Crime and criminology Books

Book SynopsisOn the morning of September 15, 1963, a bomb exploded outside the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young girls. Thirty-two years later, stymied by a code of silence and an imperfect and often racist legal system, only one person, Robert “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss, had been convicted in the murders, though a wider conspiracy was suspected. With many key witnesses and two suspects already dead, there seemed little hope of bringing anyone else to justice. But in 1995 the FBI and local law enforcement reopened the investigation in secret, led by detective Ben Herren of the Birmingham Police Department and special agent Bill Fleming of the FBI. For over a year, Herren and Fleming analyzed the original FBI files on the bombing and activities of the Ku Klux Klan, then began a search for new evidence. Their first interview—with Klansman Bobby Frank Cherry—broke open the case, but not in the way they expected. Told by a longtime officer of the Birmingham Police Department, Last Chance for Justice is the inside story of one of the most infamous crimes of the civil rights era. T. K. Thorne follows the ups and downs of the investigation, detailing how Herren and Fleming identified new witnesses and unearthed lost evidence. With tenacity, humor, dedication, and some luck, the pair encountered the worst and best in human nature on their journey to find justice, and perhaps closure, for the citizens of Birmingham. Trade Review"Thorne's story is a stunning reminder of just how tough the fight for freedom -- and justice -- really is." -- Publishers Weekly"This is a story that desperately needed to be told, to be shared." -- Alabama Booksmith"This is an important examination of the Birmingham bombing on its fiftieth anniversary."-- Booklist"Really masterful. It tells me things I didn't know about a story we all know a lot about. . . . A very compact, impactful narrative." --Robin deMonia, Birmingham News

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Book SynopsisThrough the centuries, prisons were closed institutions, full of secrets and shrouded in mystery. But modern media culture has opened the gates. Dawn Cecil explores decades of popular culture—from Golden Age Hollywood films to YouTube videos, from newspapers to beer labels, hip-hop music, and children's books—to reveal how prison imagery shapes our understanding of who commits crimes, why, and how the criminal justice system should respond.Trade ReviewEngaging and revealing.... With authority and clarity, Cecil provides a sensitive analysis of the popular spectacle of prisons in US culture today. Should be required reading for anyone who wishes to understand why society thinks the way it does about prisons, prisoners, guards, and punishment. Provides a fresh and insightful look into representation of prisons in contemporary television and film. Demonstrates how media depictions of prison life began, how images have changed over time, and how media stories emotionally manipulate and influence public perceptions about punishment and incarceration.... The author challenges educators and students to find ways to create more representative images of prison life as a more complete way of understanding prison subcultures An excellent overiew of the primary forms of media representation [of prison life].... Cecil [also] makes some provocative and powerful arguments.

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Book SynopsisExactly what role does gender play in crime, and in the criminal justice system? Addressing this two-part question from the perspective of the offender, the victim, the community, and the overall justice system, AndrewWilczak provides an accessible introduction to the full range of issues involved. Notably, this comprehensive text: • features an inclusive focus on both men and women • encompasses theory, as well as realities on the ground • draws on popular culture • challenges students to ask difficult questions • ties concepts to students’ own lives • incorporates an intersectional approach Designed to simultaneously engage and instruct, the book is ideally suited for classroom use.Trade Review“An excellent introduction [to] the dynamics of gender and the criminal justice system as a whole.” —Shon M. Reed, Criminal Justice ReviewTable of ContentsStudying Crime and Gender: Why Does It Matter? The Critical Perspective. A Refresher on Theories of Crime. From Juvenile Delinquency to Adult Crime. Gangs and Drug Violence. Relationship Violence. Sexual Violence. Gender in the System. Life After Prison. The Intersection of Gender, Race, and Class: Everything Matters.

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Book Synopsis'An engrossing history that reads like a thriller. The Godfather meets Band of Brothers.' - Andrew Roberts 'Newark tells an extraordinary tale with pace and conviction, and impressively unravels what really happened from the pervasive myths.' - History Today 'A fascinating and compelling work on three of the most evil movements of the 20th century. It ought to be required reading for anyone looking for insights into the period.' - Richard Hammer The Mafia is the most powerful criminal organisation the world has ever known. This book tells the epic story of how the Mafia was nearly destroyed by Mussolini, prospered in the US, struck a secret wartime deal with the US government, and then backed a bloody rebellion that nearly turned Sicily into an independent Mafia realm. It shows how Lucky Luciano won his freedom thanks to mobster help in World War II; how Jewish gangsters clashed with Nazis on the streets of New York; how Mafiosi nearly issued contracts to kill top Nazis including Hitler; how British bobbies patrolled the deadly streets of Palermo; and how Mafia-backed bandits conducted a guerrilla war for Sicilian independence. The Mafia at War is a provocative account of how a criminal organisation exploited the grim realities of World War II to revive its fortunes and dominate global crime.

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Book SynopsisCriminal Procedure: Cases, Readings, and Comparative Perspectives focuses on the essentials of criminal procedure law as it arises under the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments to the United States Constitution. The casebook presents both historical and contemporary U.S. Supreme Court cases that have established and expanded upon foundational principles of criminal procedure jurisprudence.The opening chapter explores two important sources of criminal procedure law: the U.S. Constitution and the United States Supreme Court. Chapters 2 through 6 examine several Fourth Amendment issues, including the definition of legally protected areas and interests, warrant requirements, and the exclusionary rule. Chapter 7 explores the Fifth Amendment and Miranda, and Chapter 8 addresses the Sixth Amendment right to counsel. Each chapter contains relevant readings by scholars in the field to further explore the intricacies and impact of court decisions.The third edition has been reorganized for easier navigation of topics and cases. Chapter 2 features significant changes to the material, including a special section on technology and the Fourth Amendment. This new edition also includes additional notes and questions designed to enhance understanding of the materials and encourage classroom dialogue.Criminal Procedure: Cases, Readings, and Comparative Perspectives is an exemplary resource for courses in criminal law and procedure.

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Book SynopsisSend Them to Hell is a horrifying, authentic chronicle of life as lived by foreign inmates over the past two decades in Bangkok's notorious prison system.Murder, human-rights abuse, drugs, blackmail, extortion, extreme violence, medical maltreatment and unjustifiable death penalties feature as everyday occurrences in the living hells that are Bangkwang and Klong Prem jails. Sebastian Williams has graphically revealed this shocking reality through the eyes of a long-term inmate from the West who endured at first hand the unimaginable, inhuman nightmare that constitutes the Thai penal system.

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Book SynopsisFinalist for the 2022 Cheiron Book Prize An Organ of Murder explores the origins of both popular and elite theories of criminality in the nineteenth-century United States, focusing in particular on the influence of phrenology. In the United States, phrenology shaped the production of medico-legal knowledge around crime, the treatment of the criminal within prisons and in public discourse, and sociocultural expectations about the causes of crime. The criminal was phrenology’s ideal research and demonstration subject, and the courtroom and the prison were essential spaces for the staging of scientific expertise. In particular, phrenology constructed ways of looking as well as a language for identifying, understanding, and analyzing criminals and their actions. This work traces the long-lasting influence of phrenological visual culture and language in American culture, law, and medicine, as well as the practical uses of phrenology in courts, prisons, and daily life. Trade Review"The book will be of clear interest to those interested in phrenology, but it will also be relevant to scholars working in the history of criminology and punishment. One reason is Thompson's excellent demonstration of phrenology's reliance on the prison, which raises larger questions about criminology's relationship with confinement....An Organ of Murder will prove interesting and helpful to scholars working in the history of criminology and punishment." — Punishment & Society Privacy International - Technology Pill podcast interview with Courtney Thompson— Privacy International - Technology Pill podcast "An Organ of Murder is a fascinating, well-written history of phrenology....Recommended."— Choice "For a compelling introduction to what a new generation of scholars is discovering about the perennially interesting topic of phrenology, Courtney E. Thompson’s An Organ of Murder comes highly recommended. This sophisticated, well-written history explores an aspect of phrenology that deserves more attention: its influence on both elite and popular conceptions of criminality....An Organ of Murder should find an appreciative readership not only among historians of science and medicine but also scholars interested in the new carceral history."— Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Scienes "This short but informative book will appeal to anyone with an interest in phrenology, criminology, or the histories of psychiatry, psychology, and related fields, especially in nineteenth-century America. It fills a void, is well researched, and is written in an engaging and captivating way."— Journal of the History of Neurosciences An Organ of Murder? - BYU Radio "Constant Wonder" interview with Courtney E. Thompson— BYU Radio, "Constant Wonder" "Unlike many existing studies of phrenology, which tend to focus on the science’s European fortunes, Thompson takes on the nineteenth-century United States, particularly the period from 1830 to 1860. The book situates phrenology in the history of American criminal justice and the emerging conceptualization of criminality as an innate biological predisposition....Thompson adds a new, distinctively legal note to recent histories of phrenological science."— New Rambler Review "This book provides much needed insight into the confluence of phrenology, criminal justice, and the attempts by Americans to better explain, understand, and even correct criminal behavior in the nineteenth century and beyond."— Law and History Review "In this compelling book, Courtney Thompson takes readers to the prisons, courtrooms, and streets of antebellum cities to expose just how phrenology claimed authority on criminality. Rich in detail and analysis, An Organ of Murder vividly illustrates the long history of making criminal minds and bodies into objects of medical and scientific inquiry." — Carla Bittel, Loyola Marymount University "Courtney Thompson provocatively measures the face, head, and soul of American phrenology and invites us to a discovery of the historical origins of scientific criminology."— Stephen Casper, Clarkson University "Professor Thompson’s book does what it does quite well. It is an important contribution to the literature. And we might expect that it will be a guide to contemporary legal theory as well. It surely should be."— Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books "Vividly narrated with great wit and insight, An Organ of Murder constitutes an important contribution to the history of criminology as well as phrenology, with important implications for the practice of law and the human sciences... Thompson succeeds brilliantly. An Organ of Murder deserves a wide readership among historians and legal scholars, who will readily see the importance of following her leads."— Susanna L. Blumenthal, Isis Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, Sciences of the Mind forum held in partnership with American Philosophical Society: Courtney Thompson and Alicia Puglionesi in discussion — Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine - Sciences of the Mind "New Books Network - New Books in Medicine" interview with Courtney E. Thompson— New Books Network - New Books in Medicine "Thompson presents an impressively researched and appealingly structured argument for the importance of crime and punishment to phrenology, that problematic frontrunner of so many human and social sciences."— Journal of the History of the Behavioral ScienceTable of ContentsContents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction Through a Mirror, Darkly 1 Origins and Organs 2 Transatlantic Societies and Skulls 3 Phrenology on Trial 4 The Prison as Laboratory 5 Policing the Self and the Stranger 6 A Victory for Phrenology? Epilogue Phrenological Futures Notes Bibliography Inde

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Book SynopsisIn the United States, race and police were founded along with a capitalist economy dependent on the enslavement of workers of African descent. Race and Police builds a critical theory of American policing by analyzing a heterodox history of policing, drawn from the historiography of slavery and slave patrols. Beginning by tracing the historical origins of the police mandate in British colonial America, the book shows that the peculiar institution of racialized chattel slavery originated along with a novel, binary conception of race. On one side, for the first time Europeans from various nationalities were united in a single racial category. Inclusion in this category was necessary for citizenship. On the other, Blacks were branded as slaves, cast as social enemies, and assumed to be threats to the social order. The state determined not only that it would administer slavery, but that it would regulate slaves, authorizing the use of violence by agents of the state and white citizens to secure the social order. In doing so, slavery, citizenship, and police mutually informed one another, and together they produced racial capitalism, a working class defined and separated by the color line, and a racial social order. Race and Police corrects the Eurocentrism in the orthodox history of American police and in predominating critical theories of police. That orthodoxy rests on an origin story that begins with Sir Robert Peel and the London Metropolitan Police Service. Predating the Met by more than a century, America’s first police, often called slave patrols, did more than maintain order—it fabricated a racial order. Prior to their creation, all white citizens were conscripted to police all Blacks. Their participation in the coercive control of Blacks gave definition to their whiteness. Targeted as threats to the security of the economy and white society, being policed defined Blacks who, for the first time, were treated as a single racial group. The boundaries of whiteness were first established on the basis of who was required to regulate slaves, given a specific mandate to prevent Black insurrection, a mandate that remains core to the police role to this day.Trade Review“Brucato’s focus on the political construction of race in and through police does more than simply correct or reorder the narratives on race and policing, but fundamentally defines them. Race and Police makes clear contributions that are long overdue in the field.”— Mike King, author of When Riot Cops Are Not Enough: The Policing and Repression of Occupy Oakland (Rutgers Univ “Every abolitionist should read this book. Prison requires police, just as slavery required patrols. Prison seems inevitable, as did slavery. History, however, reveals no inevitable institutions, not even the Peculiar Institution. As Brucato meticulously demonstrates, the slave patrols were modern police. Why read him? Because abolition of slavery requires abolition of the police and the prison, just as much as it required abolition of the slave patrols. More importantly, the abolition of slavery is proof that policing and imprisonment aren't inevitable.”— Anthony Paul Farley, James Campbell Matthews Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence at Albany Law SchoolTable of ContentsPreface Introduction Part I: Critical Theory of Race and Police 1. The Peculiar Institution of Police 2. The Peculiar Institution of Race Part II: The Police Law of Slavery 3. The Genesis of Race in Colonial Virginia 4. The First Black Slave Society 5. Acquiring a Slave Society Part III: Black Insurrection and White Counterinsurgency in Colonial America 6. A “Patroll” to Suppress Domestic Dangers 7. Policing the Chesapeake 8. Enemies of their Own Households Conclusion: Peculiar Institutions Acknowledgments Notes Index

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Book SynopsisIn the United States, race and police were founded along with a capitalist economy dependent on the enslavement of workers of African descent. Race and Police builds a critical theory of American policing by analyzing a heterodox history of policing, drawn from the historiography of slavery and slave patrols. Beginning by tracing the historical origins of the police mandate in British colonial America, the book shows that the peculiar institution of racialized chattel slavery originated along with a novel, binary conception of race. On one side, for the first time Europeans from various nationalities were united in a single racial category. Inclusion in this category was necessary for citizenship. On the other, Blacks were branded as slaves, cast as social enemies, and assumed to be threats to the social order. The state determined not only that it would administer slavery, but that it would regulate slaves, authorizing the use of violence by agents of the state and white citizens to secure the social order. In doing so, slavery, citizenship, and police mutually informed one another, and together they produced racial capitalism, a working class defined and separated by the color line, and a racial social order. Race and Police corrects the Eurocentrism in the orthodox history of American police and in predominating critical theories of police. That orthodoxy rests on an origin story that begins with Sir Robert Peel and the London Metropolitan Police Service. Predating the Met by more than a century, America’s first police, often called slave patrols, did more than maintain order—it fabricated a racial order. Prior to their creation, all white citizens were conscripted to police all Blacks. Their participation in the coercive control of Blacks gave definition to their whiteness. Targeted as threats to the security of the economy and white society, being policed defined Blacks who, for the first time, were treated as a single racial group. The boundaries of whiteness were first established on the basis of who was required to regulate slaves, given a specific mandate to prevent Black insurrection, a mandate that remains core to the police role to this day.Trade Review“Brucato’s focus on the political construction of race in and through police does more than simply correct or reorder the narratives on race and policing, but fundamentally defines them. Race and Police makes clear contributions that are long overdue in the field.”— Mike King, author of When Riot Cops Are Not Enough: The Policing and Repression of Occupy Oakland (Rutgers Univ “Every abolitionist should read this book. Prison requires police, just as slavery required patrols. Prison seems inevitable, as did slavery. History, however, reveals no inevitable institutions, not even the Peculiar Institution. As Brucato meticulously demonstrates, the slave patrols were modern police. Why read him? Because abolition of slavery requires abolition of the police and the prison, just as much as it required abolition of the slave patrols. More importantly, the abolition of slavery is proof that policing and imprisonment aren't inevitable.”— Anthony Paul Farley, James Campbell Matthews Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence at Albany Law SchoolTable of ContentsPreface Introduction Part I: Critical Theory of Race and Police 1. The Peculiar Institution of Police 2. The Peculiar Institution of Race Part II: The Police Law of Slavery 3. The Genesis of Race in Colonial Virginia 4. The First Black Slave Society 5. Acquiring a Slave Society Part III: Black Insurrection and White Counterinsurgency in Colonial America 6. A “Patroll” to Suppress Domestic Dangers 7. Policing the Chesapeake 8. Enemies of their Own Households Conclusion: Peculiar Institutions Acknowledgments Notes Index

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Book SynopsisStories of massive data breaches litter the 24-hour newsday headlines. Hackers and cybercrime syndicates are hitting a who's who of banks, retailers, law firms, and healthcare organizations: companies with sophisticated security systems designed to stop crime before it starts. They're also hitting companies that thought they were too small to matter. So how do cybercriminals continue to breach the defenses of the big companiesand why do they go after the small ones? And, most importantly, how can companies of all sizes protect themselves?Cybersecurity expert Mark Sangster deftly weaves together real-life cases in a thrilling narrative that illustrates the human complexities behind the scenes that can lead to companies throwing their digital front doors open to criminals. Within a security context, deep social engineering is the newest and biggest means of breaching our systems. Sangster shows readers that cybersecurity is not an IT problem to solveit is a business risk to ma

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