Arresting Citizenship: the democratic consequences of American crime control by 
Beneath a Ruthless Sun: a true story of violence, race, and justice lost and found by
From the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller "Devil in the Grove" comes a gripping story of sex, race, class, corruption, and the arc of justice. In December 1957, Blanche Bosanquet Knowles, the wealthy young wife of a citrus baron, is raped in her home while her husband is away. Journalist Mabel Norris Reese and an inexperienced young lawyer pursue the case, winning unlikely allies and chasing down leads until at long last they begin to unravel the unspeakable truths behind a racial conspiracy that shocked a community into silence.
"A small town. A big secret. In December 1957, the wife of a Florida citrus baron is raped in her home while her husband is away. She claims a 'husky Negro' did it, and the sheriff, the infamous racist Willis McCall, does not hesitate to round up a herd of suspects. But within days, McCall turns his sights on Jesse Daniels, a gentle, mentally impaired white nineteen-year-old. Soon Jesse is railroaded up to the state hospital for the insane, and locked away without trial. Crusading journalist Mabel Norris Reese cannot stop fretting over the case and its baffling outcome. Who is protecting whom, or what? She pursues the story for years, chasing down leads, hitting dead ends, winning unlikely allies. Bit by bit, the unspeakable truths behind a conspiracy that shocked a community into silence come to the surface. Beneath a Ruthless Sun tells a powerful page-turning story rooted in the fears that rippled through the South as integration began to take hold, sparking a surge of virulent racism that savaged the vulnerable, debased the powerful, and roils our own times still.
Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the dawn of a new America by
In 1949, Florida's orange industry was booming with cheap Jim Crow labor. When a white seventeen-year-old Groveland girl cried rape, vicious Sheriff McCall was fast on the trail of four young blacks who dared to envision a future for themselves. Then the Ku Klux Klan rolled into town, burning homes and chasing hundreds of blacks into the swamps. So began the chain of events that would bring Thurgood Marshall, the man known as "Mr. Civil Rights," into the fray. Associates thought it was suicidal for him to wade into the "Florida Terror" at a time when he was irreplaceable to the burgeoning civil rights movement, but the lawyer would not shrink from the fight--not after the Klan had murdered one of Marshall's NAACP associates and Marshall had endured threats that he would be next. Drawing on a wealth of never-before-published material, including the FBI's unredacted Groveland case files, as well as the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund files, King shines new light on this remarkable civil rights crusader against a heroic backdrop.
The Effect of Jurors' Race on Their Response to Scientific Evidence by
Albertson seeks to analyze the influence of jurors race on perceptions of complex scientific evidence. Jury eligible citizens viewed a mock criminal trial involving the presentation of mitochondrial deoxyribonucleic acid (mtDNA). White and African American mock jurors perceptions of mtDNA were measured. Although robust findings were discovered regarding race, results imply that an educational background in science and math is important. The present study has shown the negative impact that low levels of science and math courses have on perceptions of scientific evidence. Courtroom evidence will only continue to become even more complex in the future. The importance of scientific literacy and jury reform is discussed.
Forever Suspect : Racialized Surveillance of Muslim Americans in the War on Terror by
The declaration of a “War on Terror” in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks brought sweeping changes to the American criminal justice and national security systems, as well as a massive shift in the American public opinion of both individual Muslims and the Islamic religion generally. Since that time, sociologist Saher Selod argues, Muslim Americans have experienced higher levels of racism in their everyday lives. In Forever Suspect, Selod shows how a specific American religious identity has acquired racial meanings, resulting in the hyper surveillance of Muslim citizens. Drawing on forty-eight in-depth interviews with South Asian and Arab Muslim Americans, she investigates how Muslim Americans are subjected to racialized surveillance in both an institutional context by the state and a social context by their neighbors and co-workers. Forever Suspect underscores how this newly racialized religious identity changes the social location of Arabs and South Asians on the racial hierarchy further away from whiteness and compromises their status as American citizens.
The Handbook of Race, Ethnicity, Crime, and Justice by
This Handbook presents current and future studies on the changing dynamics of the role of immigrants and the impact of immigration, across the United States and industrialized and developing nations. It covers the changing dynamics of race, ethnicity, and immigration, and discusses how it all contributes to variations in crime, policing, and the overall justice system. Through acknowledging that some groups, especially people of color, are disproportionately influenced more than others in the case of criminal justice reactions, the "War on Drugs", and hate crimes; this Handbook introduces the importance of studying race and crime so as to better understand it. It does so by recommending that researchers concentrate on ethnic diversity in a national and international context in order to broaden their demographic and expand their understanding of how to attain global change. Featuring contributions from top experts in the field, The Handbook of Race and Crime is presented in five sections--An Overview of Race, Ethnicity, Crime, and Justice; Theoretical Perspectives on Race and Crime; Race, Gender, and the Justice System; Gender and Crime; and Race, Gender and Comparative Criminology. Each section of the book addresses a key area of research, summarizes findings or shortcomings whenever possible, and provides new results relevant to race/crime and justice. Every contribution is written by a top expert in the field and based on the latest research. With a sharp focus on contemporary race, ethnicity, crime, and justice studies, The Handbook of Race and Crime is the ideal reference for advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and scholars interested in the disciplines such as Criminology, Race and Ethnicity, Race and the Justice System, and the Sociology of Race.
Locking up Our Own: crime and punishment in black America by
"An original and consequential argument about race, crime, and the law today, Americans are debating our criminal justice system with new urgency. Mass incarceration and aggressive police tactics--and their impact on people of color--are feeding outrage and a consensus that something must be done. But what if we only know half the story? In Locking Up Our Own, the Yale legal scholar and former public defender James Forman Jr. weighs the tragic role that some African Americans themselves played in escalating the war on crime. As Forman shows, the first substantial cohort of black mayors, judges, and police chiefs took office around the country amid a surge in crime. Many came to believe that tough measures--such as stringent drug and gun laws and "pretext traffic stops" in poor African American neighborhoods--were needed to secure a stable future for black communities. Some politicians and activists saw criminals as a "cancer" that had to be cut away from the rest of black America. Others supported harsh measures more reluctantly, believing they had no other choice in the face of a public safety emergency. Drawing on his experience as a public defender and focusing on Washington, D.C., Forman writes with compassion for individuals trapped in terrible dilemmas--from the young men and women he defended to officials struggling to cope with an impossible situation. The result is an original view of our justice system as well as a moving portrait of the human beings caught in its coils."--
"Recounts the tragic role that some African Americans--as judges, prosecutors, politicians, police officers, and voters--played in escalating the war on crime"
The New Jim Crow: mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness by 
Penal Sanctioning in the United States: Explaining Cross-State Differences by
Laubepin investigates differences in the scope of penal sanctioning in the American states over a thirty-year period. Her analyses replicate and expand prior research examining the determinants of incarceration rates, and explore whether this theoretical framework can be usefully applied to back-end sentencing (parole revocation). She finds that states have responded to similar policy problems with solutions shaped by local social, political, economic and cultural conditions. Not only are these dynamics historically contingent, but they also play out differently at the front and back ends of the sentencing system. Unlike prior research, this study provides weak support for the influence of political factors, but points to the importance of practices of civic engagement instead, suggesting that penal sanctioning is driven by "top down" policies as well as "bottom up" democratic processes.
Police, Power, and the Production of Racial Boundaries by
Based on five years of ethnography, archival research, census data analysis, and interviews, Police, Power, and the Production of Racial Boundaries reveals how the LAPD, city prosecutors, and business owners struggled to control who should be considered "dangerous" and how they should be policed in Los Angeles. Sociologist Ana Muniz shows how these influential groups used policies and everyday procedures to criminalize behaviors commonly associated with blacks and Latinos and to promote an exceedingly aggressive form of policing. Muniz illuminates the degree to which the definitions of "gangs" and "deviants" are politically constructed labels born of public policy and court decisions, offering an innovative look at the process of criminalization and underscoring the ways in which a politically powerful coalition can define deviant behavior. As she does so, Muniz also highlights the various grassroots challenges to such policies and the efforts to call attention to their racist effects. Muniz describes the fight over two very different methods of policing: community policing (in which the police and the community work together) and the "broken windows" or "zero tolerance" approach (which aggressively polices minor infractions--such as loitering--to deter more serious crime). Police, Power, and the Production of Racial Boundaries also explores the history of the area to explain how Cadillac-Corning became viewed by outsiders as a "violent neighborhood" and how the city's first gang injunction--a restraining order aimed at alleged gang members--solidified this negative image. As a result, Muniz shows, Cadillac-Corning and other sections became a test site for repressive practices that eventually spread to the rest of the city.
Policing Los Angeles : Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD by
When the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts erupted in violent protest in August 1965, the uprising drew strength from decades of pent-up frustration with employment discrimination, residential segregation, and poverty. But the more immediate grievance was anger at the racist and abusive practices of the Los Angeles Police Department. Yet in the decades after Watts, the LAPD resisted all but the most limited demands for reform made by activists and residents of color, instead intensifying its power. In Policing Los Angeles, Max Felker-Kantor narrates the dynamic history of policing, anti–police abuse movements, race, and politics in Los Angeles from the 1965 Watts uprising to the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion. Using the explosions of two large-scale uprisings in Los Angeles as bookends, Felker-Kantor highlights the racism at the heart of the city's expansive police power through a range of previously unused and rare archival sources. His book is a gripping and timely account of the transformation in police power, the convergence of interests in support of law and order policies, and African American and Mexican American resistance to police violence after the Watts uprising.
Punishing Race: A Continuing American Dilemma by
How can it be, in a nation that elected Barack Obama, that one third of African American males born in 2001 will spend time in a state or federal prison, and that black men are seven times likelier than white men to be in prison? Blacks are much more likely than whites to be stopped by the police, arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned, and are much less likely to have confidence in justice system officials, especially the police.In Punishing Race, Michael Tonry demonstrates in lucid, accessible language that these patterns result not from racial differences in crime or drug use but primarily from drug and crime control policies that disproportionately affect black Americans. These policies in turn stem from a lack of white empathy for black people, and from racial stereotypes and resentments provoked partly by the Republican Southern Strategy of using coded "law and order" appeals to race to gain support from white voters. White Americans, Tonry observes, have a remarkable capacity to endure the suffering of disadvantaged black and, increasingly, Hispanic men. Crime policies are among a set of social policies enacted since the 1960s that have maintained white dominance over black people despite the end of legal discrimination. To redress these injustices, Tonry offers a number of proposals: stop racial profiling by the police, shift the emphasis of drug law enforcement to treatment and prevention, eliminate mandatory sentencing laws, and change sentencing guidelines to allow judges discretion to take account of offenders' life circumstances. Those proposals are all attainable and would all reduce unjustifiable racial disparities and the collateral human and social harms they cause.A damning indictment of decades of misguided criminal justice policy, Punishing Race takes a crucial look at persisting racial injustice in America."Michael Tonry's discussion and explanation of the racial disparities in prison, including black arrests for drug offenses, will change the way we think about fairness in our criminal justice system. Punishing Race is replete with original insights on how contemporary crime and drug policies have been shaped by a political climate that reflects America's unique history of race relations. Tonry documents the adverse racial effects of these policies and shows how they can be changed to do less unnecessary future harm to African Americans. This authoritative book is a must read."-William Julius Wilson, Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor, Harvard University"With Punishing Race, Michael Tonry has once again shown us why he must be counted among America's foremost criminologists. The topic of this book could not be more important, its appearance at this moment could not be more timely, nor could Tonry's mastery of his subject be more impressively complete. If you want to understand the historical, political, and sociological roots of the mess we Americans have gotten ourselves into with our criminal justice policies, and if you want help in thinking about how we might get out of that mess, then you simply must read this book."-Glenn Loury, Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences, Professor of Economics and of Public Policy, Brown University"Punishing Race dramatically shows how politicians, playing on a long history of deeply troubled race relations, set up a criminal justice system that actively over-incarcerates blacks and Latinos, and thus disadvantages and disenfranchises too many minority Americans. Michael Tonry offers wise, valuable, and practical ideas on how to reform criminal justice policies and truly ensure freedom and justice for all."-Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union
The Punitive Turn: New Approaches to Race and Incarceration by
The Punitive Turn explores the historical, political, economic, and sociocultural roots of mass incarceration, as well as its collateral costs and consequences. Giving significant attention to the exacting toll that incarceration takes on inmates, their families, their communities, and society at large, the volume's contributors investigate the causes of the unbridled expansion of incarceration in the United States. Experts from multiple scholarly disciplines offer fresh research on race and inequality in the criminal justice system and the effects of mass incarceration on minority groups' economic situation and political inclusion. In addition, practitioners and activists from the Sentencing Project, the Virginia Organizing Project, and the Restorative Community Foundation, among others, discuss race and imprisonment from the perspective of those working directly in the field. Employing a multidisciplinary approach, the essays included in the volume provide an unprecedented range of perspectives on the growth and racial dimensions of incarceration in the United States and generate critical questions not simply about the penal system but also about the inner workings, failings, and future of American democracy.
Race, Gender, and Mental Illness in the Criminal Justice System by 
Racial Profiling by 
Racial Profiling : Everyday Inequality by
In the United States, racial profiling affects thousands of Americans every day. Both individuals and institutions—such as law enforcement agencies, government bodies, and schools—routinely use race or ethnicity as grounds for suspecting someone of an offense. The high-profile deaths of unarmed people of color at the hands of police officers have brought renewed national attention to racial profiling and have inspired grassroots activism from groups such as Black Lives Matter. Combining rigorous research with powerful personal stories, this insightful title explores the history, the many manifestations, and the consequences of this form of social injustice.
Racialized Correctional Governance: The Mutual Constructions of Race and Criminal Justice by
Racialized Correctional Governance examines problems in the relationship between criminology and racialized issues. It questions current models for discussing issues of race in criminal justice systems and asks why a comprehensive theory of race and criminal justice has yet to develop in the discipline. It takes into account the full nature of problems facing racialized peoples in criminal justice systems, the developments and tensions in criminological theory and practice, as well as the scope of racialized criminal justice issues and where they occur. Suggesting that current explanations for the over-representation of racialized peoples in the criminal justice system are inadequate, the book explores the mutual constructions of race and criminal justice. It examines the shortcomings of current discourse, giving an account of how race, criminal justice and criminology are interrelated. Aiming to provide criminology with tools to engage with issues of race and criminal justice, the book develops and applies a set of rules to a series of case studies and proposes ideas for transforming institutional practice.
Rethinking Prison Reentry: Transforming Humiliation into Humility by
Rethinking Prison Reentry: Transforming Humiliation into Humility describes a prison-based education pedagogy designed to address a prevalent racial politics of shaming, self-segregation, and transgenerational learned helplessness. So many incarcerated black men face insurmountable psychosocial obstacles when attempting to make the successful transition back into ownership of their lives. Tony Gaskew confronts the issue of redemption and reconciliation head-on by critically examining the “triads of culpability” when it comes to crime and justice in America: (1) of those who commit crimes; (2) of those who enforce criminal laws; and (3) of those who stand by and do nothing. He explores the growth of a black counterculture of crime that has created modern-day killing fields across urban neighborhoods and challenges the incarcerated black men trapped within its socially constructed lies, helping them to draw upon the strength of their cultural privilege to transform from criminal offender into incarcerated student.
Slouching Toward Tyranny: Mass Incarceration, Death Sentences and Racism by 
The Torture Machine : Racism and Police Violence in Chicago by
With his colleagues at the People's Law Office (PLO), Taylor has argued landmark civil rights cases that have exposed corruption and cover-up within the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and throughout the city's political machine, from aldermen to the mayor's office. [TAYLOR's BOOK] takes the reader from the 1969 murders of Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton and Panther Mark Clark—and the historic, thirteen-year trial that followed—through the dogged pursuit of chief detective Jon Burge, the leader of a torture ring within the CPD that used barbaric methods, including electric shock, to elicit false confessions from suspects. Taylor and the PLO gathered evidence from multiple cases to bring suit against the CPD, breaking the department's “code of silence” that had enabled decades of cover-up. The legal precedents they set have since been adopted in human rights legislation around the world.
Underground Codes: Race, Crime and Related Fires by
Winner of a 2005 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award (Honorable Mention Americans fear crime, are rattled by race and avoid honest discussions of both. Anxiety, denial, miscommunication, and ignorance abound. Imaginary connections between minorities and crime become real, self-fulfilling prophecies and authentic links to race, class, gender and crime go unexplored. Katheryn Russell-Brown, author of the highly acclaimed The Color of Crime, makes her way through this intellectual minefield, determined to shed light on the most persistent and perplexing domestic policy issues. The author tackles a range of race and crime issues. From outdated research methods that perpetuate stereotypes about African Americans, women, and crime to the over hyped discourse about gangsta rap and law breaking, Russell-Brown challenges the conventional wisdom of criminology. Underground Codes delves into understudied topics such as victimization rates for Native Americans--among the highest of any racial group--and how racial profiling affects the day-to-day lives of people of color. Innovative, well-researched and meticulously documented, Underground Codes makes a case for greater public involvement in the debate over law enforcement--and our own language--that must be heard if we are to begin to have a productive national conversation about crime and race.
Understanding Race and Crime by
Why are some ethnic minorities associated with higher levels of offending? How can racist violence be explained? Are the police and criminal justice system racist? Are the reasons for offending and victimization among ethnic minorities different from those among ethnic majorities? "Understanding Race and Crime" provides a comprehensive and critical introduction to the debates and controversies about race, crime and criminal justice. While focusing on Britain and America, it also takes a broader international perspective, with case studies including the historical legacy of lynching in the United States and racist state crime in the Nazi and Rwandan genocides.The book provides a conceptual framework in which racism, race and crime might be better understood. It traces the historical origins of how thinking about crime came to be associated with racism and how fears and anxieties about race and crime become rooted in places destabilized by rapid social change. The book questions whether race and ethnicity alone are significant enough factors to explain differing offending and victimization patterns between ethnic groups. Issues examined include: Contact/conflict with the police; Public disorder; and Involvement with the criminal justice system. "Understanding Race and Crime" is essential reading for students from a range of social science disciplines and for a variety of crime-related courses. It is also useful to practitioners in the criminal justice field and those interested in understanding the issues behind debates on 'race' and crime.
White Privilege and Black Rights: the injustice of U.S. police racial profiling and homicide by 