New Books in Policing, Incarceration, and Reform

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

Following World War II, in the midst of global decolonization and intensifying freedom struggles within its borders, the United States developed a worldwide police assistance program that aimed to crush left radicalism and extend its racial imperium. Although policing had long been part of the US colonial project, this new roving cadre of advisors funded, supplied, and trained foreign counterinsurgency forces on an unprecedented scale, developing a global cop-consciousness that spanned from Los Angeles to Saigon. In ​Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing​ (University of California Press, 2019), Stuart Schrader makes the compelling case that the growth of carceral state is just one front of a “discretionary empire” that persists today. Badges Without Borders​ traces the tangled routes of police bureaucrats as they brought their munitions, methods, and money to precincts at home and abroad, and obviates the divide between “foreign” and “domestic” policy. Ultimately, Schrader suggests that US global power has relied on police reform to endlessly reproduce an ideology of “security.” Patrick Reilly​ is a PhD student in US History at Vanderbilt University. He studies police, community organizations, and urban development. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Andrea Pitzer talks about her book One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps (Little, Brown and Company, 2017), one of Smithsonian Magazine’s Ten Best History Books for 2017. While concentration camps may not seem to have much to do with travel and exploration, travel and forced detention are joined in strange and important ways. For over 100 years, at least one concentration camp has existed somewhere on Earth. First used as battlefield strategy, camps have evolved with each passing decade, in the scope of their effects and the savage practicality with which governments have employed them. Even in the twenty-first century, as we continue to reckon with the magnitude and horror of the Holocaust, history tells us we have broken our own solemn promise of "never again." Pitzer’s work has been featured in The Washington Post, USA Today, Slate, and Lapham’s Quarterly. To research the book, Pitzer traveled to a dozen countries on four different continents. She talks about history, travel, and offers a preview of her new book project on the Arctic. Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book, The Investigator: Demons of the Balkan War (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), Vladimir Dzuro, a retired Czech police commissioner, provides a first-hand look at the establishment of the International Crime Tribunal for Yugoslavia to prosecute Balkan war criminals. In contrast to the Nuremberg trials, these trials relied upon the traditional work of police detectives to provide the evidence and witnesses for the trials in the Hague. Through his thoughtful yet tantalizing narrative, Dzuro humanizes both the victims and the perpetrators of these late twentieth century acts of genocide. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book The War for Muddy Waters: Pirates, Terrorists, Traffickers, and Maritime Security (Naval Institute Press, 2019), Joshua Tallis uses the “broken windows” theory of policing to reexamine the littorals, developing a multidimensional view of the maritime threat environment. With a foundational case study of the Caribbean, Tallis explores the connections between the narcotics trade, trafficking, money laundering, and weak institutions. He finds that networks are leveraged for multiple streams of illicit activity, but enforcement efforts sometimes only focus on a single threat. Additionally, Tallis compares these findings in two comparative case studies in the Gulf of Guinea and the Straits of Malacca and Singapore. Hybrid threats emerge as a theme in these case studies, marked by the fusion of criminality and terrorism and conventional and unconventional tactics. Ultimately, Tallis recommends actors in the maritime environment evaluate threats in this multidimensional context and collaborate with communities to achieve overarching strategic objectives. Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Recent scholarship locates the origins of mass incarceration in national anticrime policy from 1960 to 1990, and has drastically reframed the “punitive turn” in American politics as bipartisan. But how then, do we reckon with the fact that most police policy and funding is determined locally? In his new book, Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago From Red Summer to Black Power (UNC Press, 2019), Simon Balto argues that local police department policies and procedures left black Chicagoans “overpoliced and underprotected” far before mass incarceration began. Machinations in municipal politics is therefore essential to understanding how and why Chicago has been a flashpoint in national conversations about police. Building a picture of the carceral state from the bottom up, Balto shows that it was not Lyndon Johnson’s War on Crime, or Richard Nixon’s War on Drugs that turned the Chicago Police into an abusive and racist institution, but rather city and police officials’ response to the Great Migrations. Police violence is therefore cast not as the product of legislation, but of mendacious discourses of black criminality that police have acted upon for over a century. Patrick Reilly is a PhD student in History at Vanderbilt University. He studies US policing and surveillance in domestic and transnational contexts. 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

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

In 1970s America, politicians began "getting tough" on drugs, crime, and welfare. These campaigns helped expand the nation's penal system, discredit welfare programs, and cast blame for the era's social upheaval on racialized deviants that the state was not accountable to serve or represent. Getting Tough: Welfare and Imprisonment in 1970s America (Princeton University Press, 2017) sheds light on how this unprecedented growth of the penal system and the evisceration of the nation's welfare programs developed hand in hand. Julilly Kohler-Hausmann shows that these historical events were animated by struggles over how to interpret and respond to the inequality and disorder that crested during this period. When social movements and the slowing economy destabilized the U.S. welfare state, politicians reacted by repudiating the commitment to individual rehabilitation that had governed penal and social programs for decades. In its place, they championed strategies of punishment, surveillance, and containment. The architects of these tough strategies insisted they were necessary, given the failure of liberal social programs and the supposed pathological culture within poor African American and Latino communities. Kohler-Hausmann rejects this explanation and describes how the spectacle of enacting punitive policies convinced many Americans that social investment was counterproductive and the "underclass" could be managed only through coercion and force. Getting Tough illuminates this narrative through three legislative cases: New York's adoption of the 1973 Rockefeller drug laws, Illinois's and California's attempts to reform welfare through criminalization and work mandates, and California's passing of a 1976 sentencing law that abandoned rehabilitation as an aim of incarceration. Spanning diverse institutions and weaving together the perspectives of opponents, supporters, and targets of punitive policies, Getting Tough offers new interpretations of dramatic transformations in the modern American state. Stephen Colbrook is a graduate student at University College London, where he is researching a dissertation on the interaction between HIV/AIDS and state policy-making. This work will focus on the political and policy-making side of the epidemic and aims to compare the different contexts of individual states, such as California, Florida, and Illinois. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The 2018 election of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil has brought the issues of police violence, racial discrimination, and misogyny to the fore. Jaime Alves’s book the Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) shows that, from the perspective of Black Brazilians, these forces have deep roots in the nation’s history. Alves makes a powerful contribution to urban anthropology, describing the spatial contours of “Brazilian Apartheid” in Sao Paulo, the role of police violence in the constitution of the city’s racial-spatial order, and the ways that national sovereignty is exercised on individual bodies. Richly ethnographic, The Anti-Black City explores these themes through an account of the lives and activism of black residents of Sao Paulo’s favelas. In this episode, Jaime Alves talks with Jacob Doherty about how his background shaped the research leading to the book, about the entanglement of neoliberal moral government through community and the deployment of police terror, and about his conceptual engagements with Afro-pessimist philosophy. Jaime Alves is assistant professor of sociology and anthropology at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York and a research affiliate at the Centro de Estudios Afrodiasporicos at Universidad Icesi, Colombia. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas, Austin. His work has appeared in the Journal of Black Studies, Antipode, Journal of Latin American Studies, Identities, and Critical Sociology. Jacob Doherty is a research associate in urban mobility at the Transport Studies Unit, University of Oxford, and, most recently, the co-editor Labor Laid Waste, a special issue of International Labor and Working Class History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How the rise of the car, the symbol of American personal freedom, inadvertently led to ever more intrusive policing-with disastrous consequences for racial equality in our criminal justice system. When Americans think of freedom, they often picture the open road. Yet nowhere are we more likely to encounter the long arm of the law than in our cars. Sarah Seo reveals how the rise of the automobile led us to accept-and expect-pervasive police power. As Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom (Harvard University Press, 2019) makes clear, this radical transformation in the nature and meaning of American freedom has had far-reaching political and legal consequences. Before the twentieth century, most Americans rarely came into contact with police officers. But with more and more drivers behind the wheel, police departments rapidly expanded their forces and increased officers' authority to stop citizens who violated traffic laws. The Fourth Amendment-the constitutional protection against unreasonable searches and seizures-did not effectively shield individuals from government intrusion while driving. Instead, jurists interpreted the amendment narrowly. In a society dependent on cars, everyone-the law-breaking and law-abiding alike-would be subject to discretionary policing. Seo overturns prevailing interpretations of the Warren Court's due process revolution. The justices' efforts to protect Americans did more to accommodate than to limit police intervention, and the new criminal procedures inadvertently sanctioned discrimination by officers of the law. Constitutional challenges to traffic stops largely failed, and motorists "driving while black" had little recourse to question police demands. Seo shows how procedures designed to safeguard us on the road ultimately undermined the nation's commitment to equal protection before the law. Stephen Colbrook is a graduate student at University College London, where he is researching a dissertation on the interaction between HIV/AIDS and state policy-making. This work will focus on the political and policy-making side of the epidemic and aims to compare the different contexts of individual states, such as California, Florida, and New Jersey. Stephen can be contacted at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her new book, This Is Really War: The Incredible True Story of a Navy Nurse POW in the Occupied Philippines (Chicago Review Press, 2019), Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi presents the largely unknown story of the US Navy nurses captured by the Japanese in the Philippines during World War II. Focusing on what she calls the “twelve anchors,” Lucchesi examines the lives of these women as they lived in prison camps throughout the Philippines, while at the same time continuing to work as nurses, and often the only medical professionals, in each camp. Focusing on the story of navy nurse Dorothy Still, Lucchesi starts at the attack on Pearl Harbor, chronicling the Japanese attack on the Philippines and the capture of thousands of Americans, including Dorothy. The narrative follows Dorothy, Chief Nurse Laura Cobb, and ten other navy nurses who continued to work in a makeshift hospital in the civilian prison camp they were sent to. Recounting their experiences with death, disease, malnutrition, starvation, and overcrowded conditions, This is Really War, follows these “twelve anchors” during the over two years that they spent imprisoned until the prison camps were liberated. 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 Street Democracy: Vendors, Violence, and Public Space in Late Twentieth-Century Mexico (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), Sandra C. Mendiola García analyzes independent union activism among street vendors facing state repression and the displacing forces of neoliberalism. Set in Puebla, Mexico’s fourth largest city, Street Democracy traces how these informal workers were politicized in the 1960s and 1970s and collaborated with working-class, leftwing student activists. After forming the Unión Popular de Vendedores Ambulantes in 1973, the vendors maintained their independence from the ruling party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional. Mendiola documents the UPVA’s varied strategies of resistance and democratic practices as well as the forms of state violence inflicted upon the rank-and-file members and leadership. She shows that Mexico’s Dirty War was waged not only on dissident students, guerrilla organizations, and peasant groups, but also on these mobilized street vendors who paid a high price for their refusal to collaborate with the ruling party. Street Democracy is also a history of the right to public space in the neoliberalizing city. Mendiola reveals how historical preservation efforts spearheaded by Puebla’s elites served to displace the city’s poor- and working-class citizens from the urban center, making way for transnational capital to move into the most commercially viable zones. As street vendors were pushed toward the city’s margins, the UPVA nevertheless has managed to adapt and survive to the present. Drawing from varied sources, including municipal records, secret police documents, and oral histories, Mendiola’s Street Democracy encourages readers to rethink what we know about labor organizing in twentieth-century Mexico and makes important contributions to the histories of student activism, democracy, and urban development. Rachel Grace Newman has a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University. Her dissertation was titled “Transnational Ambitions: Student Migrants and the Making of a National Future in Twentieth-Century Mexico.” She is also the author of a book on a binational program for migrant children whose families divided their time between Michoacán, Mexico and Watsonville, California. She is on Twitter (@rachelgnew). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In recent years, the treatment of African Americans by police departments around the country has come under increased public scrutiny. As any student of the longer historical relationship between law enforcement and people of color will know, this relationship has been the subject of tension and scrutiny at many moments in the past as well. In his new book, Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Max Felker-Kantor examines this multi-racial relationship in the key city of Los Angeles. The book begins with the uprising of the Watts neighborhood in August 1965, where decades of frustration with urban poverty and racial discrimination along with anger at racist police practices exploded in violence. The book then traces the subsequent decades of policing and anti-police abuse activism. During this time, reforms were common, yet real change was often difficult to achieve as symbolized by the 1992 rebellion, sparked by some of the same issues that caused the previous Watts uprising. In this episode of the podcast, Felker-Kantor discusses this history of policing and importantly, the way LA communities of color mobilized to reshape law enforcement in the city. He highlights both the achievements and limitations of their reform. He also discusses both the possibilities and limits of urban political reformers working within city government and the ways in which the police themselves became a political force. Finally, Felker-Kantor discusses some of the little-used archival sources he examined for this project in light of the notorious difficulty historians have faced obtaining access to law enforcement records for histories of policing. Christine Lamberson is an Associate Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th century U.S. political and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With prison reform a topic of international conversation and debate, Marica Morgan’s Black Women Prison Employees: The Intersectionality of Gender and Race offers an in-depth and unique analysis of a population largely lost in these debates and discussions: black women. By centering their experiences, Morgan offers and intersectional and psychodynamic examination of the prison worker and the organizational nature of the prison. This book offers added insight into not only the prison system as a place of employment, but also for any white-male-dominated organization. Taking the reader through the experiences of black women prison employees, Morgan highlights the importance of intersectional qualitative methodology when investigating institutional or organizational culture. Black Women Prison Employees is a necessary and timely read for policymakers and researchers interested in organizational structures and culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his most new book Fight the Power: African Americans and the Long History of Police Brutality in New York City (NYU Press, 2018), Clarence Taylor, dean of the history of the civil rights movement in New York, looks at black resistance to police brutality in the city, and institutional efforts to hold the NYPD accountable, since the late 1930s and '40s. ​“Many people think that police brutality is a recent phenomenon,” says Taylor, professor emeritus at Baruch College and The Graduate Center of City University of New York. But, in fact, it has a long, sordid history, going back even further than the years covered in this new book. And long before the era of cellphones, black newspapers did their own investigations when men, women, and children were beaten or killed by the police. (Louis Lomax, the first African-American journalist to appear regularly on television news, commented in the early 1960s that, if not for police brutality, the black press would have "considerable blank space.") Taylor also looks at the history of the Civilian Complaint Review Board, first proposed after the Harlem riots of 1935 and 1943. La Guardia and the mayors who followed refused to challenge the NYPD’s power, which is why it took nearly fifty years to establish an independent public agency to investigate allegations of abuse. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When "Dirty Harry" first premiered in 1971, it was both praised and condemned for its portrayal of a rogue policeman fighting crime by ignoring many of the rules and procedures of the profession. Yet director Don Siegel denied any attempt to make a political statement with the film. Joe Street’s book Dirty Harry’s America: Clint Eastwood, Harry Callahan, and the Conservative Backlash (University Press of Florida, 2016) discusses all five "Dirty Harry" films and helps to better explain the importance of them both cinematically and socially. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Criminal justice, policing, and mass incarceration have gained significant political attention recently, and the problems of these systems have drawn increasingly frequent calls for reform from the right and left. Historians have turned their attention to illuminating the roots of these institutions. While many historians have focused on the 20th century, others have examined the emergence of urban professional police departments in the 19th century. Adam Malka, an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma, takes these questions to the antebellum period to illuminate how these new police forces emerged in an age of liberal ideals and emancipation. In The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Malka examines the development of the Baltimore police department in the years leading up to and following the Civil War. Malka highlights several unexpected features of this development. He shows the continuity and connections between antebellum vigilante justice and the professional police force. Further, he shows the emerging image of black criminality in the post-Civil War era was not opposed to the liberal ideals that came with the war, but rather was integral to them. In this episode of the podcast, Malka discusses the insights of the book. He explains why Baltimore is a particularly apt city for studying the rise of professional policing and how those new law enforcement institutions built on and worked in tandem with the vigilante policing that came before. He also discusses how ideas of property shaped policing, the ideals of liberalism, and the image of black criminality. We also discuss the challenges of researching this topic and, finally, conclude by considering how this more nuanced history might inform our understanding of current controversies surrounding policing. Christine Lamberson is an Associate Professor of History at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching focuses on 20th century U.S. political and cultural history. She’s currently working on a book manuscript about the role of violence in shaping U.S. political culture in the 1960s and 1970s. She can be reached at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The history of Japanese American incarceration during World War II is a well-known topic in American history and has been the subject of countess books and articles. In Nature Behind Barbed Wire: An Environmental History of the Japanese American Incarceration (Oxford University Press, 2018), Connie Chiang reveals hidden layers of the experiences of Japanese Americans interned by their government during the 1940s. Chiang, a professor of history and environmental studies at Bowdoin College, argues that the non-human environment mediated every facet of the detainees lives from their labor to their recreation to the feelings of isolation and despondency they felt. Many of the thousands forcibly removed to incarceration camps had moved from the verdant Pacific coast to the stark deserts and mountains of the interior West. This movement from one climate to another profoundly influenced the meaning and experience of incarceration and provoked emotions ranging from sadness and betrayal to resilience and even occasional joy. Chiang’s book is an excellent reminder of environmental history’s power to reveal new stories about old histories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To be quite honest, I had no idea there were any Spanish prisoners at Mauthausen. That’s perhaps an unusual way to begin a blog post. But it reflects a real gap in the literature about the Holocaust, one that Sara J. Brenneis identifies and fills in her new book Spaniards in Mauthausen: Representations of a Nazi Concentration Camp, 1940-2015 (University of Toronto Press, 2018). Brenneis is interested in the ways Spanish prisoners (most of whom had fled Spain the aftermath of the Republican defeat in the Spanish Civil War) experienced the camp. She writes movingly about the efforts of the Spaniards to use their position as privileged prisoners to preserve records of their experience, records that give us great insight into their lives. But she’s especially concerned with the way this experience was remembered. As she points out, that memory reflected the distinctive political and historical context of Spain. Some accounts by survivors and researchers did appear, particularly in the period immediately after Franco’s death. But Franco and his legacy ensured that public accounts would be both rare and circumspect. Only recently has there been a resurgence of interest in Spain, one that brings with it both historical and methodological experimentation and investigation. It’s a fascinating book, one that sheds new light on an experience most scholars have passed over. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How did prisons become a tool of racial inequality? Using historical data, Heather Schoenfeld’s new book Building the Prison State: Race and the Politics of Mass Incarceration (University of Chicago Press, 2018) “answers how the United States became a nation of prisons and prisoners” (p. 5). Schoenfeld exposes the reader to the historical development of prisons and policy development. She focuses specifically on Florida as a case study to show how prisons become racialized social systems. Interestingly, much of the crime control we have today grew out of racialized punishments and unrest shaped during the civil rights era. Bringing us all the way up to 2016, Schoenfeld sheds light on how prisons developed over time, even as crime rates have fallen. Often incentivized as a source of economic potential in rural areas, prisons have a unique history in the U.S. and this book uncovers that fascinating history. This book will be of interest to Sociologists and Criminologists, but also Political Scientists and social activists. Sections of the book could be used in an undergraduate Criminology course or a course specifically focused on race and crime. This text would also be critically important to have in a graduate level Criminology course. Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What happened inside NKVD interrogation rooms during the Great Terror? How did the perpetrators feel when the Soviet state turned on them in 1938 during “the purge of the purgers?” In her newest book, Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial: Scenes from the Great Terror in Soviet Ukraine (Oxford University Press, 2017),... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you look at the history of punishment (at least in the West), what you’ll see is that we’ve gone from a penal regime that used (inter alia) physical violence—whipping, beating, branding, amputation, and killing—to one that uses confinement. It is a mark of our “civility” that we no longer “hurt” people to get them to do what we want; instead, we put them in jails and prisons. We sentence them to “do time,” that time being a period of confinement away from, well, pretty much everybody. In her thought-provoking book Sentencing in Time (Amherst College Press, 2017), Linda Ross Meyer examines “doing time.” What, she asks, does it really mean to “do time” and does “doing time” really do what we say it does? Her answers are, to say the least, disturbing. “Doing time” means being sentenced to meaninglessness (something humans don’t like at all) and, no, it really doesn’t do much good at all beyond removing potential malefactors from our midst for a period of time—no “reforming” is really accomplished. Her conclusion: the current penal regime, insofar as it is inhumane and ineffective, is badly broken. By the way, this is an open-access book. You can get it for free here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Who benefits from mass incarceration in the U.S.? In her new book Inside Private Prisons: An American Dilemma in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Columbia University Press, 2017), Lauren-Brooke Eisen explain how, when and why the for-profit prison system emerged, the ways in which it functions throughout the criminal justice system today, and what we might do to improve it. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics and 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 People’s 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 University Press, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How do systems of incarceration influence racial sorting inside and outside of prisons? And how do the social structures within prisons spill out into neighborhoods? In his new book, Stick Together and Come Back Home: Racial Sorting and the Spillover of Carceral Identity (University of California Press, 2018), Patrick Lopez-Aguado answers these questions and more. Focusing on a juvenile detention center, an alternative education center, and a job placement center in California, Lopez-Aguado uses his ethnographic data and interviews to better understand sorting within prisons. Finding that prisons sort inmates based on race, geographical location/neighborhoods, and connections inside the prison, these group labels often have negative consequences inside and outside prison walls. This book also speaks to other issues of incarceration, including “secondary prisonization”, or how incarceration affects families of the incarcerated, as well as the lingering effects of incarceration on the individual after they leave. Within the system, respondents often rely on “cliquing” up for survival and comradery with both style and space serving important roles in constructing identities. Lopez-Aguado pays particular attention to the ways in which race and gender are defined not only by other inmates but also by the system itself. Overall, this book presents a holistic view of the “carceral social order” and the consequences for those inside and outside its walls. This book is interesting and accessible to a wide audience; key terms and concepts are defined clearly and given thorough examples. This book would fit perfectly into a Criminology course at the graduate level and could be the basis for an upper level undergraduate Criminology course. Social stratification and race scholars will also find this book of interest. Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A History of Infamy: Crime, Truth, and Justice in Mexico (University of California Press, 2017) explores the definitive changes that the justice system as well as criminal ideas and practices underwent during the 1920s-1950s. For his most recent book, Pablo Piccato investigated spaces, actors, and fictions that shaped the complicated relationship between crime, justice, and truth during the consolidation of the post-revolution Mexican state. Through a series of compelling arguments, the author shows how impunity, the lack of transparency in judicial processes, and infamy are related to a constant quest for truth and justice that the state could not provide to Mexicans. From the abolition of the jury system in the 20s, to the emergence of crime fiction, the author shows that men and women, the press, detectives, policemen, and even murderers themselves, shaped both ideas and practices in regards to violence, law-breaking, and the normalization of injustice in the country. Pamela Fuentes is Assistant Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department, Pace University-NYC campus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book, Barbed-Wire Imperialism: Britain’s Empire of Camps, 1876-1903 (University of California Press, 2017), Aidan Forth employs a comparative and trans-imperial approach to map a global network of camps established by Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Between 1876 and 1903, officials set up famine, plague, and wartime concentration camps across India and South Africa in response to a number of interconnected global emergencies. Situating these imperial camps within a longer tradition of Victorian reforms, Forth argues that, while the camps ostensibly provided care and relief for millions of inmates, they simultaneously functioned as sites of social control and confinement. In this way, Barbed-Wire Imperialism challenges existing understandings of British concentration camps, recasting them not as exceptional wartime measures, but as ubiquitous tools of imperial governance. Aidan Forth is an Assistant Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago, where he teaches courses on modern British history, colonialism, transnational urban history and European urban history. Jess Clark is an Assistant Professor of History at Brock University (St. Catharines, Ontario). She is currently writing a history of the beauty business in Victorian London. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The United States leads the world in incarceration. That’s a problem, especially the disproportionate impact of “mass incarceration” on low-income men of color. In their new book Start Here: A Roadmap to Reducing Mass Incarceration (The New Press, 2018), Greg Berman and Julian Adler take us though a series of concrete, practical, and practicable steps that we could take to radically reduce the number of people we incarcerate while, at the same time, making our communities healthier and safer. Listen in. Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics and 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 People’s 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 University Press, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How does the juvenile justice system impact the lives of the young people that go through it? In her new book, Trapped in a Vice: The Consequences of Confinement for Young People (Rutgers University Press, 2018), Alexandra Cox uses interviews and ethnographic data to analyze the juvenile justice system and incarceration. While the book focuses specifically on New York’s justice system, the take-aways and Cox’s analyses are relevant for anyone interested in incarceration in general. Using the voices and experiences of those she interviews to articulate her findings, Cox points out that young people often suffer the most in systems of social inequality. She elaborates clearly on concepts and main take-aways through the book, from the idea that these young people are expected to mature within an institution, and how this impacts their development. Cox uses really powerful examples and pinpoints important concepts for us to think further about: the definition of worthiness (i.e. worthy of “saving”), being ungovernable (i.e. being uncontrollable), the idea of reformation systems as taking care of “other people’s children,” and the ethos of personal responsibly to youth who cannot even vote yet. The stories from the book show how it’s easy to get into trouble and very difficult to get out. This book will be enjoyed by Sociologists and Criminologists in general, but also by social workers, those working in the area of incarceration, in addition to anyone interested in developmental psychology within the context of incarceration. This book would be a great addition to any higher level undergraduate or entry level graduate course in criminology because of its clear organization and presentation of arguments. Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As immigration from Mexico to the United States grew through the 1970s and 1980s, the Border Patrol, police, and other state agents exerted increasing violence against ethnic Mexicans in San Diego’s volatile border region. In response, many San Diego activists rallied around the leadership of the small-scale print shop owner Herman Baca in the Chicano movement to empower Mexican Americans through Chicano self-determination. The combination of increasing repression and Chicano activism gradually produced a new conception of ethnic and racial community that included both established Mexican Americans and new Mexican immigrants. In Raza Si, Migra No: Chicano Movement Struggles for Immigrant Rights in San Diego (University of North Carolina Press, 2017), Jimmy Patino narrates the rise of this Chicano/Mexicano consciousness and the dawning awareness that Mexican Americans and Mexicans would have to work together to fight border enforcement policies that subjected Latinos of all statuses to legal violence. By placing the Chicano and Latino civil rights struggle on explicitly transnational terrain, Patino fundamentally reorients the understanding of the Chicano movement. Ultimately, Patio tells the story of how Chicano/Mexicano politics articulated an abolitionist position on immigration–going beyond the agreed upon assumptions shared by liberals and conservatives alike that deportations are inherent to any solutions to the still burgeoning immigration debate. Jimmy Patino is Assistant Professor of Chicano and Latino studies at the University of Minnesota. His broader research and teaching interests include Comparative Ethnic Studies, Chicano/a-Latino/a History, diaspora/transnationalism/borderlands, social movements and political mobilizations, and Cultural Studies. Lori A. Flores is an Associate Professor of History at Stony Brook University (SUNY) and the author of Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement (Yale University Press, out in paperback May 2018). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we talked to Dr. Anna Muller about her latest book, If the Walls Could Speak: Inside a Women’s Prison in Communist Poland (Oxford University Press, 2017). Using archival research as well as oral interviews with many of the women in her book, Muller paints a portrait of life within the walls of Polish prisons for political prisoners. From harrowing tales of interrogation, to the creation of friendships that outlast the length of prison sentences, Muller’s work illustrates how female political prisoners adapted to and survived lengthy prison sentences for various “political” crimes. Muller discusses the interrogation process the women experienced, how they adapted to life behind bars, the records written by spies placed in the cells with the political prisoners, and how the women attempted to redefine themselves within an environment that controlled their daily lives. Muller’s work is a fascinating look at women as subjects in the Communist period of Polish history as well as a glimpse into women as subjects within the penal system. Dr. Muller is an Assistant Professor of history and the Frank and Mary Padzieski Endowed Professor in Polish/Polish American/Eastern European Studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon is an adjunct history instructor and independent scholar near Houston, Texas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her new book, The Battle Within: POWs in Postwar Australia (NewSouth Books, 2018), Christina Twomey, Professor of History at Monash University, explores the “battle within,” the individual and collective challenge of rehabilitating Australian prisoners of war in the post-war decades. Using a variety of sources, including memoirs and the archives of the Prisoners of War Trust Fund, Twomey argues that the commemorations of the 1980s and more recent decades were actually a change from the quiet decades of mid century, when the country struggled to address the needs of its returning servicemen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alex Vitale is a Professor of Sociology and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College. He has written for a number of popular publications including the New York Times, New York Daily News, USA Today, and the Nation. His newest book The End of Policing is out now from Verso press. The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What are the lives of young incarcerated Latinas like? And what were their lives like before and after their incarceration? In his new book, Caught Up: Girls, Surveillance, and Wrap-Around Incarceration (University of California Press, 2017), Jerry Flores explores these questions and more through ethnographic research along with interviews, focus groups, and collection of secondary data. Flores asks the reader to contemplate the ways in which wraparound services may actually be aiding in wraparound incarceration for these young women. By taking a life course approach, Flores gives a rich understanding of how these young women end up in their current institutions, from early histories of abuse and drug problems, then investigates how their lives change upon incarceration. Often, these young women are constantly monitored and punished, with the alternative day school mirroring incarceration in many ways. Following a rich history of feminist research, Flores considers how the criminal justice system is gendered, why we consider women’s particular activities as deviant, and the intersectionality of race, class, and gender in the everyday lives of these young women. This book gives a clear, deep, and insightful picture of the lived experiences of this often hidden population. This book would be perfect for any undergraduate Criminology class, as the writing is clear and accessible to a wide audience. The stories of these young women would be compelling in any graduate level Criminology or Social Stratification class. This book is also a must-read for anyone working in either wrap-around services or in the prison system. Sarah E. Patterson is a Sociology postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Claire Schmidt is not a prison worker, rather she is a folklorist and an Assistant Professor at Missouri Valley College. However, many members of her extended family in her home state of Wisconsin either were or are prison workers and it is their work-related humor that inspired this book. If You Don’t Laugh, You’ll Cry: The Occupational Humor of White Wisconsin Prison Workers (University of Wisconsin Press, 2017) is based on multiple interviews which Schmidt conducted during a decade or more, and also on her memories of hearing relatives talk about their working lives to great comedic effect at family gatherings over the years. Schmidt’s analysis provides many different examples of the ways in which humor can be deployed by prison workers. For example, it can be a means of acclimatizing recent recruits to their new roles as prison officers; it can alleviate the long stretches of tedium that characterize prison work, as well as offer a way to cope with the periods of extremely high stress which punctuate that tedium; it can help officers negotiate the boundaries between their working and their non-working lives; and it can help them to maintain manageable relationships with—and exercise control over—the inmates under their watch. In presenting her research, Schmidt engages with a range of previous folkloristic studies of work-placed culture. She also situates her subject within a problematic institutional landscape. She highlights the fact that the Wisconsin prison system has the highest incarceration rate of black men in the United States, describing it as a clear example of ongoing and systematic social injustice at the state level (5) and an oppressive structure of institutionalized racism and class warfare that affects both inmates and prison workers (11). She also attends to popular preconceptions about correctional officers which often depicts them as sadistic bullies. Whilst some could be described as such, Schmidt ultimately argues that casting prison workers in the public role of the bad guys keeps the hostile public focus on the relatively powerless individual prison worker as the source of oppression and racism, which deflects the focus of public critique and outrage from the larger social and political institutions that maintain oppression and racism (13). Rachel Hopkin is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio producer and is currently a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the most important developments in Holocaust Studies over the past couple decades has been one of scale. Rather than focus on decision making at the national or regional level, scholars are immersing themselves in the deep history of a small town or camp. In doing so you may miss the debates of diplomats and politicians. But you get a much better idea of how people actually experienced the Holocaust. Omer Bartov’s new book Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (Simon and Schuster, 2018) is a superb example of this trend. Bartov spent two decades immersed in archives across the world. He knows his characters, Polish, Jewish, German and Ukrainian, inside and out. His explanations for their actions and descriptions are fully convincing because they are so fully imagined and described. It is because of this attention to detail that his conclusions are so sobering. He describes policeman, soldiers, neighbors and victims living lives that were intertwined. The killers here were not engaged in some anonymous, industrial process. Instead, they killed maids, and seamstresses, former classmates and colleagues. They lived in a world where the killing is only one aspect of their lives, one often subsumed in the routine of their jobs, in the community of card playing and drinking, and in their romantic adventures. They lived in a world where there was never a shortage of people willing to shoot to kill. It’s a wonderful book, one that I recommend highly. Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices