In <I>The Social Life of Forensic Evidence</I>, Corinna Kruse provides a major contribution to understanding forensic evidence and its role in the criminal justice system. Arguing that forensic evidence can be understood as a form of knowledge, she reveals that each piece of evidence has a social life and biography. Kruse shows how the crime scene examination is as crucial to the creation of forensic evidence as laboratory analyses, ...
In this novel approach to understanding consent, Jill D. Weinberg presents two case studies of activities in which participants engage in violent acts: competitive mixed martial arts (MMA) and sexual sadism and masochism (BDSM). Participants in both cases assent to injury and thereby engage in a form of social decriminalization, using the language of consent to render their actions legally and socially tolerable. Yet, these activities are treate ...
South Africa boasts the largest private security sector in the entire world, reflecting deep anxieties about violence, security, and governance. <I>Twilight Policing </I>is an ethnographic study of the daily policing practices of armed response officers—a specific type of private security officer—and their interactions with citizens and the state police in Durban, South Africa. This book shows how their policing practices simultaneou ...
While considerable attention has been given to encounters between black citizens and police in urban communities, there have been limited analyses of such encounters in suburban settings. <I>Race, Place, and Suburban Policing</I> tells the full story of social injustice, racialized policing, nationally profiled shootings, and the ambiguousness of black life in a suburban context. Through compelling interviews, participant observation ...
The resurrection of former prisons as museums has caught the attention of tourists along with scholars interested in studying what is known as dark tourism. Unsurprisingly, due to their grim subject matter, prison museums tend to invert the «Disneyland» experience, becoming the antithesis of «the happiest place on earth.» In <I>Escape to Prison,</I> the culmination of years of international research, noted criminologist Michael Welch ...
In 2014, the arrest and detention of thousands of desperate young migrants at the southwest border of the United States exposed the U.S. government's shadowy juvenile detention system, which had escaped public scrutiny for years. This book tells the story of six Central American and Mexican children who are driven from their homes by violence and deprivation, and who embark alone, risking their lives, on the perilous journey north. They suf ...
We hold many assumptions about police work—that it is the responsibility of the state, or that police officers are given the right to kill in the name of public safety or self-defense. But in <I>The Killing Consensus</I>, Graham Denyer Willis shows how in Sao Paulo, Brazil, killing and the arbitration of «normal» killing in the name of social order are actually conducted by two groups—the police and organized crime—both operating acc ...
The expansion of organized crime across national borders has become a key security concern for the international community. In this theoretically and empirically vibrant portrait of a global phenomenon, Jana Arsovska examines some of the most widespread myths about the so-called Albanian Mafia. Based on more than a decade of research, including interviews with victims, offenders, and law enforcement across ten countries, as well as court files a ...
Having gained unique access to California prisoners and corrections officials and to thousands of prisoners’ written grievances and institutional responses, Kitty Calavita and Valerie Jenness take us inside one of the most significant, yet largely invisible, institutions in the United States. Drawing on sometimes startlingly candid interviews with prisoners and prison staff, as well as on official records, the authors walk us through the byzanti ...
