did on the topic of today’s Klan) Kerner Commission Report (1968) Ethical Society of Police (cf. this compelling local post-Ferguson PBS documentary that speaks with St. Louis African-American police officers) Recallable Books Walter Johnson, “The Broken Heart of America” (2020) James Baldwin, “The Fire Next Time” (1963) Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Between the World and Me” (2015) Listen and Read Here: Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Asylum Ways of Seeing: Psychiatric Patients, American Thought and Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) by Dr. Heather Murray is a cultural and intellectual history of people with mental illnesses in the twentieth-century United States. While acknowledging the fraught, and often violent, histories of American psychiatric hospitals, Heather Murray also suggests that it is in these hospitals that patients became more intense observers: they gave more conscious consideration to institutional and broader kinds of citizenship, to the nature and needs of communities versus those of individuals, to scientific modernity, and to human rights and solidarities among the suffering. All of these ideas have animated twentieth-century America, and, as Dr. Murray shows, have not just flowed into psychiatric hospitals but outward from them as well. These themes are especially clear within patients' intimate, creative, and political correspondence, writings, and drawings, as well as in hospital publications and films. This way of thinking and imagining contrasts with more common images of the patient—as passive, resigned, and absented from the world in the cloistered setting of the hospital—that have animated psychiatry over the course of the twentieth century. Asylum Ways of Seeing traces how it is that patient resignation went from being interpreted as wisdom in the early twentieth century, to being understood as a capitulation in scientific and political sources by mid-century, to being seen as a profound violation of selfhood and individual rights by the century's end. In so doing, it makes a call to reconsider the philosophical possibilities within resignation. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anne Gray Fischer speaks about her path to and through research, including how sex workers informed her analysis of policing and state violence, the role of law enforcement in struggles over economic development, and the intellectual and practical factors of research design. Men, especially Black men, often stand in as the ultimate symbol of the mass incarceration crisis in the United States. Women are treated as marginal, if not overlooked altogether, in histories of the criminal legal system. In The Streets Belong to Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification (UNC Press, 2022)--a searing history of women and police in the modern United States--Anne Gray Fischer narrates how sexual policing fueled a dramatic expansion of police power. The enormous discretionary power that police officers wield to surveil, target, and arrest anyone they deem suspicious was tested, legitimized, and legalized through the policing of women's sexuality and their right to move freely through city streets. Throughout the twentieth century, police departments achieved a stunning consolidation of urban authority through the strategic discretionary enforcement of morals laws, including disorderly conduct, vagrancy, and other prostitution-related misdemeanors. Between Prohibition in the 1920s and the rise of broken windows policing in the 1980s, police targeted white and Black women in distinct but interconnected ways. These tactics reveal the centrality of racist and sexist myths to the justification and deployment of state power. Sexual policing did not just enhance police power. It also transformed cities from segregated sites of urban vice into the gentrified sites of Black displacement and banishment we live in today. By illuminating both the racial dimension of sexual liberalism and the gender dimension of policing in Black neighborhoods, The Streets Belong to Us illustrates the decisive role that race, gender, and sexuality played in the construction of urban police regimes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Murder by Mail: A Global History of the Letter Bomb (Reaktion, 2024) by Dr. Mitchel P. Roth and Dr. Mahmut Cengiz unfolds the gripping history of weaponized mail, offering the first ever comprehensive exploration of this sinister phenomenon. Spanning two centuries, the book unveils the history of postal bombs, describing the evolution of both explosives and the postal services that facilitated their deadly use. From an eighteenth-century incident involving Jonathan Swift to modern acts of terror by groups like the IRA and the suffragettes and lone wolves such as the Unabomber, it uncovers the surprising ubiquity of mail bombs. This chronological account meticulously covers each decade, from early anarchists and world wars through the Cold War to the rise of the serial bomber. Astounding in scope, this book sheds light on the psychopathy, motivations and political implications behind murder by mail. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

LISTENER DISCRETION IS ADVISED: The topic of today’s episode is human trafficking and crimes against children, usually sexual crimes, and sometimes ritual abuse and organ harvesting. Matt Osborne has worked with OUR Rescue (originally Operation Underground Railroad) for ten years; he left his CIA career to join this NGO and is now one of the longest-serving members of the team. Last year he was COO and president and these days he’s Global Ambassador for Operations and Education; as part of this new role, he hosts the Voices for Freedom podcast with his friend and colleague Jessica Mass. [I intentionally did not ask Matt about Tim Ballard, the founder of the organization and subject of the loosely biographical Sound of Freedom, who had to leave the organization after accusations in 2023 about past scandalous behavior toward (adult) women. I also did not ask him about the politics of Jim Caviezel who played Ballard in the film. You can read about these things very easily online, but it seemed to me to have nothing to do with our guest today and were rather a distraction from the important work of OUR Rescue.] OUR Rescue website and Instagram. Voices of Freedom podcast with Matt Osborne and Jessica Mass. Cyber TipLine (“cybertipline.org”) that Matt discussed in our show; this is a place to report the exploitation of children or potential or suspected exploitation of children. Sound of Freedom (2023) Trailer and Angel Studios webpage. Here is the pilgrimage with Monique and Joseph González this coming September with Inside the Vatican, and the related episodes from Almost Good Catholics: Pilgrimage to Mexico: Our Lady of Guadalupe & the Flower World Prophecy 2024 Colleen Dulle on Almost Good Catholics, episode 16: Marxists and Mystics: A Vatican Journalist discusses her Biography of Madeleine Delbrêl and the New Papal Constitution Father James Martin, SJ, on Almost Good Catholics, episode 30: What if You’re Gay? Starting Conversations with and about LGBT Catholics. Joseph and Monique González on Almost Good Catholics, episode 74: Our Lady of Guadalupe and Aztec True Myth: How the Flower World Bloomed into History in 1531. Here is my first discussion with Pastor Brian Zahnd and the film A Hidden Life which we will be talking about on August 15: A Hidden Life (2019) trailer, IMBD, and on Amazon Prime. Brian Zahnd on Almost Good Catholics, episode 82: The Wood between the Worlds: Why Death on the Cross? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jessica Henry's Smoke But No Fire: Convicting the Innocent of Crimes that Never Happened (U California Press, 2021) explores a shocking but all-too-common kind of wrongful conviction: wrongful convictions for crimes that never actually happened. Henry's meticulously-researched book sheds light on how the US criminal justice system makes it possible to convict people of nonexistent crimes. By tracing this issue from first interactions with the police, to encounters with legal professionals, to judges' verdicts, and beyond, Henry's analysis explains in heartbreaking detail the impacts of convictions without a crime on those convicted and their families—as well as what this means for US criminal law. Drawing from Henry's own experience working for many years as a public defender, Smoke But No Fire will be of great interest to legal professionals, students, organizers, and anyone interested in criminal law. Jessica Henry is a Professor in the Department of Justice Studies at Montclair State University. Previously, she worked as a public defender in New York City for nearly ten years. Her research focuses on the US criminal justice system, particularly wrongful convictions, severe sentences, and hate crimes. Rine Vieth is an incoming FRQSC Postdoctoral Fellow at Université Laval. Interested in how people experience state legal regimes, their research centres around questions of law, migration, gender, and religion. Further reading: National Registry of Exonerations Jessica Henry, "Smoke but No Fire: When Innocent People Are Wrongly Convicted of Crimes That Never Happened" in the American Criminal Law Review (via SSRN) Michelle Alexander, “Go to Trial: Crash the Justice System” in the New York Times Opinion section 2024 New Jersey Clemency Initiative Announcement Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Liberal democracy is in crisis around the world, unable to address pressing problems such as climate change. There is, however, another path—cooperation democracy. From consumer co-ops to credit unions, worker cooperatives to insurance mutuals, nonprofits to mutual aid, countless examples prove that people working together can extend the ideals of participatory democracy and sustainability into every aspect of their lives. These forms of cooperation do not depend on electoral politics. Instead, they harness the longstanding practices and values of cooperatives: self-determination, democratic participation, equity, solidarity, and respect for the environment. Bernard E. Harcourt develops a transformative theory and practice that builds on worldwide models of successful cooperation. He identifies the most promising forms of cooperative initiatives and then distills their lessons into an integrated framework: Coöperism. This is a political theory grounded on recognition of our interdependence. It is an economic theory that can ensure equitable distribution of wealth. Finally, it is a social theory that replaces the punishment paradigm with a cooperation paradigm. A creative work of normative critical theory, Cooperation: A Political, Economic, and Social Theory (Columbia UP, 2023) provides a positive vision for addressing our most urgent challenges today. Harcourt shows that by drawing on the core values of cooperation and the power of people working together, a new world of cooperation democracy is within our grasp. Bernard E. Harcourt is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and professor of political science at Columbia University and a chaired professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. An editor of Michel Foucault’s work in French and English, Harcourt is the author of several books, including Critique and Praxis (Columbia, 2020). He is a social-justice litigator and the recipient of the 2019 Norman Redlich Capital Defense Distinguished Service Award from the New York City Bar Association for his longtime representation of death row prisoners. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The U.S. government's decades-long "war on drugs" is increasingly recognized as a moral travesty as well as a policy failure. The criminalization of substances such as marijuana and magic mushrooms offends core tenets of liberalism, from the right to self-rule to protection of privacy to freedom of religion. It contributes to mass incarceration and racial subordination. And it costs billions of dollars per year—all without advancing public health. Yet, in hundreds upon hundreds of cases, courts have allowed the war to proceed virtually unchecked. How could a set of policies so draconian, destructive, and discriminatory escape constitutional curtailment? In The Constitution of the War on Drugs (Oxford UP, 2024), David Pozen provides an authoritative, critical constitutional history of the drug war, casting new light on both drug prohibition and U.S. constitutional development. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, advocates argued that criminal drug bans violate the Constitution's guarantees of due process, equal protection, federalism, free speech, free exercise of religion, and humane punishment. Many scholars and jurists agreed. Pozen demonstrates the plausibility of a constitutional path not taken, one that would have led to a more compassionate approach to drug control. Rather than restrain the drug war, the Constitution helped to legitimate and entrench it. Pozen shows how a profoundly illiberal and paternalistic policy regime was assimilated into, and came to shape, an ostensibly liberal and pluralistic constitutional order. Placing the U.S. jurisprudence in comparative context, The Constitution of the War on Drugs offers a comprehensive review of drug-rights decisions along with a roadmap to constitutional reform options available today. This book is available open access here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For over thirty years, modern Italy was plagued by ransom kidnappings perpetrated by bandits and organised crime syndicates. Nearly 700 men, women, and children were abducted from across the country between the late 1960s and the late 1990s, held hostage by members of the Sardinian banditry, Cosa Nostra, and the ’Ndrangheta. Subjected to harsh captivities and psychological abuse, the victims spent months and even years in isolation while law enforcement and the state struggled to find them. Ransom Kidnapping in Italy: Crime, Memory, and Violence (University of Toronto Press, 2024) by Dr. Alessandra Montalbano examines this Italian criminal phenomenon. Alessandra Montalbano argues that abduction is a key vantage point from which to understand modern Italy: it troubled the law, terrified society, ignited juridical and parliamentary debates, and mobilised citizens. Bringing together archival and media materials with the victims’ accounts and diverse forms of cultural response, the book examines ransom kidnapping through the lenses of historiography, law, literary criticism, trauma studies, phenomenology, and political philosophy. Ransom Kidnapping in Italy traces how and at what price Italians became aware of living in a country that was being blackmailed by criminal organisations that arguably jeopardised the nation even more than terrorism. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today’s book is: Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit (U Chicago Press, 2024), by Dr. Robin Bernstein, which tells the story of a teenager named William Freeman. Convicted of a horse theft he insisted he did not commit, he was sentenced to five years of hard labor in Auburn’s new prison. Uniting incarceration and capitalism, the facility included industrial factories where prisoners worked as “slaves of the state.” They earned no wages, yet they manufactured furniture, animal harnesses, carpets, and combs, which consumers bought throughout the North. Then one young man challenged the system. Incensed at being forced to work without pay, William Freeman demanded wages. His challenge triggered violence: first against him, then by him. Freeman committed a murder that terrified and bewildered white America. And white America struck back—with aftereffects that reverberate into our lives today in the persistent myth of inherent Black criminality. William Freeman’s story reveals how the North invented prison for profit half a century before the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery “except as a punishment for crime”—and how Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and other African Americans invented strategies of resilience and resistance in a city dominated by a citadel of unfreedom. Through one Black man, his family, and his city, Dr. Bernstein tells an explosive, moving story about the entangled origins of prison for profit and anti-Black racism. Our guest is: Dr. Robin Bernstein, who is an award-winning cultural historian specializing in race and racism from the nineteenth century to the present. She teaches at Harvard University, where she is the Dillon Professor of American History and Professor of African and African American Studies and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell (and why) and what happens to those we never tell. Playlist for listeners who wish to learn more: Stitching Freedom: Embroidery and Incarceration Education Behind the Wall Hands Up, Don't Shoot: Researching Racial Injustice The Journal of Higher Education in Prison Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 200+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Throughout US history, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people have been pathologized, victimized, and criminalized. Reports of lynching, burning, or murdering of LGBTQ people have been documented for centuries. Prior to the 1970s, LGBTQ people were deemed as having psychological disorders and subsequently subject to electroshock therapy and other ineffective and cruel treatments. LGBTQ people have historically been arrested or imprisoned for crimes like sodomy, cross-dressing, and gathering in public spaces. And while there have been many strides to advocate for LGBTQ rights in contemporary times, there are still many ways that the criminal justice system works against LGBTQ and their lives, liberties, and freedoms. Queering Law and Order: LGBTQ Communities and the Criminal Justice System (Lexington Books, 2020) examines the state of LGBTQ people within the criminal justice system. Intertwining legal cases, academic research, and popular media, Nadal reviews a wide range of issues—ranging from historical heterosexist and transphobic legislation to police brutality to the prison industrial complex to family law. Grounded in Queer Theory and intersectional lenses, each chapter provides recommendations for queering and disrupting the justice system. This book serves as both an academic resource and a call to action for readers who are interested in advocating for LGBTQ rights. Nick Pozek is the Assistant Director of the Parker School of Foreign and Comparative Law at Columbia University in the City of New York and a host of New Books in Law. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In recent years, a searching national conversation has called attention to the social and racial injustices that define America’s criminal system. The incarceration of vast numbers of people, and the punitive treatment of African Americans in particular, are targets of widespread criticism. But despite the election of progressive prosecutors in several cities and the passage of reform legislation at the local, state, and federal levels, the system remains very much intact. How can the damage and depredations of the carceral state be undone? In this pathbreaking reader, three of the nation’s leading advocates —Premal Dharia, James Forman Jr., and Maria Hawilo—provide us with tools to move from despair and critique to hope and action. Dismantling Mass Incarceration: A Handbook for Change (FSG Originals, 2024) surveys new approaches to confronting the carceral state in all its guises, exploring ways that police, prosecutors, public defenders, judges, prisons, and even life after prison can be radically reconceived. The book captures debates about the comparative merits of reforming or abolishing prisons and police forces, and introduces a host of bold but practical interventions. The contributors range from noted figures such as Angela Davis, Clint Smith, and Larry Krasner to local organizers, judges, and people currently or formerly incarcerated. The result is an invaluable guide for students, activists, and anyone who wishes to understand mass incarceration—and hasten its end. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Law and Personality Disorder: Human Rights, Human Risks, and Rehabilitation (Oxford UP, 2024), Dr Ailbhe O'Loughlin considers the controversial and under-researched concern of what to do with dangerous people with severe personality disorders. She brings together scientific evidence, law and policy, to consider risk prevention, public security and human rights. This is a controversial area of law and policy, informed by ongoing debates about 'dangerous' offenders which exists at the intersection of liberal legal principles and advocates of social defence. In today's conversation, we spoke about preventative detention, the effectiveness of therapeutic intervention and risk management, gaps in human rights protections, and the assumptions that the legal principles and processes that govern this population are founded on. O'Loughlin draws out key issues for reform and calls for further evidence-based inquiry with regards to criminal defences, sentencing and dispositions. This will be an important book for policy makers, legal academics, psychiatrists and anyone who works with this category of offenders. Dr Ailbhe O'Loughlin is a Senior Lecturer at York Law School, at The University of York. Her research focuses on the intersection between mental health and criminal justice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In recent years, dozens of counties in North Carolina have partnered with federal law enforcement in the criminalization of immigration--what many have dubbed "crimmigration." Southern border enforcement still monopolizes the national immigration debate, but immigration enforcement has become common within the United States as well. While Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations are a major part of American immigration enforcement, Felicia Arriaga maintains that ICE relies on an already well-established system--the use of local law enforcement and local governments to identify, incarcerate, and deport undocumented immigrants. In Behind Crimmigration: ICE, Law Enforcement, and Resistance in America (UNC Press, 2023), Arriaga contends that the long-term partnership between local sheriffs and immigration law enforcement in places like North Carolina has created a form of racialized social control of the Latinx community. Arriaga uses data from five county sheriff's offices and their governing bodies to trace the creation and subsequent normalization of ICE and local law enforcement partnerships. Arriaga argues that the methods used by these partnerships to control immigration are employed throughout the United States, but they have been particularly visible in North Carolina, where the Latinx population increased by 111 percent between 2000 and 2010. Arriaga's evidence also reveals how Latinx communities are resisting and adapting to these systems. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is involuntary psychiatric treatment the solution to the intertwined crises of untreated mental illness, homelessness, and addiction? In recent years, politicians and advocates have sought to expand the use of conservatorships, a legal tool used to force someone deemed “gravely disabled,” or unable to meet their needs for food, clothing, or shelter as a result of mental illness, to take medication and be placed in a locked facility. At the same time, civil liberties and disability rights groups have seized on cases like that of Britney Spears to argue that conservatorships are inherently abusive. Conservatorship: Inside California's System of Coercion and Care for Mental Illness (Columbia UP, 2023) is an incisive and compelling portrait of the functioning—and failings—of California’s conservatorship system. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with professionals, policy makers, families, and conservatees, Alex V. Barnard takes readers to the streets where police encounter homeless people in crisis, the locked wards where people receiving treatment are confined, and the courtrooms where judges decide on conservatorship petitions. As he shows, California’s state government has abdicated authority over this system, leaving the question of who receives compassionate care and who faces coercion dependent on the financial incentives of for-profit facilities, the constraints of underresourced clinicians, and the desperate struggles of families to obtain treatment for their loved ones. This book offers a timely warning: reforms to expand conservatorship will lead to more coercion but little transformative care until government assumes accountability for ensuring the health and dignity of its most vulnerable citizens. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is a Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His general area of study is in the areas of social construction of experience, identity, and place. He is currently conducting research for his next project that looks at nightlife and the emotional labor that is performed by employees of bars and nightclubs. To learn more about Michael O. Johnston you can go to his website, Google Scholar, Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or by email at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood (Cambridge University Press, 2020) a brilliant but shocking account of the criminalization of all aspects of reproduction, pregnancy, abortion, birth, and motherhood in the United States. In her extensively researched monograph, Michele Goodwin recounts the horrific contemporary situation, which includes, for example, mothers giving birth shackled in leg irons, in solitary confinement, even in prison toilets, and in some states, women being coerced by the State into sterilization, in exchange for reduced sentences. She contextualises the modern day situation in America’s history of slavery and oppression, and also in relation to its place in the world. Goodwin shows how prosecutors abuse laws, and medical professionals are complicit in a system that disproportionally impacts the poor and women of color. However, Goodwin warns that these women are just the canaries in the coalmine. Not only is the United States the deadliest country in the developed world for pregnant women, but the severe lack of protections for reproductive rights and motherhood is compounding racial and indigent disparities. Jane Richards is a doctoral candidate in Human Rights Law at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include disability, equality, criminal law and civil disobedience. You can find her on twitter @JaneRichardsHK where she avidly follows the Hong Kong’s protests and its politics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Do I Know You? From Faceblindness to Super Recognition (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023), Dr. Sharrona Pearl explores the fascinating category of face recognition and the "the face recognition spectrum," which ranges from face blindness at one end to super recognition at the other. Super recognizers can recall faces from only the briefest exposure, while face blind people lack the capacity to recognize faces at all, including those of their closest loved ones. Informed by archival research, the latest neurological studies, and testimonials from people at both ends of the spectrum, Dr. Pearl tells a nuanced story of how we relate to each other through our faces. The category of face recognition is relatively new despite the importance of faces in how we build relationships and understand our own humanity. Dr. Pearl shows how this most tacit of knowledge came to enter the scientific and diagnostic field despite difficulties with identifying it. She offers a grounded framework for how we evaluate others and draw conclusions about them, with significant implications for race, gender, class, and disability. Dr. Pearl explores the shifting ideas around the face-recognition spectrum, explaining the effects of these diagnoses on real people alongside implications for how facial recognition is studied and understood. Face blindness is framed as a disability, while super recognition is framed as a superpower with no meaningful disadvantages. This superhero rhetoric is tied to the use of super recognizers in criminal detection, prosecution, and other forms of state surveillance. Do I Know You? demonstrates a humanistic approach to the study of the brain, one that offers an entirely new method for examining this fundamental aspect of human interaction. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Aya Gruber, a professor of law at the University of Colorado Law School, has written a history of how the women’s movement in America has shaped the law on domestic violence and sexual assault. In The Feminist War on Crime: The Unexpected Role of Women’s Liberation in Mass Incarceration (University of California Press, 2020), Professor Gruber contends that the legal reform movement on sexual assault began with feminists in the 19th century, who argued in favor of temperance reform, partly in the hope that it would lead to less violence against women. She also argues that the social context in which sexual assault allegations were made in the 19th century, especially regarding African-American males and white women, influenced the outcomes in legal cases and divided the feminists of the 19th century. Professor Gruber also addresses the fissures created in the women’s movement from the 1960s through today regarding how sexual assault should be treated under the law has worked against justice for both victims and their assailants. Professor Gruber argues that sexual assault law is premised upon erroneous beliefs about how men and women interact, the norms of nonverbal conduct, and the efficacy of punitive solutions. In addition to covering the history of sexual assault law she addresses how the criminal law might be reformed to meet the “convergent interests” of men and women. Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Many of us know that immigrants have been deported from the United States for well over a century, but has anyone ever asked how? In The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Expelling Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020), author Adam Goodman brings together new archival evidence to write an expansive history of deportation from the United States that threads the late-nineteenth century through to the present. Goodman, Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latino studies as well as history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, argues that the “deportation machine” operated through three main mechanisms: formal deportations, voluntary departures, and self-deportations. But contrary to mainstream assumptions about the U.S. immigration system, the overwhelming majority of deportations throughout the 1900s have not been formal proceedings in immigration court, but instead administrative processes and informal fear campaigns that pushed immigrants out of the country. Our interview with Goodman will cover how the history of deportation is linked with the development of federal power, state coercion, and activist resistance for due process. We also discuss the connections between the deportation machine and the contemporary debate on the prison-industrial complex, anti-immigrant prejudice, and demands for police reform. Far beyond the harsh realities of deportation, this book shows us how the politics of expulsion sought to define who truly belonged in America. Jaime Sánchez, Jr. is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at Princeton University and a scholar of U.S. politics and Latino studies. He is currently writing an institutional history of the Democratic National Committee and partisan coalition politics in the twentieth century. You can follow him on Twitter @Jaime_SanchezJr. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Poverty is big business in America. The federal government spends about $900 billion a year on programs that directly or disproportionately impact poor Americans, including antipoverty programs such as the earned income tax credit, Medicaid, and affordable housing vouchers and subsidies. States and local governments spend tens of billions more. Ironically, these enormous sums fuel the “corporate poverty complex,” a vast web of hidden industries and entrenched private-sector interests that profit from the bureaucracies regulating the lives of the poor. From bail bondsmen to dialysis providers to towing companies, their business models depend on exploiting low-income Americans, and their political influence ensures a thriving set of industries where everyone profits except the poor, while U.S. taxpayers foot the bill. In Poverty for Profit: How Corporations Get Rich off America’s Poor (The New Press, 2024), veteran journalist Anne Kim investigates the multiple industries that infiltrate almost every aspect of the lives of the poor—health care, housing, criminal justice, and nutrition. She explains how these businesses are aided by public policies such as the wholesale privatization of government services and the political influence these industries wield over lawmakers and regulators. Supported by original investigative reporting on the lesser-known players profiting from the antipoverty industry, Poverty for Profit adds a crucial dimension to our understanding of how structural inequality and structural racism function today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Although Latinos are now the largest non-majority group in the United States, existing research on white attitudes toward Latinos has focused almost exclusively on attitudes toward immigration. Ignored Racism: White Animus Toward Latinos (Cambridge University Press) changes that. It argues that such accounts fundamentally underestimate the political power of whites' animus toward Latinos and thus miss how conflict extends well beyond immigration to issues such as voting rights, criminal punishment, policing, and which candidates to support. Providing historical and cultural context and drawing on rich survey and experimental evidence, Mark Ramirez and David Peterson show that Latino racism-ethnicism (LRE) is a coherent belief system about Latinos that is conceptually and empirically distinct from other forms of out-group hostility, and from partisanship and ideology. Moreover, animus toward Latinos has become a powerful force in contemporary American politics, shaping white public opinion in elections and across a number of important issue areas - and resulting in policies that harm Latinos disproportionately. Mark D. Ramirez is Associate Professor in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University. David A. M. Peterson is Professor and Whitaker-Lindgren Faculty Fellow in Political Science at Iowa State University. David-James Gonzales (DJ) is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of migration, urbanization, and social movements in the U.S., and specializes in Latina/o/x politics and social movements. Follow him on Twitter @djgonzoPhD. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"The Polish Police, commonly called the Blue or uniformed police in order to avoid using the term “Polish,” has played a most lamentable role in the extermination of the Jews of Poland. The uniformed police has been an enthusiastic executor of all German directives regarding the Jews." -Emanuel Ringelblum, Warsaw, 1943. Shortly after the occupation of Poland in the fall of 1939, the Germans created the Blue Police, consisting mainly of prewar Polish police officers. Within a short time, this police force was responsible for enforcing many anti-Jewish regulations issued by the Nazis. Who were these policemen, and how did they transform from ordinary policemen to murderous executioners? And what was the role of the Germans in this horrifying picture? In On Duty: The Role of the Polish Blue and Criminal Police in the Holocaust (Yad Vashem, 2024) addresses these questions and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For 40 years, this classic text has taken the issue of economic inequality seriously and asked: Why are our prisons filled with the poor? Why aren't the tools of the criminal justice system being used to protect Americans from predatory business practices and to punish well-off people who cause widespread harm? This new edition continues to engage readers in important exercises of critical thinking: Why has the U.S. relied so heavily on tough crime policies despite evidence of their limited effectiveness, and how much of the decline in crime rates can be attributed to them? Why does the U.S. have such a high crime rate compared to other developed nations, and what could we do about it? Are the morally blameworthy harms of the rich and poor equally translated into criminal laws that protect the public from harms on the streets and harms from the suites? How much class bias is present in the criminal justice system-both when the rich and poor engage in the same act, and when the rich use their leadership of corporations to perpetrate mass victimization? The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison (Routledge, 2023) shows readers that much of what goes on in the criminal justice system violates citizens' sense of basic fairness. It presents extensive evidence from mainstream data that the criminal justice system does not function in the way it says it does nor in the way that readers believe it should. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

'A woman, a dog and a walnut tree, the more they are beaten, the better they’ll be.' So went the proverb quoted by a prominent MP in the Houses of Parliament in 1853. His words – intended ironically in a debate about a rise in attacks on women – summed up the prevailing attitude of the day, in which violence against women was waved away as a part and parcel of modern living – a chilling seam of misogyny that had polluted both parliament and the law. But were things about to change? The Walnut Tree: Women, Violence and the Law – A Hidden History (Mudlark, 2024) is a vivid and essential work of historical non-fiction. In it, Kate Morgan explores the legal campaigns, test cases and individual injustices of the Victorian and Edwardian eras which fundamentally re-shaped the status of women under British law. These are seen through the untold stories of women whose cases became cornerstones of our modern legal system and shine a light on the historical inequalities of the law. We hear of the uniquely abusive marriage which culminated in the dramatic story of the ‘Clitheroe wife abduction’; of the domestic tragedies which changed the law on domestic violence; the controversies surrounding the Contagious Diseases Act and the women who campaigned to abolish it; and the real courtroom stories behind notorious murder cases such as the ‘Camden Town Murder’. Exploring the 19th- and early 20th Century legal history that influenced the modern-day stances on issues such as domestic abuse, sexual violence and divorce, The Walnut Tree lifts the lid on the shocking history of women under British law – and what it means for women today. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Pozen is the Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and the author of the new book, The Constitution of the War on Drugs (Oxford UP, 2024). An expert in constitutional law, Pozen argues that the drug war has been an unmitigated disaster, in terms of money, efficacy, and human rights. But even as activists peel off the drug war’s more unsavory aspects through cannabis and psychedelic legalization, Pozen also argues that they’ve neglected to consider the impact America’s courts could have on rectifying oppressive drug laws. It wasn’t always this way. The Constitution of the War on Drugs also details the “hidden history” of a brief legal moment in the late 1960s and early 1970s when lawyers effectively argued for liberalized drug policies – on the sound basis of the Constitution. The moment was eventually overturned, but Pozen argues it could be a useful historical lesson for people interested in the effects of constitutional law on the drug war today. A link to the digital edition of The Constitution of the War on Drugs will soon be available here. Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is coming out soon from the University of Chicago Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today’s book is: Stitching Freedom: Embroidery and Incarceration (Common Threads Press, 2024), by Dr. Isabella Rosner, which considers how for centuries, people have stitched in good times and in bad, finding strength in the needle moving in and out of fabric. Stitching Freedom explores the embroidery made in prisons and mental health hospitals — those who have embroidered to distract, to reflect or to calm. From Mary, Queen of Scots to Lorina Bulwer to “Unfortunate Annie” Parker, embroidery historian and curator Isabella Rosner unpicks embroidered histories to discover what can be created when freedom is out of reach. Our guest is: Dr. Isabella Rosner, who is curator of the Royal School of Needlework and a research consultant at Witney Antiques. She hosts the “Sew What?” podcast about historic needlework and those who stitched it. She is a 2023 BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker, and the author of the History Today article “With Her Own Hair: A Victorian Prisoner’s Art,” and the new book Stitching Freedom: Embroidery and Incarceration. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator and show host of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell. Listeners may also be interested in: The Royal School of Needlework Rozsika Parker's The Subversive Stitch. Betty Ring's Girlhood Embroidery: American Samplers & Pictorial Needlework 1650-1850. Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin's Women and the Material Culture of Needlework and Textiles, 1750-1950. A conversation with the director of the Emerson Prison Initiative A conversation about The Journal of Higher Education in Prison Education Behind the Wall Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Please help support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

American guns have entangled the lives of people on both sides of the US-Mexico border in a vicious circle of violence. After treating wounded migrants and refugees seeking safety in the United States, anthropologist Ieva Jusionyte boldly embarked on a journey in the opposite direction—following the guns from dealers in Arizona and Texas to crime scenes in Mexico. An expert work of narrative nonfiction, Exit Wounds: How America's Guns Fuel Violence across the Border (University of California Press, 2024) provides a rare, intimate look into the world of firearms trafficking and urges us to understand the effects of lax US gun laws abroad. Jusionyte masterfully weaves together the gripping stories of people who live and work with guns north and south of the border: a Mexican businessman who smuggles guns for protection, a teenage girl turned trained assassin, two US federal agents trying to stop gun traffickers, and a journalist who risks his life to report on organized crime. Based on years of fieldwork, Exit Wounds expands current debates about guns in America, grappling with US complicity in violence on both sides of the border. Ieva Jusionyte is an anthropologist and associate professor at Brown University. A former paramedic and Harvard Radcliffe and Fulbright fellow, she is the author of the award-winning Threshold: Emergency Responders on the US-Mexico Border. Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Co-edited by Dave Mac Marquis and Moira Marquis, two activists with deep experience in organizing prison books programs (PBPs), Books Through Bars: Stories from the Prison Books Movement (University of Georgia Press, 2024) introduces readers to PBPs and their decentralized organization. PBPs are a grassroots-level and nationwide activist movement challenging the largest prison industry in the world by refusing to let incarcerated people remain isolated and forgotten. Operating on shoestring budgets, will all-volunteer workforces and donated libraries, books to prisoner programs are examples of ordinary people acting to undermine the isolation and judgment of incarceration. Although there are currently fifty-three books to prisoners groups serving in all fifty states, these programs remain relatively unknown. The goal of this book is to bring awareness to this diffuse and long-standing social movement and offer readers a way to get involved. In addition to highlighting voices from PBPs throughout the United States, the volume also includes essays, images, and artwork from independent bookstore owners, formerly and currently incarcerated folks, activists, artists, journalists, volunteers, organizers, and scholars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Paramilitaries, crime, and tens of thousands of disappeared persons—the so-called war on drugs has perpetuated violence in Latin America, at times precisely in regions of economic growth. Legal and illegal economy are difficult to distinguish. A failure of state institutions to provide security for its citizens does not sufficiently explain this. Selective Security in the War on Drugs: The Coloniality of State Power in Colombia and Mexico (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) analyzes authoritarian neoliberalism in the war on drugs in Colombia and Mexico. It interprets the “security projects” of the 2000s—when the security provided by the state became ever more selective—as embedded in processes of land appropriation, transformed property relations, and global capital accumulation. By zooming in on security practices in Colombia and Mexico in that decade and juxtaposing the two contexts, this book offers a detailed analysis of the role of the state in violence. To what extent and for whom do states produce order and disorder? Which social forces support and drive such state practices? Expanding the literature on authoritarian neoliberalism and the coloniality of state power—thus linking political economy to postcolonial approaches—the book builds a theoretical lens to study state security practices. Different social groups, enjoying differentiated access to the state, influenced the state discourse on crime to very different extents. Security practices—which oscillated between dispersed organization by a multiplicity of actors and institutionalization with the military—materialized as horrific insecurity for social groups thought of as disposable. In tendency, putting security centerstage disabled dissent. The “security projects” exacerbated contradictions driven by a particular economic model and simultaneously criminalized precisely those that this model had already radically disadvantaged. Alke Jenss is senior researcher at Arnold-Bergstraesser Institute Freiburg. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dismissed as ‘Mrs Sherlock Holmes’ or amateurish Miss Marples, mocked as private dicks or honey trappers, they have been investigating crime since the mid-nineteenth century – everything from theft and fraud to romance scams and murder. In Private Inquiries: The Secret History of Female Sleuths (The History Press, 2023), Caitlin Davies traces the history of the UK’s female investigators, uncovering the truth about their lives and careers from the 1850s to the present day. Women like Victorian private inquiry agent Antonia Moser, the first woman to open her own agency; Annette Kerner, who ran the Mayfair Detective Agency on Baker Street in the 1940s; and Liverpool sleuth Zena Scott-Archer, who became the first woman president of the World Association of Detectives. Davies also follows in the footsteps of her subjects, undertaking a professional qualification to become a Private Investigator, and meeting modern PIs to find out the reality behind the fictional image. Female investigators are on the rise in the UK – and despite the industry’s sleazy reputation, nearly a third of new trainees are women. After a century of undercover work, it’s time to reveal the secrets of their trailblazing forebears. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Spatiality and Temporality of Urban Violence: Histories, Rhythms and Ruptures (Manchester UP, 2023) asks how the city, with its spatial and temporal configuration and its rhythms, produces and shapes violence, both in terms of the built environment, and through particular 'urban' social relations. The book builds on the insight that violence itself is a spatiotemporal practice with generative capacities, which produces and transforms urban space and time in the long turn, also through the impact of memory. The analytical categories of space and time must be thought as inextricably linked with each other. Expanding this fundamental conceptual idea offers fresh perspectives on urban violence. The book unites case studies on different world regions and historical periods , and thus challenges assumed binaries of cities the global North and South, the past and present. Roberto Mazza is currently an independent scholar. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at [email protected]. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Covert violence occurs in all social institutions—including families and close relationships, education, workplaces, politics, mass media, and healthcare—each with its own unique power dynamics that shape the incidence and patterns of these vicious acts. Covert Violence: The Secret Weapon of the Powerless (Bristol University Press, 2023) by Dr. Jack Levin and Dr. Julie B. Wiest focuses on the types of surreptitious murder and mayhem that perpetrators intend to go unnoticed by would-be victims—until it’s too late. When such attacks are carried out with efficiency and competence, they may be disguised in official records as the result of illness, accident, or intentional self-harm, only on occasion to be later reclassified as the brutal crimes they are. This compelling and much-needed book is for all those who seek to understand—and strive to prevent—violence in society. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Max Ward’s Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan (Duke University Press, 2019) analyzes the trajectory and transformations of the implementation of Japan’s 1925 Peace Preservation Law from its conception until the early years of the 1940s. The law, which began as a state effort to tamp down radicalism and “dangerous thought” (mostly Marxism) and preserve and protect imperial sovereignty, spawned a massive apparatus populated by both state and nonstate actors dedicated to ideologically converting and rehabilitating thought criminals. In addition to being a case study of the nature and ideology of punishment and repentance for thought crimes in late Imperial Japan—and the way in which the emperor functioned as a “ghost in the machine” animating the pursuit of political repression—Ward’s book also provides insight into the policing of ideological threats and its relationship to national identity politics. Thought Crime follows the evolution and transformation of the Peace Preservation Law and its attendant social and institutional structures from interwar attempts to repress dangerous thought to a system of mass ideological conversion, and finally to the consequences of its integration into practices of total mobilization during wartime. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In September of 2019, Luis Alberto Quiñonez—known as Sito— was shot to death as he sat in his car in the Mission District of San Francisco. He was nineteen. His killer, Julius Williams, was seventeen. It was the second time the teens had encountered one another. The first, five years before, also ended in tragedy, when Julius watched as his brother was stabbed to death by an acquaintance of Sito’s. The two murders merited a few local news stories, and then the rest of the world moved on. But for the families of the slain teenagers, it was impossible to move on. And for Laurence Ralph, the stepfather of Sito’s half-brother who had dedicated much of his academic career to studying gang-affiliated youth, Sito’s murder forced him to revisit a subject of scholarly inquiry in a profoundly different, deeply personal way. Written from Ralph's perspective as both a person enmeshed in Sito's family and as an Ivy League professor and expert on the entanglement of class and violence, SITO: An American Teenager and the City that Failed Him (Grand Central Publishing, 2024) is an intimate story with an message about the lived experience of urban danger, and about anger, fear, grief, vengeance, and ultimately grace. Laurence Ralph is a Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, where he is the Director for the Center on Transnational Policing. Before that, he was a tenured professor at Harvard University for eight years. He is the author of Renegade Dreams: Living Through Injury in Gangland Chicago (2014) and The Torture Letters: Reckoning With Police Violence (2020), both published by University of Chicago Press. He is currently a Guggenheim Fellow, a fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton; he has also been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim National Science Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Ford Foundation. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey with his wife and daughter. Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With its signature "DARE to keep kids off drugs" slogan and iconic t-shirts, DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) was the most popular drug education program of the 1980s and 1990s. But behind the cultural phenomenon is the story of how DARE and other antidrug education programs brought the War on Drugs into schools and ensured that the velvet glove of antidrug education would be backed by the iron fist of rigorous policing and harsh sentencing. Max Felker-Kantor has assembled the first history of DARE, which began in Los Angeles in 1983 as a joint venture between the police department and the unified school district. By the mid-90s, it was taught in 75 percent of school districts across the United States. DARE received near-universal praise from parents, educators, police officers, and politicians and left an indelible stamp on many millennial memories. But the program had more nefarious ends, and Felker-Kantor complicates simplistic narratives of the War on Drugs. In DARE to Say No: Policing and the War on Drugs in Schools (UNC Press, 2023), he shows how policing entered US schools and framed drug use as the result of personal responsibility, moral failure, and poor behavior deserving of punishment rather than something deeply rooted in state retrenchment, the abandonment of social service provisions, and structures of social and economic inequality. Jeffrey Lamson is a PhD student in world history at Northeastern University. His research focuses on the history of police technology, its relationship to the history of police reform, and its place at the intersection of U.S. domestic policing and global counterinsurgency. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Marisol LeBrón’s new book, Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico (University of California Press, 2019), examines the rise of and resistance to punitive governance (tough on crime policing policies) in Puerto Rico from the 1990s to the present. As in the United States, LeBrón shows how increased investment in policing did not respond to a spike in crime. It actually emerged as a strategy to shore up the local political and economic establishment mired in the crisis of the archipelago’s postwar colonial development policy “Operation Bootstrap,” spiking unemployment, lack of U.S. investment, and a growing informal economy which included the drug trade. Puerto Rican elites hoped to reinvent themselves as models for tough on crime policing and gatekeepers for the United States to Latin America. Beginning with the mano dura contra el crimen (iron fist against crime) policy of commonwealth Governor Pedro Rosselló in 1993, police increasingly targeted lower income, predominantly Black public housing complexes (caseríos) as sources of criminality and lawlessness. Using Justice Department reports, social media research, newspapers, and oral interviews to create a “police archive,” LeBrón demonstrates that while police killings, brutality, surveillance, and harassment were hallmarks of mano dura, the policy also reinvented popular understandings of the “who” and “where” of crime that endure to the present. In doing so, she shows how presumptions about race, class, gender, and sexuality linked to certain places (public housing, sex work neighborhoods, schools, and universities) created notions of victims and criminals who “deserved” life or death. The book’s second half explores critiques of and resistance to punitive governance by looking at underground rap, university student activism, social media debates, and non-punitive anti-violence activism. These case studies show the growing resistance to policing as policy instead of social investment, but also the tenacity of the discourses of criminality activists must wrestle with today. LeBrón is also the author of the forthcoming Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm (Haymarket Books) and the co-creator of the Puerto Rico Syllabus. Jesse Zarley will be an assistant professor of history at Saint Joseph’s College on Long Island, where in Fall 2019 he will be teaching Latin American, Caribbean, and World History. His research interests include borderlands, ethnohistory, race, and transnationalism during Latin America’s Age of Revolution, particularly in Chile and Argentina. He is the author of a recent article on Mapuche leaders and Chile’s independence wars. You can follow him on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Purgatory Citizenship: Reentry, Race, and Abolition (University of California Press, 2023), Calvin John Smiley explores the lives of people who were formerly incarcerated and the many daunting challenges they face. Those being released from prison must navigate the reentry process with diminished legal rights and amplified social stigmas, in a journey that is often confusing, complex, and precarious. Calvin John Smiley is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Hunter College, City University of New York. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Most accounts of post-1950s political history tell the story of of the war on drugs as part of a racial system of social control of urban minority populations, an extension of the federal war on black street crime and the foundation for the "new Jim Crow" of mass incarceration as key characteristics of the U.S. in this period. But as the Nixon White House understood, and as the Carter and Reagan administrations also learned, there were not nearly enough urban heroin addicts in America to sustain a national war on drugs. The Suburban Crisis: White America and the War on Drugs (Princeton University Press, 2023) argues that the long war on drugs has reflected both the bipartisan mandate for urban crime control and the balancing act required to resolve an impossible public policy: the criminalization of the social practices and consumer choices of tens of millions of white middle-class Americans constantly categorized as "otherwise law-abiding citizens."" That is, the white middle class was just as much a target as minority populations. The criminalization of marijuana - the white middle-class drug problem - moved to the epicenter of the national war on drugs during the Nixon era. White middle-class youth by the millions were both the primary victims of the organized drug trade and excessive drug war enforcement, but policymakers also remained committed to deterring their illegal drug use, controlling their subculture, and coercing them into rehabilitation through criminal law. Only with the emergence of crack cocaine epidemic of the mid-1980s did this use of state power move out of suburbs and reemerge more dramatically in urban and minority areas. This book tells a history of how state institutions, mass media, and grassroots political movements long constructed the wars on drugs, crime, and delinquency through the lens of suburban crisis while repeatedly launching bipartisan/nonpartisan crusades to protect white middle-class victims from perceived and actual threats, both internal and external. The book works on a national, regional, and local level, with deep case studies of major areas like San Francisco, LA, Washington, and New York. This history uses the lens of the suburban drug war to examine the consequences when affluent white suburban families serve as the nation's heroes and victims all at the same time, in politics, policy, and popular culture. Matthew D. Lassiter is professor of history and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor at the University of Michigan, where he is co-director of the Carceral State Project. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From the Black Power movement and state surveillance to Silicon Valley and gentrification, Medina by the Bay: Scenes of Muslim Study and Survival (Duke UP, 2023) examines how multiracial Muslim communities in the San Francisco Bay Area survive and flourish within and against racial capitalist, carceral, and imperial logics. Weaving expansive histories, peoples, and geographies together in an ethnographic screenplay of cinematic scenes, Maryam Kashani demonstrates how sociopolitical forces and geopolitical agendas shape Muslim ways of knowing and being. Throughout, Kashani argues that contemporary Islam emerges from the specificities of the Bay Area, from its landscapes and infrastructures to its Muslim liberal arts college, mosques, and prison courtyards. Theorizing the Medina by the Bay as a microcosm of socioeconomic, demographic, and political transformations in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, Kashani resituates Islam as liberatory and abolitionist theory, theology, and praxis for all those engaged in struggle. Maryam Kashani is a filmmaker and associate professor in Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is an affiliate with Anthropology, Media and Cinema Studies, the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. Her films and video installations have been shown at film festivals, universities, and museums internationally and include things lovely and dangerous still (2003), Best in the West (2006), las callecitas y la cañada (2009), and Signs of Remarkable History (2016); she is currently working on two film duets with composer/musician Wadada Leo Smith that examine the ongoing relationships between the struggles for Black freedom, creative music, and spirituality. Kashani is also in the leadership collective of Believers Bail Out, a community-led effort to bailout Muslims in pretrial and immigration incarceration towards abolition. Najwa Mayer is an interdisciplinary cultural scholar of race, gender, sexuality, and Islam in/and the United States, working at the intersections of politics, aesthetics, and critical theory. She is currently a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Against the Carceral Archive: The Art of Black Liberatory Practice (Fordham UP, 2023) is a meditation upon what author Damien M. Sojoyner calls the “carceral archival project,” offering a distillation of critical, theoretical, and activist work of prison abolitionists over the past three decades. Working from collections at the Southern California Library (Black Panthers, LA Chapter; the Coalition Against Police Abuse; Urban Policy Research Institute; Mothers Reclaiming Our Children; and the collection of geographer Clyde Woods), it builds upon theories of the archive to examine carcerality as the dominant mode of state governance over Black populations in the United States since the 1960s. Each chapter takes up an element of the carceral archive and its destabilization, destruction, and containment of Black life: its notion of the human and the production of “pejorative blackness,” the intimate connection between police and military in the protection of racial capitalism and its fossil fuel–based economy, the role of technology in counterintelligence, and counterinsurgency logics. Importantly, each chapter also emphasizes the carceral archive’s fundamental failure to destroy “Black communal logics” and radical Black forms of knowledge production, both of which contest the carceral archive and create other forms of life in its midst. Concluding with a statement on the reckoning with the radical traditions of thought and being which liberation requires, Sojoyner offers a compelling argument for how the centering of Black­ness enables a structuring of the mind that refuses the violent exploitative tendencies of Western epistemological traditions as viable life-affirming practices. Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Reckoning with Restorative Justice Hawaii Women's Prison Writing (Duke University Press, 2023), Dr. Leanne Trapedo Sims explores the experiences of women incarcerated at the Women’s Community Correctional Center, the only women’s prison in Hawaii. Adopting a decolonial and pro-abolitionist lens, she focuses mainly on women’s participation in the Kailua Prison Writing Project and its accompanying Prison Monologues program. Trapedo Sims argues that while the writing project was a vital resource for the inside women, it also remained deeply embedded within carceral logics at the institutional, state, and federal levels. She foregrounds different aspects of these programs, such as the classroom spaces and the dynamics that emerged between performers and audiences in the Prison Monologues. Blending ethnography, literary studies, psychological analysis, and criminal justice critique, Trapedo Sims centers the often-overlooked stories of incarcerated Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander women in Hawai‘i in ways that resound with the broader American narrative: the disproportionate incarceration of people of color in the prison-industrial complex. Rameen Mohammed is a community organizer based in Texas, a fellow for Muslim Counterpublics Lab, and a soon-to-be law student. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Scott Gac's Born in Blood: Violence and the Making of America (Cambridge UP, 2023) investigates one of history's most violent undertakings: The United States of America. People the world over consider violence in the United States as measurably different than that which troubles the rest of the globe, citing reasons including gun culture, the American West, Hollywood, the death penalty, economic inequality, rampant individualism, and more. This compelling examination of American violence explains a political culture of violence from the American Revolution to the Gilded Age, illustrating how physical force, often centered on racial hierarchy, sustained the central tenets of American liberal government. It offers an important story of nationhood, told through the experiences and choices of civilians, Indians, politicians, soldiers, and the enslaved, providing historical context for understanding how violence has shaped the United States from its inception. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, members of the NYPD had worked to enforce partisan political power rather than focus on crime. That changed when La Guardia took office in 1934 and shifted the city's priorities toward liberal reform. La Guardia's approach to low-level policing anticipated later trends in law enforcement, including "broken windows" theory and "stop and frisk" policy. Police officers worked to preserve urban order by controlling vice, including juvenile delinquency, prostitution, gambling, and the "disorderly" establishments that officials believed housed these activities. This mode of policing was central to La Guardia's influential vision of urban governance, but it was met with resistance from the Black New Yorkers, youth, and working-class women it primarily targeted. The mobilization for World War II introduced new opportunities for the NYPD to intensify policing and criminalize these groups with federal support. In the 1930s these communities were framed as perils to urban order; during the militarized war years, they became a supposed threat to national security itself. In Gotham’s War Within a War: Policing and the Birth of Law-and-Order Liberalism in World War II-Era New York City (UNC Press, 2023), Emily M. Brooks recasts the evolution of urban policing by revealing that the rise of law-and-order liberalism was inseparable from the surveillance, militarism, and nationalism of war. Jeffrey Lamson is a PhD student in world history at Northeastern University. His research focuses on the history of police technology, its relationship to the history of police reform, and its place at the intersection of U.S. domestic policing and global counterinsurgency. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emma Kuby’s new book, Political Survivors: The Resistance, the Cold War, and the Fight against Concentration Camps After 1945 (Cornell UP, 2019) traces the fascinating history of the International Commission Against the Concentration Camp Regime (CICRC) established in 1949 by the French intellectual and Nazi camp survivor David Rousset. In the wake of the Second World War, Rousset called upon fellow deportees who had been detained for their political activities to serve as expert witnesses to Nazism’s “concentrationary universe” and to oppose any repetition of its crimes in the postwar world. Following the work of the CICRC through the 1950s and up to the end of the Algerian War, Political Survivors examines the vicissitudes of an organization whose makeup and activities embodied the complexities of the post-1945 political field. Negotiating the traumatic experience and memory of the war, the CICRC’s members and activism were caught up in the politics of the Cold War. This included receiving funding support from the CIA. Attending to sites of political repression and incarceration around the globe, from the Soviet Union’s gulag system to Franco’s Spain, Greece, Tunisia, China, and French Algeria, the international group’s preoccupations also expressed the specificities of French national and imperial politics. The CICRC’s investigations and dramatic mock trials exposed and denounced some injustices, but short-circuited in the face of others. The organization’s insistence on the repeatability of the Nazi camp system was both a source of its power to judge and a weakness. When confronted with situations in which past and present could not be compared so easily, the group’s mission fell short. Plagued by a number of tensions, including a membership policy that refused “racial” victims and did not engage the issue of genocide, the organization ultimately foundered over the case of the Algerian War. Analyzing this complex history, Political Survivors is a book that feels all-too-urgent in 2019. Readers interested in learning more about political violence and resistances past and present will find its insights challenging, and deeply thought-provoking. To read Emma’s thoughts on the contemporary relevance of the history she treats in Political Survivors, particularly with respect to the detention of migrants in the United States today, see her July 2, 2019 piece in Dissent here. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest, please send an email to: [email protected]. *The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of “Creatures,” a song written and performed by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (“hazy”). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Gary Shiffman’s book The Economics of Violence: How Behavioral Science Can Transform our View of Crime, Insurgency, and Terrorism (Cambridge UP, 2020) serves as a fantastic introduction to anyone interested in thinking critically about terrorist, insurgency, and criminal groups of all sorts. Using case studies from multiple continents, ideological contexts, and political situations, Dr. Shiffman shows how the language and tools familiar to economists can assist policy makers and security personnel to combat rival ‘firms,’ as he classifies them. Arguing strongly against essentialist labels and stories about why these groups act the way that they do, Dr. Shiffman offers us an approach to understanding ‘illicit’ groups that would be recognizable to leaders of many ‘legitimate’ organizations. Dr. Gary Shiffman is a Professor at Georgetown University, the CEO of two software companies, a former Naval Officer and Border Patrol leader, a former Fortune 200 executive, and an engaging writer. His is the author of one other book on the Economic Instruments of Security Policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For all the diversity of views within the animal protection movement, there is a surprising consensus about the need for more severe criminal justice interventions against animal abusers. More prosecutions and longer sentences, it is argued, will advance the status of animals in law and society. In Beyond Cages: Animal Law and Criminal Punishment (Cambridge UP, 2019), Professor Justin Marceau demonstrates that a focus on 'carceral animal law' puts the animal rights movement at odds with other social justice movements, and may be bad for humans and animals alike. Animal protection efforts need to move beyond cages and towards systemic solutions if the movement hopes to be true to its own defining ethos of increased empathy and resistance to social oppression. Providing new insights into how the lessons of criminal justice reform should be imported into the animal abuse context, Beyond Cages is a valuable contribution to the literature on animal welfare and animal rights law. Mark Molloy is the reviews editor at MAKE: A Literary Magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Communication at SUNY Geneseo--interviews Bryan McCann (he/his)--Associate Professor of Communication at Louisiana State University--on a dope new work of cultural criticism The Mark of Criminality: Rhetoric, Race, and Gangsta Rap in the War-on-Crime Era (University of Alabama Press, 2017). The Mark of Criminality positions the work of key gangsta rap artists--Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and Tupac Shakur--as well as the controversies their work produced, squarely within the law-and-order politics and popular culture of the 1980s and 1990s to reveal a profoundly complex period in American history when the meanings of crime and criminality were incredibly unstable. McCann argues that, among other well-circulated meanings, the mark of criminality was a source of power, credibility, and revenue. By understanding gangsta rap as a potent, if deeply imperfect, enactment of the mark of criminality, we can better understand how crime is always a site of struggle over meaning. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her book From Rage to Reason: Why We Need Sex Crime Laws Based on Facts, Not Fear (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), Emily Horowitz shows how current sex-offense policies in the United States create new forms of harm and prevent those who have caused harm from the process of constructive repentance or contributing to society after punishment. Horowitz also illustrates the failure of criminal justice responses to social problems. Sharing detailed narratives from the experiences of those on registries and their loved ones, Horowitz reveals the social impact and cycle of violence that results from dehumanizing and banishing those who have already been held accountable. Emily Horowitz is professor of sociology and criminal justice at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, NY. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices