- American Homicide
- Randolph Roth
- In American Homicide, Randolph Roth charts changes in the character and incidence of homicide in the U.S. from colonial times to the present. Roth examines the four factors that explain why homicide rates have gone up and down in the United States and in other Western nations over the past four centuries, and why the United States is today the most homicidal affluent nation.
- Hardcover 2009
- The Challenge of Crime
- Henry Ruth
- Kevin R. Reitz
- Rejecting traditional liberal and conservative outlooks, The Challenge of Crime examines the history, scope, and effects of the revolution in America's response to crime since 1970. Henry Ruth and Kevin Reitz offer a comprehensive, long-term, pragmatic approach to increase public understanding of and find improvements in the nation's response to crime.
- Hardcover 2003 / Paperback 2006
- The Condemnation of Blackness
- Khalil Gibran Muhammad
- Lynch mobs, chain gangs, and popular views of black southern criminals that defined the Jim Crow South are well known. We know less about the role of the urban North in shaping views of race and crime in American society. Chronicling the emergence of deeply embedded notions of black people as a dangerous race of criminals by explicit contrast to working-class whites and European immigrants, this fascinating book reveals the influence such ideas have had on urban development and social policies.
- Hardcover 2010
- First in Violence, Deepest in Dirt
- Jeffrey S. Adler
- Between 1875 and 1920, Chicago's homicide rate more than quadrupled. Based on an analysis of nearly six thousand homicide cases, First in Violence, Deepest in Dirt examines the ways in which industrialization, immigration, poverty, ethnic and racial conflict, and powerful cultural forces reshaped Chicago city life and generated soaring levels of lethal violence. From rage killers to the "Baby Bandit Quartet," Jeffrey Adler offers a dramatic portrait of Chicago during a period in which the characteristic elements of modern homicide in America emerged.
- Hardcover 2006
- Illusion of Order
- Bernard E. Harcourt
- This is the first book to challenge the "broken-windows" theory of crime, which argues that permitting minor misdemeanors to go unpunished only encourages more serious crime. Bernard Harcourt argues that although the broken-windows theory has been around for nearly thirty years, it has never been empirically verified.
- Hardcover 2001 / Paperback 2005
- Off the Books
- Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh
- In this revelatory book, Sudhir Venkatesh takes us into Maquis Park, a poor black neighborhood on Chicago's Southside, to explore the desperate and remarkable ways in which a community survives. The result is a dramatic narrative of individuals at work, and a rich portrait of a community. But while excavating the efforts of men and women to generate a basic livelihood for themselves and their families, Off the Books offers a devastating critique of the entrenched poverty that we so often ignore in America, and reveals how the underground economy is an inevitable response to the ghetto's appalling isolation from the rest of the country.
- Hardcover 2006 / Paperback 2009
- Police Interrogation and American Justice
- Richard A. Leo
- "Read him his rights." We all recognize this line from cop dramas. But what happens afterward? In this book, Leo sheds light on a little-known corner of our criminal justice system--the police interrogation. An important study of the criminal justice system, this book provides interesting answers and raises some unsettling questions.
- Hardcover 2008 / Paperback 2009
- Security in Paraguay
- James L. Cavallaro
- Jacob Kopas
- Yukyan Lam
- Timothy Mayhle
- Soledad Villagra de Biedermann
- The perception of rising insecurity has plagued Paraguay over the past decade as the country has continued its transition from authoritarian to democratic rule. At the same time, reforms of the penal code and the code of criminal procedure have been implemented, leading many to attribute the rising sense of insecurity to the new, rights-based approach to criminal justice. In Security in Paraguay, the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School assesses the disparity between the sensation of insecurity and actual levels of urban crime.
- Paperback 2008
- Sexual Blackmail
- Angus McLaren
- This fascinating view of the impact of regulating sexuality from the late Victorian Age to our own time demonstrates the centrality of blackmail to sexual practices, deviance, and the law.
- Hardcover 2002
- Shared Beginnings, Divergent Lives
- John H. Laub
- Robert J. Sampson
- This book analyzes newly collected data on crime and social development up to age 70 for 500 men who were remanded to reform school in the 1940s. Updating their lives at the close of the twentieth century, and connecting their adult experiences to childhood, this book is arguably the longest longitudinal study of age, crime, and the life course to date. The authors' long-term data, combined with in-depth interviews, defy the conventional wisdom that links individual traits such as poor verbal skills, limited self-control, and difficult temperament to long-term trajectories of offending. Rather, they find that men who desisted from crime were rooted in structural routines and had strong social ties to family and community.
- Hardcover 2003 / Paperback 2006
- Stealing Lincoln's Body
- Thomas J. Craughwell
- On the night of the 1876 presidential election, a gang of counterfeiters attempted to steal the entombed embalmed body of Abraham Lincoln and hold it for ransom. Craughwell returns to this bizarre, and largely forgotten, event with the first book to place the grave robbery in historical context. This rousing story of hapless con men, intrepid federal agents, and ordinary Springfield citizens offers an unusual glimpse into late-nineteenth-century America.
- Hardcover 2007 / Paperback 2009
- Street Stories
- Robert Jackall
- Based on years of fieldwork with the New York City Police Department and the District Attorney of New York, this book examines the moral ambiguities of the detectives' world as they shuttle between the streets and a bureaucratic behemoth. In piecing together street stories to solve intriguing puzzles of agency and motive, detectives crisscross the checkerboard of urban life. This book brims with the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction violence of the underworld and tells about a justice apparatus that splinters knowledge, reduces life-and-death issues to arcane hair-splitting, and makes rationality a bedfellow of absurdity.
- Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2009
- Suspect Identities
- Simon A. Cole
- In an intriguing history that traverses the globe, Cole excavates the forgotten history of criminal identification--from photography to exotic anthropometric systems based on measuring body parts, from fingerprinting to DNA typing. He reveals how fingerprinting ultimately won the trust of the public and the law after a long battle against rival identification systems.
- Hardcover 2001 / Paperback 2002
- Wild Cowboys
- Robert Jackall
- In this bloody urban saga, Robert Jackall tells how New York detectives pieced together a case of drug trafficking, money laundering, and murder, all centered on a vicious gang of Dominican youths known as the Wild Cowboys. Alongside this gripping tale he tells a sobering one--of a society with irreconcilable differences, fraught with self-doubt and moral ambivalence, where the institutional logics of law and bureaucracy often have perverse outcomes.
- Hardcover 1997 / Paperback 2005