New Books in Policing, Incarceration, and Reform

The “smart” city of today looks little like what experts of yesteryear expected them to. In this book, Aaron Shapiro, Ph.D. takes readers on a behind the scenes tour of the smart city and shows the revolution in urban technology that is currently taking place in large metropolitan areas around the United States. Technology has fundamentally transformed urban life. Throughout Design, Control, Predict: Logistical Governance in the Smart City (U Minnesota Press, 2020), Shapiro develops a new lens called logistical governance in his effort to interpret and understand urban technologies. This lens was used to critique urban future based on extraction and rationalization. Through ethnographic research, journalistic interviews, and his own hands-on experience, Shapiro helps readers peer through cracks of the façade that smart cities are bearing. He investigates the true price New Yorkers pay for “free,” ad-funded WiFi, finding that it is ultimately serving the ends of commercial media. Shapiro also builds on his experience as a bike courier delivering food for a startup company and examines how promises of “flexible employment” in the gig economy paves the way for strict managerial control. And he turns his discussion toward the current debates about police violence and new patrol technologies, asking whether algorithms are the answer to reforming the ongoing crises of criminal justice in large urban cities. Through these gripping accounts of new technology in urban areas, Shapiro and Design, Control, Predict make vital contributions to conversations about data privacy and algorithmic governance. Shapiro provides a ground level account of a timely and important piece of research in Design, Control, Predict. This piece can be used when comprehending urbanism today and when identifying strategies to advance the critique and resistance to a dystopian future that is often viewed as inevitable. Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at William Penn University. His most recent research, “The Queen and Her Royal Court: A Content Analysis of Doing Gender at a Tulip Queen Pageant“, was published in Gender Issues Journal. He researches culture, social identity, and collective representation as it is presented in everyday social interactions. He is currently studying the social interactions that people engage in at two annual festivals that take place during the summer months along the banks of the Mississippi River. You can learn more about him on his website, Google Scholar, follow him on Twitter @ProfessorJohnst, or email him at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Privilege and Punishment: How Race and Class Matter in Criminal Court (Princeton UP, 2020) by Matthew Clair is a powerful ethnographic study of the experiences and perspectives of criminal defendants. While many studies have demonstrated the existence of race and class disparities in the criminal justice system, Clair conducted a rare and compelling study that puts heart and emotion into these disparities. As he argues and shows, not only should we care about quantitative inequalities in criminal justice, but "[w]e should [also] be concerned about differences in the quality of the court experience" for so many defendants. Clair did extensive interviews with and observed criminal defendants, defense lawyers, judges, police officers, and others interact with each other in the Boston court system. What he shows is a system that operates differently for people of privilege compared to people without. While many criminal defendants face struggles of alienation from societal structures, the underprivileged often resort to crime out of necessity, whereas privileged defendants were more likely to enter the system because of pleasure-seeking or to avoid pain. Once in courtrooms, underprivileged defendants, especially racial minorities, develop profound mistrust of their court-appointed attorneys. These defendants face, and have often repeatedly been represented by overworked lawyers who often refuse to listen or to develop relationships of trust with their clients, which led many of these defendants to "withdraw," as Clair coins it, from the attorney-client relationship. Some resisted the lawyer or the court: complaining openly about the lack of diligence, asking the court to appoint new counsel, or taking it upon themselves (often with group support) to learn the law and make the arguments their lawyers refused to make. Others developed what Clair calls an attitude of resignation, recognizing the futility of their situation, and essentially giving up the fight. The experience is fundamentally different for privileged defendants. These defendants often have broad social circles that include the police or lawyers. Because of those connections, they are able to obtain counsel of their choice. The payment of fees engenders trust in the relationship. These defendants defer to their lawyers, trust their judgment, and feel genuinely satisfied with the representation. Clair argues that courts punish those defendants who withdraw from their lawyers and reward those who defer to them. He calls on lawyers to develop more trusting relationships with their clients and to work toward a more holistic style of defense that considers more than just the legal issues in the case. He encourages courts to allow defendants to choose their court-appointed attorney and to encourage a more participatory legal system in which defendants are not punished for expressing dissatisfaction with their lawyer. Clair's study is replete with compelling and personal examples. The narrative is what makes this study especially moving. Clair gives voice to those who repeatedly tried, but failed to get their lawyers and courts to listen. Because of Clair's work, we can now hear them. Samuel P. Newton is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Idaho. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the wake of the George Floyd killing, many Americans are engaging in a renewed debate about the role violence and especially police violence, plays in American society. In A Pattern of Violence: How the Law Classifies Crimes and What it Means for Justice (Harvard UP, 2020), David Alan Sklansky, the Stanley Morrison Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, argues that in order to think sensibly about criminal justice, we must consider how we think about violence and the criminal law’s role in shaping our perceptions. Sklansky argues that the criminal law’s definitions of violence have proven “slippery” and have been used in highly inconsistent ways. We talk about offenders as being characterologically violent, but contrastingly talk about the police, gun owners, or free speech activists in nonviolent terms. For example, police officers use “force” to subdue “vicious” criminals. Or they “stop and frisk” suspects instead of violently violating a person’s bodily integrity. While the police have increasingly militarized and have become more insular and reactionary, Sklansky argues that police institutions themselves have also played a role in creating many of the situations in which the police find themselves. Additionally, Sklansky significantly details how our conversations of violence regarding rape and domestic violence, the treatment of juvenile offenders, and free speech and gun rights, suffer from the same inconsistencies, especially as they tend to exaggerate and perpetuate race, gender, and class differences. Sklansky argues that the law has not always drawn consistent boundaries between violent and non-violent offenses. Burglary, while labeled a violent felony, requires no act of interpersonal violence. Assault or battery, on the other hand, are often misdemeanors, though they require physical violence. In addition to thinking inconsistently about violence, most Americans accept and even celebrate forms of societal violence. For example, American prisons, while not officially condoning violence, allow and sometimes encourage violence against prisoners as forms of discipline and retribution. As Sklansky argues, violence in these institutions is often treated as a form of entertainment, a “morbid parody of combat sports.” Sklansky prompts us to confront our overly simplistic definitions and assumptions about violence in the American law. He encourages us to take advantage of an increased awareness of violence and to work toward more just and consistent definitions. Samuel P. Newton is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Idaho College of Law. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr Katie Cruz contributed a chapter titled "The Work of Sex Work: Prostitution, Unfreedom and Criminality at Work" to the book Criminality at Work (Oxford UP, 2020). In this podcast, Dr Cruz talks about her research around stripping and labour rights. She discusses the case of Nowack vs Chandler Bars when a woman working as a stripper in a London strip club was successful in pursuing her case against the club. She discusses her other work including her research among sex workers in Jamaica. Kate's blog posts are available here. Cruz's other works in include: --Cruz, K., & Brown, W. (2016). "Feminism, law, and neoliberalism: An interview and discussion with Wendy Brown." Feminist Legal Studies, 24(1), 69-89. --Cruz, K. (2018). "Beyond Liberalism: Marxist feminism, migrant sex work, and labour unfreedom." Feminist Legal Studies, 26(1), 65-92. --Hardy, K., & Cruz, K. (2019). "Affective organizing: Collectivizing informal sex workers in an intimate union." American behavioural scientist, 63(2), 244-261. --Cruz, K., Davidson, J. O. C., & Taylor, J. S. (2019). "Tourism and sexual violence and exploitation in Jamaica: contesting the ‘trafficking and modern slavery frame." Journal of the British Academy, 7(s1), 191-216. Rachel Stuart is a sex work researcher whose primary interest is the lived experiences of sex workers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oksana Kis’s Survival as Victory: Ukrainian Women in the Gulag (Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies, Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University Press, 2021) fundamentally contributes to the Gulag studies through its essential intervention into the conventional framework of researching the Gulag as a system of measures to control the individuals and the collectives. The work draws readers' attention to the survival strategies of the individual who has to learn how to make sense of life again under the inhumane and dehumanizing conditions. Oksana Kis builds her research on diaries, memoirs, documents which were created by the Gulag detainees. Her main characters are Ukrainian women who were arrested and sent to the Gulag on the basis of accusation or suspicion of national engagements. A meticulously researched body of documents provides insight into the everyday life of the women who were forced to re-invent their lives, while trying to maintain some sense of normalcy. Can there be any normalcy in the Gulag? And what is “a normalcy” in the Gulag? With her book, Kis asks and pursues these questions and invites readers to subvert their horizon of expectations. There is some sort of normalcy in the Gulag, but one has to reinvent herself in order to create and accept it. In this regard, the book surpasses the boundaries of one national community: the discussion that it initiates invites readers to expand their understanding of the Gulag life. Survival as Victory: Ukrainian Women in the Gulag is a valuable addition to the scholarship on the USSR, post-Soviet studies, and Ukraine. Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD student in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Community Relations Service (CRS) came into being alongside the Voting Rights Act—as part of the Act itself. And this organization was integrated into the Voting Rights Act in 1964 because President Lyndon Johnson wanted it to be included in that landmark legislation, in part because Johnson, as an adept politician and negotiator, saw the importance of establishing a means for mediation and negotiation on the local level in many places throughout the United States. The initial portfolio of the CRS was focused solely on issues around race and racial disputes, though it has since been formally extended to include issues around ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, etc. The CRS is housed in the Department of Justice, but operates as an independent entity, and does not work as part of the FBI or the Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice. Grande Lum, who is currently provost and vice president for Academic Affairs at Menlo College, had served as the Director of the CRS from 2012-2016, and he has taken the original edition of America's Peacemakers: The Community Relations Service and Civil Rights (U Missouri Press, 2020), written by Bertram Levine, and updated it with another twenty years of the history of the CRS. This is a fascinating history of this often- overlooked governmental institution, and in our podcast conversation, Grande and I also discuss the process of updating the book itself, since he had made such great use of the original edition when he first became Director of the CRS. In taking the original text and adding in another two decades of history, Grande Lum worked with Bertram Levine’s children to make sure his work was also in the spirit of their father’s work, since Levine had written the original edition of the book. This podcast is an engaging discussion about the history of the Community Relations Service itself, the book that incorporates that history, highlighting the many successes of these domestic mediators and peacemakers, and the process for collaboratively updating this kind of a book. Lum also discusses some of the projects that have come out of the CRS, including the Divided Community Project at the Moritz School of Law at the Ohio State University (https://moritzlaw.osu.edu/dividedcommunityproject/), and other community mediation centers in different states and localities around the United States. These local and national organizations, along with the CRS, have been pursuing many of the ideas that are currently being discussed about law enforcement reform. America’s Peacemakers: The Community Relations Service and Civil Rights, co-authored by Bertram Levine and Grande Lum, is a fascinating history of the organization that has, for more than fifty years, been working to bring divided communities together, in peaceful dialogue, in an effort to defuse situations without violence or indictments. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Empire of Convicts: Indian Penal Labor in Colonial Southeast Asia (University of California Press, 2021) (University of California Press, 2021) focuses on male and female Indians incarcerated in Southeast Asia for criminal and political offenses committed in colonial South Asia. From the seventeenth century onward, penal transportation was a key strategy of British imperial rule, exemplified by deportations first to the Americas and later to Australia. Case studies from the insular prisons of Bengkulu, Penang, and Singapore illuminate another carceral regime in the Indian Ocean World that brought South Asia and Southeast Asia together through a global system of forced migration and coerced labor. A major contribution to histories of crime and punishment, prisons, law, labor, transportation, migration, colonialism, and the Indian Ocean World, Empire of Convicts narrates the experiences of Indian bandwars (convicts) and shows how they exercised agency in difficult situations, fashioning their own worlds and even becoming “their own warders.” Anand A. Yang brings long journeys across kala pani (black waters) to life in a deeply researched and engrossing account that moves fluidly between local and global contexts. Anand A. Yang is the Walker Family Endowed Professor in History and Professor of International Studies at the University of Washington. His monographs include the books The Limited Raj: Agrarian Relations in Colonial India; Bazaar India: Peasants, Traders, Markets and the Colonial State in Gangetic Bihar; and the edited volumes Crime and Criminality in British India and Interactions: Transregional Perspectives on World History. Kelvin Ng hosted the episode. He is a Ph.D. student at Yale University, History Department. His research interests broadly lie in the history of imperialism and anti-imperialism in the early-twentieth-century Indian Ocean circuit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Siobhán Hearne's Policing Prostitution: Regulating the Lower Classes in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford UP, 2021) examines the complex world of commercial sex in the late Russian Empire. From the 1840s until 1917, prostitution was legally tolerated across the Russian Empire under a system known as regulation. Medical police were in charge of compiling information about registered prostitutes and ensuring that they followed the strict rules prescribed by the imperial state governing their visibility and behaviour. The vast majority of women who sold sex hailed from the lower classes, as did their managers and clients. This study examines how regulation was implemented, experienced, and resisted amid rapid urbanization, industrialization, and modernization around the turn of the twentieth century. Each chapter examines the lives and challenges of different groups who engaged with the world of prostitution, including women who sold sex, the men who paid for it, mediators, the police, and wider urban communities. Drawing on archival material from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, Policing Prostitution illustrates how prostitution was an acknowledged, contested, and ever-present component of lower-class urban society in the late imperial period. In principle, the tsarist state regulated prostitution in the name of public order and public health; in practice, that regulation was both modulated by provincial police forces who had different local priorities, resources, and strategies, and contested by registered prostitutes, brothel madams, and others who interacted with the world of commercial sex. Siobhán Hearne is a historian of gender and sexuality in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. She received her PhD from the University of Nottingham and is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Durham University in the UK. She is also one of the editors of the website Peripheral Histories, a collaborative digital history project exploring ‘peripheral’ spaces in the Russian Empire, Soviet Union, and post-Soviet world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why did the international drug regulatory regime of the twentieth century fail to stop an explosive increase in trade and consumption of illegal drugs? This study investigates the histories of smugglers and criminal entrepreneurs in the Netherlands who succeeded in turning the country into the so-called ‘Colombia of Europe’ or, ‘the international drug supermarket’. Increasing state regulations and interventions led to the proliferation of a ‘hydra’ of small, anarchic groups and networks ideally suited to circumvent the enforcement of regulation. Networks of smugglers and suppliers of heroin, cocaine, cannabis, XTC, and other drugs were organized without a strict formal hierarchy and based on personal relations and cultural affinities rather than on institutional arrangements. These networks created a thriving underground industry of illegal synthetic drug laboratories and indoor cannabis cultivation in the Netherlands itself. Their operations were made possible and developed because of the deep historical social and cultural ‘embeddedness’ of criminal anarchy in Dutch society. Using examples from the rich history of drug smuggling, Drug Smuggler Nation: Narcotics and the Netherlands, 1920-95 (Manchester UP, 2021) investigates the deeper and hidden grounds of the illegal drug trade, and its effects on our drug policies. Geert Slabbekorn works as an analyst in the field of public security. In addition he has published on different aspects of dark web drug trade in Belgium. Find him on twitter, tweeting all things drug related @GeertJS. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sarah Kovner’s Prisoners of the Empire: Inside Japanese POW Camps (Harvard UP, 2020) is a nuanced look at the experiences, narratives―and the popular/historical memories of those experiences and narratives―of World War II-era Allied POWs in Japanese custody, especially in the English-language world. While never denying the horrors of war and the POW experience, Kovner finds less systemic and intentional cruelty by the Japanese camp commanders and guards than she does poor planning and preparation, and often outright neglect when it came to the fate of internees. Simultaneously, the book is sensitive to how POWs’ experiences differed enormously due to their status in the eyes of the Japanese as well as the time and place of their captivity. In particular, Kovner contrasts the experience of white, mostly Anglophone POWs and Asians, who were more likely to be subjected to systematically poor treatment. In addition, Prisoners of the Empire also explores the ways that Japan “was present even when it was absent” in the twentieth-century history of international agreements on POW treatment and war crimes. Kovner has produced a significant and thought-provoking contribution to several different subfields of history. In addition to its obvious relevance to those interested in the history of modern Japan, World War II, and historical memory, because of its considerations of such issues as the Geneva conventions and war crimes trials, the book will also be of interest to readers interested in international law and relations. Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese and East Asian history in the Graduate School of Humanities, Nagoya University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The rise of Neo-Evangelicalism as a social and political American movement accompanied shifting attitudes in broader American criminal justice policies. Religious leaders from Billy Graham to David Wilkerson found growing concerns around juvenile delinquency and general lawbreaking as strategic connection points for their evangelistic message and ministries. In God's Law and Order: The Politics of Punishment in Evangelical America (Harvard UP, 2020), Aaron Griffith explores the rhetoric of crime and punishment in the postwar Evangelical movement. The rhetoric of law and order became deeply enmeshed with religious conservatism, but not without attending efforts at criminal justice reform as growing number of Americans, disproportionately from urban and minority populations, spent years in state incarceration. In this expertly researched volume, Griffith presents a complex and important investigation into a timely subject in the recent past of the history of religion in politics in American society. Find out more about Aaron on his website or follow him on Twitter (@AaronLGriffith). Ryan David Shelton (@ryoldfashioned) is a social historian of British and American Protestantism and a PhD researcher at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode of Ethnographic Marginalia features Dr. Leslie MacColman, a Postdoctoral Scholar in Sociology at The Ohio State University who studies crime and policing in Latin America. Leslie explains how extensive experiences with civil society organizations inspired her move to academia while continuing to inform her research. She then describes research on police reform in Buenos Aires and how a project that centered police experiences grew to include government officials, activists, sex workers, and homeless teens. Leslie tells us how her identity as an American woman affected the way her participants related to her, and how her responsibilities as a mother affected the kind of fieldwork she could do. Finally, she reflects on how recent calls for police reform in the US have affected how her own research is understood. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Prison abolition and decarceration are increasingly debated, but it is often without taking into account the largest exodus of people from carceral facilities in the twentieth century: the closure of disability institutions and psychiatric hospitals. Decarcerating Disability (2020, University of Minnesota Press) provides a much-needed corrective, combining a genealogy of deinstitutionalization with critiques of the current prison system. Liat Ben-Moshe (https://www.liatbenmoshe.com/) provides groundbreaking case studies that show how abolition is not an unattainable goal but rather a reality, and how it plays out in different arenas of incarceration—antipsychiatry, the field of intellectual disabilities, and the fight against the prison-industrial complex. Ben-Moshe discusses a range of topics, including why deinstitutionalization is often wrongly blamed for the rise in incarceration; who resists decarceration and deinstitutionalization, and the coalitions opposing such resistance; and how understanding deinstitutionalization as a form of residential integration makes visible intersections with racial desegregation. By connecting deinstitutionalization with prison abolition, Decarcerating Disability also illuminates some of the limitations of disability rights and inclusion discourses, as well as tactics such as litigation, in securing freedom. Decarcerating Disability’s rich analysis of lived experience, history, and culture helps to chart a way out of a failing system of incarceration. C.J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California San Diego. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Many scholars have interrogated the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese-Americans during WWII – with an eye to understanding the particular type of racism that allowed the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt to punish based on heritage rather than any particular action or crime. Bradford Pearson’s new book The Eagles of Heart Mountain: A True Story of Football, Incarceration, and Resistance in World War II America (Atria/Simon and Schuster, 2021) provides a political history of the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during WWII by, first, going back in time to highlight the complex history of how Japanese (and Chinese) Americans first came to the West coast in the 17th century and the nuances of the racism they encountered over the centuries. Once Pearson establishes the origins of Anti-Asian-American racism, he follows several teenagers who played football both free and incarcerated. These nisei, American citizens of Japanese heritage, had their education and participation in a sport that has come to define what is “American” interrupted by the transports, relocations, and imprisonments that placed families in concentration camps across the United States. Pearson uses their role in a football team created in one concentration camp – Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Cody, Wyoming – to document racism and discrimination but also sports competition as a means of escapism and regaining dignity. Pearson, the former features editor of Southwest: The Magazine and a journalist who has published in the New York Times, Esquire, Time, and Salon, uses foundational works in history and political science, his own oral histories, government surveillance files, and archives associated with Heart Mountain, to create a relevant history for considering how we define citizenship in the U.S., the role of the legislature and courts in establishing and maintain white supremacy, American acceptance of incarceration based on race, and the importance of fully contextualizing American public figures such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Earl Warren. Susan Liebell is an associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. Why Diehard Originalists Aren’t Really Originalists recently appeared in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage and “Retreat from the Rule of Law: Locke and the Perils of Stand Your Ground” was published in the Journal of Politics (July 2020). Email her comments at [email protected] or tweet to @SusanLiebell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we are joined by Fiona Greenland, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, to talk about her new book, Ruling Culture: Art Police, Tomb Raiders, and the Rise of Cultural Power in Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2021). Through much of its history, Italy was Europe’s heart of the arts, an artistic playground for foreign elites and powers who bought, sold, and sometimes plundered countless artworks and antiquities. This loss of artifacts looted by other nations once put Italy at an economic and political disadvantage compared with northern European states. Now, more than any other country, Italy asserts control over its cultural heritage through a famously effective art-crime squad that has been the inspiration of novels, movies, and tv shows. In its efforts to bring their cultural artifacts home, Italy has entered into legal battles against some of the world’s major museums, including the Getty, New York’s Metropolitan Museum, and the Louvre. It has turned heritage into patrimony capital—a powerful and controversial convergence of art, money, and politics. In 2006, the then-president of Italy declared his country to be “the world’s greatest cultural power.” With Ruling Culture, Fiona Greenland traces how Italy came to wield such extensive legal authority, global power, and cultural influence—from the nineteenth century unification of Italy and the passage of novel heritage laws, to current battles with the international art market. Today, Italy’s belief in its cultural superiority is evident through interactions between citizens, material culture, and the state—crystallized in the Art Squad, the highly visible military-police art protection unit. Greenland reveals the contemporary actors in this tale, taking a close look at the Art Squad and state archaeologists on one side and unauthorized excavators, thieves, and smugglers on the other. Drawing on years in Italy interviewing key figures and following leads, Greenland presents a multifaceted story of art crime, cultural diplomacy, and struggles between international powers. Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We first heard from the sociologist of American racism David Cunningham in Episode 36 Policing and White Power. Less than a week after the horrors of January 6th, he came back for an extended conversation about “asymmetrical policing” of the political right and left–and of White and Black Americans. His very first book (There’s Something … Continue reading "49 The Capitol Insurrection and Asymmetrical Policing: David Cunningham (EF, JP)" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, more than 200,000 men and women over age fifty are languishing in prisons around the United States. It is projected that by 2030, one-third of all incarcerated individuals will be older adults. An already overcrowded and underserved prison system is straining to manage the needs of incarcerated older adults with growing frailty and health concerns. Separated from their families and communities despite a low risk of recidivism, incarcerated older adults represent a major social-justice issue that reveals the intersectional factors at play in their imprisonment. How do the people aging in prison understand their life experiences? In Aging Behind Prison Walls, Tina Maschi and Keith Morgen offer a data-driven and compassionate analysis of the lives of incarcerated older people. They explore the transferable resiliencies and coping strategies used by incarcerated aging adults to make meaning of their lives before, during, and after imprisonment. The book draws on extensive quantitative and qualitative research as well as national datasets. It features rich narrative case studies that present stories of trauma, coping, and well-being. Based on the data, Maschi and Morgen present a solution-focused caring-justice framework in order to understand and transform the individual- and community-level structural factors that have led to and perpetuate the aging-in-prison crisis. They offer concrete proposals--at the community and national policy levels--to address the pressing issues of incarcerated elders. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Black Lives and Spatial Matters: Policing Blackness and Practicing Freedom in Suburban St. Louis (Cornell University Press, 2020), Dr. Jodi Rios examines relationships between blackness, space, and racism, in the northern suburbs of St. Louis. She argues that the “double bind of living as Black in North St. Louis County means that Black residents both suffer from, and pay for, the loss of economic and political viability that occurs when they simply occupy space” (1). Rios theorizes “Blackness-as-risk” as foundational to the historical and contemporary construction of metropolitan space. She documents the ways in which Black residents in the north St. Louis suburbs are subject to excessive ordinances and constant policing. Yet, these residents also resist such constraints. After the murder of Michael Brown in August 2014, Black Lives Matter protests erupted throughout St. Louis as well as across the country. Through the lens of such protests, Rios theorizes “Blackness-as-freedom” as “the unique capacity of blackness to embody freedom in the face of death and to imagine other worlds, other futures” (5). Black Lives and Spatial Matters is a transdisciplinary work that draws from history, ethnography, geography, as well as architecture and design, to show how anti-blackness is produced and contested when Black people occupy space. Jodi Rios is a scholar, designer, and educator whose work is located at the intersection of physical, social, and political space. Reighan Gillam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Anna Hájková's new book The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt (Oxford UP, 2020) is the first in-depth analytical history of a prisoner society during the Holocaust. Terezín (Theresienstadt in German) was operated by the Nazis between November 1941 and May 1945 as a transit ghetto for Central and Western European Jews before their deportation for murder in the East. Rather than depict the world of the prisoners as an atomized state of exception, it argues that the prisoner societies in the Holocaust are best understood as existing among the many versions of societies as we know them. This book challenges the claims of Holocaust exceptionalism and insisting that we view it with the same analytical tools as other historical events. The prisoner society Terezín produced its own social hierarchies, but the contents of categories such as class changed radically: seemingly small differences among prisoners could determine whether one ultimately lived or died. During the three and a half year of the ghetto’s existence, prisoners created their own culture and habits, bonded, fell in love, and forged new families. The shared Jewishness of the prisoners was not the basis of their identities, but rather, prisoners embraced their ethnic origin. Based on extensive archival research in nine languages, The Last Ghetto is a transnational, cultural, social, gender, and organizational history of Terezín, revealing how human society works in extremis. Dr Anna Hájková is associate professor of modern European continental history at the University of Warwick. Hájková has co-edited the yearbook Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente between 2006 and 2008. A special issue of German History on “Sexuality, Holocaust, Stigma” appeared online this summer. She has also edited family wartime diaries from the Communist resistance in the Holocaust. She is on Twitter at @ankahajkova. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The world of theater performances is often thought of as being composed of wealthy persons who received elite educations at art institutions all so they could be observed by a small, wealthy elite at exclusive and expensive gatherings. Theater is seen as an insular, elitist practice, for and by a select few. However, this image of theater is deeply misleading, especially as more performances are available for download, and many smaller more open institutions invest more in theater productions. One place that might surprise a lot of people is the popularity of performances staged by incarcerated persons, and presented in behind the walls of prisons. Theater is a social, communal practice, so making it happen within an institution that is not only isolated from the outside world, but is designed to isolate those within, will naturally come with various challenges, and also raises various questions on the nature of both theater and the carceral system. These are the questions Ashley Lucas addresses in her recent book Prison Theatre and the Global Crisis of Incarceration (Bloomsbury, 2020). Featuring a combination of her own firsthand experience as a director of prison theater, interviews with those involved in the world prison theater and scholarly research, the book is a unique combination of genres that occupies some very interesting intersections, and is able to explore some very difficult topics, from questions of artistic expression, the nature of community and what hope in a hopeless situation looks like. Ashley Lucas is an associate professor of Theatre and Drama and the Residential College at the University of Michigan, and is also the former director of the Prison Creative Arts Project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Using case studies and the results of extensive fieldwork, this book considers the nature of state power and legal violence in liberal democracies by focusing on the interaction between law, science, and policing in India. The postcolonial Indian police have often been accused of using torture in both routine and exceptional criminal cases, but they, and forensic psychologists, have claimed that lie detectors, brain scans, and narcoanalysis (the use of “truth serum,” Sodium Pentothal) represent a paradigm shift away from physical torture; most state high courts in India have upheld this rationale. The Truth Machines: Policing, Violence, and Scientific Interrogations in India (University of Michigan Press, 2020) examines the emergence and use of these three scientific techniques to analyze two primary themes. First, the book questions whether existing theoretical frameworks for understanding state power and legal violence are adequate to explain constant innovations of the state. Second, it explores the workings of law, science, and policing in the everyday context to generate a theory of state power and legal violence, challenging the monolithic frameworks about this relationship, based on a study of both state and non-state actors. Jinee Lokaneeta argues that the attempt to replace physical torture with truth machines in India fails because it relies on a confessional paradigm that is contiguous with torture. Her work also provides insights into a police institution that is founded and refounded in its everyday interactions between state and non-state actors. Theorizing a concept of Contingent State, this book demonstrates the disaggregated, and decentered nature of state power and legal violence, creating possible sites of critique and intervention. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Julius Margolin was a Polish Jew caught between the twin 1939 invasions of Poland by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. He spent the years 1940-1945 in Soviet labor camps, finally returning to his family in Palestine, in 1946. In her book Journey Into the Land of the Zeks and Back (Oxford UP, 2020), Israeli scholar Stefani Hoffman has provided the English-speaking world with its first full translation of Margolin’s story, which reiterates the importance of individual human dignity, no matter the circumstances. Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western, in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism. 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 her book, The Politics of Police Reform: Society against the State in Post-Soviet Countries (Oxford University Press, 2018), Erica Marat provides an answer to a very important question: “What does it take to reform a post-Soviet police force?” Marat looks as specific case studies – in Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan – in order to identify and analyze instances where public mobilization challenged the conduct of police offers and their use of violence. In her analysis, she considers the legacies of Soviet policing, but also identifies important factors that led to policing’s reform. The book is valuable reading for those following contemporary issues in Central Asia and the post-Soviet space, as well those interested broadly in the problems of police violence and the challenge of police reform. Nicholas Seay is a PhD Student at The Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mentioned in this episode: Laurence Ralph, Renegade Dreams: Living through Injury in Gangland Chicago James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me Mahomedou Ould Slahi, Guantánamo Diary Truth and Reconciliation Commission (South Africa) Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963, “banality of evil”; not optimism but hopefulness) Recallable …..Stuff Billie Holiday’s … Continue reading "45 Global Policing 3 Laurence Ralph: Reckoning with Police Violence" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1985, Greg Mack, a DJ working for Los Angeles radio station KDAY, played a song that sounded like nothing else on West Coast airwaves: Toddy Tee’s “The Batteram,” a hip hop track that reflected the experiences of a young man growing up in 1980s Compton. The song tells about the Los Angeles Police Department’s battering ram truck, an emblem of the city under Police Chief Daryl Gates, and which terrorized largely African American neighborhoods across Los Angeles under his watch. In To Live and Defy in LA: How Gangsta Rap Changed America (Harvard UP, 2020), historian at San Francisco State University Felicia Angeja Viator describes how rap leapt across the continent from its New York roots in the mid-1980s and took hold in Los Angeles. Often gaining popularity by word of mouth and mobile DJ parties, local groups like NWA pioneered a new, harder-edged, style of hip hop music that reflected their experiences as youth growing up in Gates era LA. Viator explains how the rapid rise of West Coast rap became engulfed in the culture wars of the late 1980s and 1990s and shaped perceptions of the 1992 LA uprising. When gangsta rap hit the American mainstream in the early 90s, the artform changed the face of popular music and American culture forever. For a playlist of songs featured in To Live and Defy in LA, see the following link. Stephen Hausmann is an Assistant Professor of US History at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. He teaches courses on modern US history, environmental history, and Indigenous history and is currently working on his book manuscript, an environmental history of the Black Hills of South Dakota and Wyoming. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hannah Walker’s new book, Mobilized by Injustice: Criminal Justice Contact, Political Participation, and Race (Oxford UP, 2020), brings together the political science and criminal justice disciplines in exploring how individuals are mobilized to engage in political participation by their connection to the criminal justice system in the United States. The fusion between these two academic disciplines, and the focus of their respective studies in this area, answers some questions that are often omitted or passed over by the individual disciplines given the kinds of questions posed by each discipline. Thus, the topics and issues explored in Mobilized by Injustice focuses on political mobilization, advocacy, and activism, often beyond the issue of voting, to tease out how individuals who have been incarcerated or their friends and relatives are involved in the political system. The American criminal justice system is often seen as imposing the “prison beyond the prison” in how formerly incarcerated individuals are constrained and limited in their lives after they leave prison, including limits on voting rights in many states, limits on access to federal policies, and the myriad other ways in which these citizens are essentially marginalized with our society. Walker’s research digs into these constraints and also the stigmatization that individuals experience because of incarceration. At the same time that she is trying to discern how these individuals respond within the political system itself, Walker is also trying to get at how communities are impacted by the criminal justice system, exploring the ways in which this system can be particularly corrosive in certain communities. The research explores political participation by a number of different and often intersecting groups, specifically the individuals who have been incarcerated or directly experienced the criminal justice system, and those who have proximate contact with that system, through their family member’s direct experience. Within these two umbrella groups, Walker also digs into distinctions across racial groups (white, black, Latinx) and across socio-economic categories (examining class distinctions in this context). Mobilized by Injustice finds interesting results in the multi-method research approach, discerning different kinds of political involvement that is not captured by questions about whether an individual does vote or can vote. Rather, the research highlights that those with proximal contact with the criminal justice system have lower barriers to political engagement, which may lead them more naturally into politics because these individuals find themselves working as advocates for their family member who is incarcerated. Those who have been incarcerated face a variety of higher barriers, both structural and psychological, and they often need more support to engage in politics, because of the “dignity deficit” they may suffer because of societal stigmatization. Mobilized by Injustice: Criminal Justice Contact, Political Participation, and Race will likely be of interest to those who study political science, criminal justice, sociology, public policy, social science methodology, and race and class. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). 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. In the context of both the Black Lives Matter movement, and in the lead up to the 2020 Presidential election, her book could not be more timely; 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

Following the high-profile deaths of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and twenty-five-year-old Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland, both cities erupted in protest over the unjustified homicides of unarmed black males at the hands of police officers. These local tragedies—and the protests surrounding them—assumed national significance, igniting fierce debate about the fairness and efficacy of the American criminal justice system. Yet, outside the gaze of mainstream attention, how do local residents and protestors in Ferguson and Baltimore understand their own experiences with race, place, and policing? In Hands Up, Don’t Shoot: Why the Protests in Ferguson and Baltimore Matter, and How They Changed America (NYU Press), Jennifer Cobbina draws on in-depth interviews with nearly two hundred residents of Ferguson and Baltimore, conducted within two months of the deaths of Brown and Gray. She examines how protestors in both cities understood their experiences with the police, how those experiences influenced their perceptions of policing, what galvanized Black Lives Matter as a social movement, and how policing tactics during demonstrations influenced subsequent mobilization decisions among protesters. Ultimately, she humanizes people’s deep and abiding anger, underscoring how a movement emerged to denounce both racial biases by police and the broader economic and social system that has stacked the deck against young black civilians. Hands Up, Don’t Shoot is a remarkably current, on-the-ground assessment of the powerful, protestor-driven movement around race, justice, and policing in America. Jennifer E. Cobbina is Associate Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University. Dr. Christina Gessler’s background is in American women’s history, and literature. She specializes in the diaries written by rural women in the 19th century. In seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary, Gessler writes the histories of largely unknown women, poems about small relatable moments, and takes many, many photos in nature. 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

In this episode, Siobhan talks with Philip Thai about his book, China's War on Smuggling: Law, Illicit Markets, and State Power on the China Coast (Columbia University Press, 2018). Thai is Assistant Professor of History at Northeastern University. He is a historian of Modern China with research and teaching interests that include legal history, economic history, and diplomatic history. Smuggling along the Chinese coast has been a thorn in the side of many regimes. From opium and weapons concealed aboard foreign steamships in the Qing dynasty to nylon stockings and wristwatches trafficked in the People’s Republic, contests between state and smuggler have exerted a surprising but crucial influence on the political economy of modern China. Seeking to consolidate domestic authority and confront foreign challenges, states introduced tighter regulations, higher taxes, and harsher enforcement. These interventions sparked widespread defiance, triggering further coercive measures. Smuggling simultaneously threatened the state’s power while inviting repression that strengthened its authority. Philip Thai chronicles the vicissitudes of smuggling in modern China—its practice, suppression, and significance—to demonstrate the intimate link between illicit coastal trade and the amplification of state power. China’s War on Smuggling shows that the fight against smuggling was not a simple law enforcement problem but rather an impetus to centralize authority and expand economic controls. The smuggling epidemic gave Chinese states pretext to define legal and illegal behavior, and the resulting constraints on consumption and movement remade everyday life for individuals, merchants, and communities. Drawing from varied sources such as legal cases, customs records, and popular press reports and including diverse perspectives from political leaders, frontline enforcers, organized traffickers, and petty runners, Thai uncovers how different regimes policed maritime trade and the unintended consequences their campaigns unleashed. China’s War on Smuggling traces how defiance and repression redefined state power, offering new insights into modern Chinese social, legal, and economic history. Siobhan M. M. Barco, J.D. explores legal history at Princeton University Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Inspired by the rise of environmental psychology and increasing support for behavioral research after the Second World War, new initiatives at the federal, state, and local levels looked to influence the human psyche through form, or elicit desired behaviors with environmental incentives, implementing what Joy Knoblauch calls “psychological functionalism.” Recruited by federal construction and research programs for institutional reform and expansion—which included hospitals, mental health centers, prisons, and public housing—architects theorized new ways to control behavior and make it more functional by exercising soft power, or power through persuasion, with their designs. In the 1960s –1970s era of anti-institutional sentiment, they hoped to offer an enlightened, palatable, more humane solution to larger social problems related to health, mental health, justice, and security of the population by applying psychological expertise to institutional design. In turn, Knoblauch argues, architects gained new roles as researchers, organizers, and writers while theories of confinement, territory, and surveillance proliferated. The Architecture of Good Behavior: Psychology and Modern Institutional Design in Postwar America (University of Pittsburgh Press) explores psychological functionalism as a political tool and the architectural projects funded by a postwar nation in its efforts to govern, exert control over, and ultimately pacify its patients, prisoners, and residents. Joy Knoblauch is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan, where she teaches history and theory of architecture as an exploration of architecture's engagement with politics and science. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How do we move police forces from a warrior culture to connecting better with communities they serve? Today I talked to David A. Harris about his new book A City Divided: Race, Fear and the Law in Police Confrontations (Anthem Press, 2020). Harris is a professor at the University of Pittsburgh’s law school and is the leading U.S. authority on racial profiling. Also the author of Profiles in Injustice (2002). he hosts the podcast Criminal Injustice. Topics covered in this episode include: Harris’s vantage point on what the Minnesota legislature got right and only half-right in recently approving a police accountability measure in the wake of the George Floyd killing. Why navigating fear and anger is so hard for both black suspects and the police alike. What role a lack of familiarity – and trust – plays for officers and suspects in trying to avoid escalating their encounters. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. To check out his “Faces of the Week” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When children become entangled with the law, their lives can be disrupted irrevocably. When those children are underrepresented minorities, the potential for disruption is even greater. The Legacy of Racism for Children: Psychology, Law and Public Policy (Oxford University Press) examines issues that arise when minority children's lives are directly or indirectly influenced by law and public policy. Uniquely comprehensive in scope, this trailblazing volume offers cutting-edge chapters on the intersections of race/ethnicity within the context of child maltreatment, child dependency court, custody and adoption, familial incarceration, school discipline and the "school-to-prison pipeline," juvenile justice, police/youth interactions, and jurors' perceptions of child and adolescent victims and defendants. The book also includes chapters focused on troubling situations that are less commonly researched, but growing in importance, including the role of race and racism in child sex trafficking and US immigration law and policy. Thus, individual chapters explore myriad ways in which law and policy shape the lives of marginalized children and adolescents - racial and ethnic minorities - who historically and presently are at heightened risk for experiencing disadvantageous consequences of law and policy. In so doing, The Legacy of Racism for Children can help social scientists to understand and work to prevent the perpetuation of racial discrimination in American laws and public policies. Margaret C. Stevenson is Associate Professor at the University of Evansville. She has published over 30 peer-reviewed articles, chapters, and an edited volume related to jury decision-making. Bette L. Bottoms is Professor of Psychology and Dean Emerita of the Honors College at The University of Illinois at Chicago. She is Fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA) and a past president of APA's Society for Child and Family Policy and Practice and Section on Child Maltreatment. Kelly C. Burke is a doctoral candidate in the Social Psychology Program at The University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research on the influence of prejudice and case evidence (e.g., body-worn camera footage) on juror decision making has been published in peer-reviewed journals and books and funded by the American Psychology-Law Society's Diversity Research Award and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues Grant-in-Aid Award. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A Peoples History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the 1970s and 1980s, a group of Chicago police officers routinely tortured criminal suspects in their custody, while fellow cops, state attorneys and elected officials looked the other way. In his book, Beyond the Usual Beating: The Jon Burge Police Torture Scandal and Social Movements For Police Accountability in Chicago (University of Chicago Press), Andrew Baer explains how the eponymous detective and others hid their violence, and the arduous struggle to get Burge fired and win reparations for survivors. He blends legal and social history with ethnography to chronicle the labyrinthine legal system that concealed this torture, and the challenges of political coalition-building across class, race, and prison walls. The result is a history of the fraying reform discourse with which we live. Andrew S. Baer is assistant professor of history with a secondary appointment in African American studies at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Patrick Reilly studies US history, race, and civilian cooperation with police at Vanderbilt University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

St. Louis, Missouri is the city with the highest rate of police shootings in the United States. It’s the city with an 18 year difference in life expectancy between Black and white neighborhoods which stand just 10 miles apart. It’s the city where, after Mike Brown was shot in 2014, the Black Lives Matter movement was born. It is also, now, the city whose history offers essential lessons about the history of the United States as a whole, thanks to Walter Johnson’s indispensable new book The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States (Basic Books). The book tracks how anti-Blackness in America has long had everything to do with imperialism, working as much by removal as by predation. Imperial racism was at play when 19th-century settlers demanded Native land west of the Mississippi as compensation for abolition, when they tried to make the end of slavery would go hand in hand with the removal of free black people, or when they massacred black workers for strike-breaking instead of organizing across racial divides in the 20th century. However, the book also shows that the city’s radicalism has never been far from the surface. From the 1877 strike where the proletariat literally took control of the city for a day, to the 1930s when Black women led successful multiracial organizing, people have fought the racial capitalist status quo. The status quo has fought back, shapeshifting from genocide to lynching to strike-breaking to redlining, ultimately building white supremacy into the very fabric of the city’s material infrastructure. It is this “structural racism” which we need to understand and unbuild if we are to create truly anti-racist, decolonial futures, and this book is a must-read for everyone – historians, organizers, allies, citizens – interested in taking that first step. Walter Johnson is Winthrop Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Aparna Gopalan is a Ph.D. Candidate in Social Anthropology at Harvard University studying the reproduction of inequality through development projects in rural western India. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Black Lives Matter movement and the policing-related deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and others have struck a nerve worldwide. Our “Global Policing” series aims to capture the protests over systemic racism and policing in their various national forms. In Turkey, for example, a June 19 article in the English edition of DuvaR. … Continue reading "40 Global Policing 1: Hayal Akarsu on Turkish Community Policing (EF, JP)" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Most Gulag scholarship focuses on political prisoners and, as a result, our knowledge of the camps as a lived experience remains relatively incomplete. Criminal Subculture in the Gulag: Prisoner Society in the Stalinist Labour Camps, 1924–53 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020) draws on Gulag journals, song collections, tattoo drawings and dictionaries of slang, to explore the lives of the recidivist criminals and criminal gangs that originated in the Gulag under Stalin. Join us to listen as Mark Vincent maps the Gulag 'penal arc' of prisoners across initiation tests, means of communication, the importance of card playing, punishment rituals, tattooing rituals, and conflict between the vory v zakone and the other prisoners and camp staff. Mark Vincent is an independent scholar who obtained his PhD in 2015 from the University of East Anglia, UK. Samantha Lomb is an Assistant Professor at Vyatka State University in Kirov, Russia. Her research focuses on daily life, local politics and political participation in the Stalinist 1930s. Her book, Stalin’s Constitution: Soviet Participatory Politics and the Discussion of the Draft 1936 Constitution, is now available online. Her research can be viewed here. 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

In this episode, Siobhan talks with Robert T. Chase about his book, We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners’ Rights in Postwar America (UNC Press, 2020). In the early twentieth century, the brutality of southern prisons became a national scandal. Prisoners toiled in grueling, violent conditions while housed in crude dormitories on what were effectively slave plantations. This system persisted until the 1940s when, led by Texas, southern states adopted northern prison design reforms. Texas presented the reforms to the public as modern, efficient, and disciplined. Inside prisons, however, the transition to penitentiary cells only made the endemic violence more secretive, intensifying the labor division that privileged some prisoners with the power to accelerate state-orchestrated brutality and the internal sex trade. Reformers' efforts had only made things worse--now it was up to the prisoners to fight for change. Drawing from three decades of legal documents compiled by prisoners, Chase narrates the struggle to change prison from within. Prisoners forged an alliance with the NAACP to contest the constitutionality of Texas prisons. Behind bars, a prisoner coalition of Chicano Movement and Black Power organizations publicized their deplorable conditions as “slaves of the state” and initiated a prison-made civil rights revolution and labor protest movement. These insurgents won epochal legal victories that declared conditions in many southern prisons to be cruel and unusual--but their movement was overwhelmed by the increasing militarization of the prison system and empowerment of white supremacist gangs that, together, declared war on prison organizers. Told from the vantage point of the prisoners themselves, this book weaves together untold but devastatingly important truths from the histories of labor, civil rights, and politics in the United States as it narrates the transition from prison plantations of the past to the mass incarceration of today. Chase is Associate Professor of History at Stony Brook University This episode is part of a series featuring legal history works from UNC Press. Support for the production of this series was provided by the Versatile Humanists at Duke program. Siobhan M. M. Barco, J.D. explores U.S. legal history at Duke University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Black lives matter. Yet for decades or centuries in America that basic truth has been ignored, denied, violently suppressed. 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 … Continue reading "36 Policing and White Power: (EF, JP) Global Policing Series" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Recent calls for the defunding or abolition of police raise important questions about the legitimacy of state violence and the functions that police are supposed to serve. Criticism of the militarization of police, concerns about the rise of the private security industry, and the long-standing belief that policing should be controlled by municipal governments suggest that police should be civilians who defend the public interest, and that they should be accountable to the communities that they serve. In Violence Work: State Violence and the Limits of Police (Duke University Press, 2018), Micol Seigel exposes the mythical nature of the civilian/military, public/private, and local/national/international boundaries that supposedly delimit the legitimate sphere of policing in a liberal democratic society. Focusing on the employees of the Office of Public Safety, a branch of the State Department that provided technical assistance to police forces in developing countries from 1962 until it was closed amid controversy over its role in aiding despotic governments in 1974, Seigel follows their careers as these violence workers put their knowledge of counter-insurgency to use in US police forces, pursued opportunities working for private security firms protecting the oil industry in places like Alaska and Saudi Arabia, and worked alongside military officers in aid missions to Cold War hotspots in the Global South. As she follows the careers of the policemen, she demonstrates that civilian policing has been militarized from the beginning, that capitalist production relies on state violence to discipline workers and dispossess groups who stand in the way of resource extraction, and that violence workers are rarely accountable to the people they supposedly serve. Violence Work is critical reading for anyone who is interested in rethinking the functions that police should perform in a democratic society. It also weakens the legitimacy of state-sanctioned violence by calling commonly-held ideological distinctions into question. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Challenging incarceration and policing was central to the post-war Black Freedom Movement. In his new book Those Who Know Don't Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State (UNC Press, 2020), Garrett Felber centers the Nation in the Civil Rights Era and the making of the modern carceral state. In doing so, he reveals a multifaceted freedom struggle that focused as much on policing and prisons as on school desegregation and voting rights. The book examines efforts to build broad-based grassroots coalitions among liberals, radicals, and nationalist to oppose the carceral state and struggle for local Black self-determination. It captures the ambiguous place of the Nation of Islam specifically, and Black nationalist organizing more broadly, during an era which has come to redefined by non-violent resistance, desegregation campaigns, and racial liberalism. By provocatively documenting the interplay between law enforcement and Muslim communities, Felber decisively shows state repression and Muslim organizing laid the groundwork for the modern carceral state and the contemporary prison abolition movement which opposes it. Exhaustively researched, the book illuminates new sites and forms of political struggle as Muslims prayed under surveillance in prison yards and used courtroom political theatre to put the state on trial. This history captures familiar figures in new ways Malcolm X the courtroom lawyer and A. Philip Randolph the Harlem coalition builder while highlighting the forgotten organizing of rank and file activists in prisons such as Martin Sostre. This definitive account is an urgent reminder that Islamophobia, state surveillance, and police violence have deep roots in the state repression of Black communities during the mid-20th century. Adam McNeil is a 3rd year Early African American History PhD Student at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A stark disparity exists between black and white youth experiences in the justice system today. Black youths are perceived to be older and less innocent than their white peers. When it comes to incarceration, race trumps class, and even as black youths articulate their own experiences with carceral authorities, many Americans remain surprised by the inequalities they continue to endure. In Presumed Criminal: Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York (NYU Press, 2019), Carl Suddler brings to light a much longer history of the policies and strategies that tethered the lives of black youths to the justice system indefinitely. The criminalization of black youth is inseparable from its racialized origins. In the mid-twentieth century, the United States justice system began to focus on punishment, rather than rehabilitation. By the time the federal government began to address the issue of juvenile delinquency, the juvenile justice system shifted its priorities from saving delinquent youth to purely controlling crime, and black teens bore the brunt of the transition. In New York City, increased state surveillance of predominantly black communities compounded arrest rates during the post–World War II period, providing justification for tough-on-crime policies. Questionable police practices, like stop-and-frisk, combined with media sensationalism, cemented the belief that black youth were the primary cause for concern. Even before the War on Crime, the stakes were clear: race would continue to be the crucial determinant in American notions of crime and delinquency, and black youths condemned with a stigma of criminality would continue to confront the overwhelming power of the state. Adam McNeil is a PhD Student in History at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When Britain went to war in 1914, policemen throughout Great Britain found themselves called upon to perform an ever-increasing range of new tasks that reflected the expanded power of the British state in wartime. In Policing the Home Front, 1914-1918: The Control of the British Population at War (Routledge, 2018), Mary Fraser details the challenges these officers faced and how they worked to carry out their increased responsibilities in straitened circumstances. As Fraser notes, the war imposed new burdens upon the police from the start, as many men quit their posts in order to enlist in the armed forces. To compensate for their absence, auxiliaries were enlisted and women found themselves employed in policing for the first time. These officers were needed as the police were expected to perform a number of new duties, from the administration of wartime separation allowances to dealing with the expanded problems of prostitution, alcohol regulation and youth crime, many of which reflected an expectation by the government that the police could fill much of the void created by the absence of so many men who were serving at the front. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The State of Indiana denies one million applications for healthcare, foodstamps and cash benefits in three years―because a new computer system interprets any mistake as “failure to cooperate.” In Los Angeles, an algorithm calculates the comparative vulnerability of tens of thousands of homeless people in order to prioritize them for an inadequate pool of housing resources. In Pittsburgh, a child welfare agency uses a statistical model to try to predict which children might be future victims of abuse or neglect. Since the dawn of the digital age, decision-making in finance, employment, politics, health and human services has undergone revolutionary change. Today, automated systems―rather than humans―control which neighborhoods get policed, which families attain needed resources, and who is investigated for fraud. While we all live under this new regime of data, the most invasive and punitive systems are aimed at the poor. In Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor (St. Martin's, 2018), Virginia Eubanks systematically investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America. The book is full of heart-wrenching and eye-opening stories, from a woman in Indiana whose benefits are literally cut off as she lays dying to a family in Pennsylvania in daily fear of losing their daughter because they fit a certain statistical profile. The U.S. has always used its most cutting-edge science and technology to contain, investigate, discipline and punish the destitute. Like the county poorhouse and scientific charity before them, digital tracking and automated decision-making hide poverty from the middle-class public and give the nation the ethical distance it needs to make inhumane choices: which families get food and which starve, who has housing and who remains homeless, and which families are broken up by the state. In the process, they weaken democracy and betray our most cherished national values. This deeply researched and passionate book could not be more timely. John Danaher is a lecturer the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is also the host of the wonderful podcast Philosophical Disquisitions. You can find it here on Apple Podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tocqueville and Putnam insist that civil society helps individuals flourish and resist authority, but Daniel C. Mattingly’s decade of research in rural China leads him to conclude that civil society offers officials leverage over citizens that strengthens the state’s coercive capacity. In his book The Art of Political Control in China (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Mattingly argues that civil society can encourage contributions to public goods like roads, schools, and charities, civil associations increase the prestige and authority of local elites who can help insure political compliance. Civil society groups help officials in rural China tamp down protest, requisite land, and enforce mandatory birth quotas. Instead of focusing on oppressive formal institutions such secret police or the military, Mattingly looks to the ways in which civic associations may be used to apply hidden pressure on citizens through informal institutions. Mattingly’s extensive field work, experiments embedded in face-to-face surveys, and datasets from villages point to three ways in which the state uses civil society to coerce. First, the state collects information and tracks behavior – such that the presence of a temple or lineage associations leads to more land requisitions and few protests. Second, the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) coopts local elites by including them in political bodies. These local officials understand which citzens have grievances and are the most likely to mobilize against the state. Last, the state creates infiltrating institutions with street level agents are able to spy, coax, or snitch. This rich book combines detailed qualitative case studies with clear prose. Mattingly provides details for those well-versed in Chinese political systems and translates for political scientists seeking a more nuanced understanding of authoritarianism and civil society. Mattingly is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University. Susan Liebell is associate professor of political science at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Democracy, Intelligent Design, and Evolution: Science for Citizenship (Routledge, 2013). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

America has the largest incarcerated population in the world. This staggering and troubling fact has driven a great deal of scholarship. Much of this research has shown that mass incarceration in America is facilitated by systemic racial discrimination, which disproportionately affects African-American and Latinx communities. Only recently have scholars focused on the role of religion in American prisons. In American Prisons: A Critical Primer on Culture and Conversion to Islam (First Edition Design, 2017), SpearIt, Professor in the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University, brings the subject of incarcerated Muslims into focus. The collection of essays synthesizes SpearIt’s legal and academic work on issues of conversion, radicalization, and Muslim prisoner rights. Overall, the collection demonstrates that prisons are a crucial space for understanding the history of Muslims in America. In our conversation we discussed how Muslims have shaped religious life in prisons, the everyday challenges of incarceration, prison as a center for religious conversion, reasons prisoners chose Islam while incarcerated, prison administrators’ and policy makers’ definitions of radicalization, Muslim hip hop in the age of mass incarceration, incarcerated Latinx communities, and strategies to improve the criminal justice system. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film (Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Professor Talitha LeFlouria, a fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia, discusses her book, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (University of North Carolina Press, 2016) and the lives, labors, and legacies of incarcerated black women and the convict lease system in the early 20th century South. In 1868, the state of Georgia began to make its rapidly growing population of prisoners available for hire. The resulting convict leasing system ensnared not only men but also African American women, who were forced to labor in camps and factories to make profits for private investors. In this vivid work of history, LeFlouria draws from a rich array of primary sources to piece together the stories of these women, recounting what they endured in Georgia's prison system and what their labor accomplished. LeFlouria argues that African American women's presence within the convict lease and chain-gang systems of Georgia helped to modernize the South by creating a new and dynamic set of skills for black women. At the same time, female inmates struggled to resist physical and sexual exploitation and to preserve their human dignity within a hostile climate of terror. This revealing history redefines the social context of black women's lives and labor in the New South and allows their stories to be told for the first time. Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenstein Institute's Project on Gender in the Global Community at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Southern Labor History Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Long-term solitary confinement meets the legal definition of torture, and yet solitary confinement is used in every state in the United States. People are placed in solitary confinement for a variety of reasons, and long-term solitary confinement can have a harmful effect on mental and physical health. Reform is happening, but the use of solitary confinement is still a problem in the US. Taylor Pendergrass, a lawyer who works on criminal justice reform for the ACLU, has spent over a decade collecting stories of people who have been impacted by the criminal justice system. Along with Mateo Hoke, he has co-edited the book Six by Ten: Stories from Solitary (Haymarket, 2018). In addition to a primer and brief history of solitary confinement, the book consists of personal history narratives. The stories are by people who have spent time in solitary confinement, family members, and people who have worked in prison systems. Voices of people who are, or have been, in solitary confinement are rare to hear, because they oppressed and difficult to access. The stories in this book are powerful, nuanced, and complex, and give readers a better understanding of the impact of solitary confinement on people’s lives. In this interview, Pendergrass describes the conditions and psychological impact of solitary both during and after incarceration. He also discusses the history and rational behind solitary confinement in the US, progress toward criminal justice reform, and ways people can help. Resources mentioned in this interview: -NY Times Articles about solitary confinement in Colorado by Rick Raemisch here and here. -Pen Pal program with people in solitary confinement here. -Article by Craig Haney, Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz, an overview of research on the psychological impact of solitary confinement here. Debbie Sorensen, Ph.D. is a licensed psychologist practicing in Denver, Colorado and a co-host of the podcast Psychologists Off The Clock. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices