After decades of rigorous study in the United States and across the Western world, a great deal is known about the early risk factors for offending. High impulsiveness, low attainment, criminal parents, parental conflict, and growing up in a deprive…
Police do not and cannot prevent crime. This alarming thesis is explored by David Bayley, one of the most prolific and internationally renowned authorities on criminal justice and policing, in Police for the Future. Providing a systematic assessment…
With urban poverty rising and affordable housing disappearing, the homeless and other "disorderly" people continue to occupy public space in many American cities. Concerned about the alleged ill effects their presence inflicts on property values and…
Braithwaite's argument against punitive justice systems and for restorative justice systems establishes that there are good theoretical and empirical grounds for anticipating that well designed restorative justice processes will restore victims, off…
Police departments across the country are busily "reinventing" themselves, adopting a new style known as "community policing". This approach to policing involves organizational decentralization, new channels of communication with the public, a commi…
Police departments across the USA are busily "reinventing" themselves, adopting a new style known as "community policing". Police departments that succeed in adopting this new stance have an entirely different relationship to the public that they se…
Why does the United States continue to employ the death penalty when fifty other developed democracies have abolished it? Why does capital punishment become more problematic each year? How can the death penalty conflict be resolved? In Contradiction…
Despite its suspected prevalence, no comprehensive analysis of police corruption has been published for nearly three decades. Fallen Blue Knights provides a systematic, in-depth analysis of the subject, while also addressing the question of what can…
Early in the 1980s, a new category of crime appeared in the criminal law lexicon. In response to what was said to be an epidemic of prejudice-motivated violence, Congress and many state legislatures passed a wave of "hate crime" laws that required t…
In the early 1980s, a new category of crime appeared in the criminal law lexicon. In response to concerted advocacy-group lobbying, Congress and many state legislatures passed a wave of "hate crime" laws requiring the collection of statistics on, an…
At no time in history, and certainly in no other democratic society, have prisons been filled so quickly and to such capacity than in the United States. And nowhere has this growth been more concentrated than in the disadvantaged-and primarily minor…
Many theories-from the routine to the bizarre-have been offered up to explain the crime decline of the 1990s. Was it record levels of imprisonment? An abatement of the crack cocaine epidemic? More police using better tactics? Or even the effects of…
Many theories - from the routine to the bizarre - have been offered up to explain the crime decline of the 1990s. Was it record levels of imprisonment? An abatement of the crack cocaine epidemic? More police using better tactics? Or even the effects…
In the past decade, alarming reports of youth violence have appeared with increasing frequency in the news media. Legislators across the United States have responded to this sense of national emergency by changing many of the laws designed to cope w…
This is the definitive examination of adolescent violence in the United States as both a social phenomenon and a policy problem. Franklin Zimring, one of America's most esteemed scholars of law and crime, scrutinizes criminal statistics and demograp…
Michael Tonry offers a comprehensive overview of research, policy developments, and practical experience concerning sentencing and sanctions. He considers what we know about the effects of innovations of the past twenty years on sentencing dispariti…
Most Americans are not aware that the US prison population has tripled over the past two decades, nor that the US has the highest rate of incarceration in the industrialized world. Despite these facts, politicians from across the ideological spectru…
In Chinatown Gangs, Ko-lin Chin penetrates a closed society and presents a rare portrait of the underworld of New York City's Chinatown. Based on first-hand accounts from gang members, gang victims, community leaders, and law enforcement authorities…
This book has three main aims: the first is to show that what separates the USA from other countries is not crime rates but lethal violence. Crimes like burglary and theft are a part of modern urban life worldwide; shootings and stabbings are not -…
This book provides a broad summary of American criminal justice in a time of great concern about solutions to the current crime epidemic. Allen suggests that the way to a more effective penal policy can be found by a closer adherence to the law rath…
In this, the first comprehensive assessment of incapacitation, Professors Zimring and Hawkins show the increasing reliance of restraint to justify imprisonment, analyse the existing theoretical literature on incapacitation effects, review the existi…
This book reviews what has been known about gangs, and updates that information into the 1990s. It covers reported changes in the structure and crime patterns of gangs, their age, ethnic, and gender characteristics, and their spread into almost all…
An unrelenting prison boom, marked by stark racial disparities, pulled a disproportionate number of young black men into prison in the last forty years. In Children of the Prison Boom, Sara Wakefield and Christopher Wildeman draw upon broadly repres…
The forty-percent drop in crime that occurred across the U.S. from 1991 to 2000 remains largely an unsolved mystery. Even more puzzling is the eighty-percent drop over nineteen years in New York City. Twice as long and twice as large, it is the larg…
The 40% drop in crime that occurred across the U.S. from 1991 to 2000 largely remains an unsolved mystery. Even more puzzling then is the crime rate drop in New York City, which lasted twice long and was twice as large. This 80% drop in crime over n…
Today, two-thirds of the world's nations have abolished the death penalty, either officially or in practice, due mainly to the campaign to end state executions led by Western European nations. Will this success spread to Asia, where over 95 percent…
In 1840, Alexander Maconochie, a privileged retired naval captain, became at his own request superintendent of two thousand twice-convicted prisoners on Norfolk Island, a thousand miles off the coast of Australia. In four years, Maconochie transform…
The United Kingdom has more than 4.2 million public closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras-one for every fourteen citizens. Across the United States, hundreds of video surveillance systems are being installed in town centers, public transportation…
In the past two decades, many prevention and suppression programs have been initiated on a national and local level to combat street gangs-but what do we really know about them? Why do youths join them? Why do they proliferate? Street Gang Patterns…
Street Gang Patterns and Policies provides a crucial update and critical examination of knowledge about gangs and major gang control programs across the nation. Malcolm Klein and Cheryl Maxson here focus on gang proliferation, migration, and crime p…
The immigration of Muslims to Europe and the integration of later generations presents many challenges to European societies. Unwanted builds on five years of ethnographic research with a group of fifty-five second-generation Muslim immigrant drug d…
"Getting tough on crime" has been one of the favorite rallying cries of American politicians in the last two decades, and "getting tough" on repeat offenders has been particularly popular. "Three strikes and you're out" laws, which effectively impos…
In America today, one in every hundred adults is behind bars. As our prison population has exploded, 'law and order' interest groups have also grown - in numbers and political clout. In The Toughest Beat, Joshua Page argues in crisp, vivid prose tha…
In America today, one in every hundred adults is behind bars. As our prison population has exploded, "law and order" interest groups have also grown-in numbers and political clout. Committed to punitive justice, these organizations perpetuate Americ…
Every day the American government, the United Nations, and other international institutions send people into non-English speaking, war-torn, and often minimally democratic countries struggling to cope with rising crime and disorder under a new regim…
This collection of original essays surveys the evolution of sentencing policies and practices in Western countries over the past twenty-five years. The volume consists of approximately ten essays. Six consider sentencing policy strategies and practi…
Although criminal justice systems vary greatly around the world, one theme has emerged in all western jurisdictions in recent years: a rise in both the rhetoric and practice of severe punishment at a time when public opinion has played a pivotal rol…
Across America today gated communities sprawl out from urban centers, employers enforce mandatory drug testing, and schools screen students with metal detectors. Social problems ranging from welfare dependency to educational inequality have been rec…
Across America today, gated communities sprawl out from urban centers, employers enforce mandatory drug testing, and schools screen students with metal detectors. Social problems ranging from welfare dependency to educational inequality have been re…
In this timely, challenging book, a former minister and current legislator in the British government examines the wave of American federal crime-control laws that surfaced both before and after the 1994 "Republican Revolution" in Congress. Lord Wind…
In 2003, well over half a million jailed Americans will leave prison and return to society. Largely uneducated, unskilled, often without family support, and with the stigma of a prison record hanging over them, many if not most will experience serio…
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 mor…
This book provides an overview of the dominant philosophical approaches and practices in handling status offenders - the kinds of youth who habitually resist the control of their parents and schools, who run away from home, who drink and stay out af…
Crime is an American preoccupation. Campaigns such as "the war on drugs," zero tolerance policing, and three strikes and you're out-not to mention the ever-shrill coverage of crime stories-all suggest a perpetually outraged nation determined to keep…
In this comprehensive study, Jean-Paul Brodeur examines the diversity of the policing web. Policing agencies such as criminal investigation units, intelligence services, private security companies, and military policing organizations, are examined i…
Within the past three decades, social and legal changes have transformed the juvenile court from a nominally rehabilitative welfare agency into a second-class criminal court for young offenders. Recent efforts to "toughen" juvenile justice policies…
Written by a leading scholar of juvenile justice, this book examines the social and legal changes that have transformed the juvenile court in the last three decades from a nominally rehabilitative welfare agency into a scaled-down criminal court for…
The question "What can justify criminal punishment ?" becomes especially insistent at times, like our own, of penal crisis, when serious doubts are raised not only about the justice or efficacy of particular modes of punishment, but about the very l…
Few schisms in American life run as deep or as wide as the divide between gun rights and gun control advocates. Awash in sound and symbol, the gun regulation debate has largely been defined by forceful rhetoric rather than substantive action. Politi…
The objective of this book is to quantify the social costs of gun violence in order to help policy makers determine how many and which violence programmes to support. Drawing upon the most detailed and extensive economic study of the cost of gun vio…
During 2000-1 in Afghanistan, the Taliban achieved a longtime goal of national and international drug policy agencies: a large, sudden, and unanticipated reduction in world opium production. This cutback provides an unprecedented opportunity to stud…
Living in Infamy: Felon Disfranchisement and the History of American Citizenship examines the history of disfranchisement for criminal conviction in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the post-war South, white southe…
"Mr. Manza and Mr. Uggen... wade into one of the most contested empirical debates in political science: How many (if any) recent American elections would have gone differently if all former felons had been allowed to vote?"-The Chronicle of Higher E…
5.4 million Americans-1 in every 40 voting age adults- are denied the right to participate in democratic elections because of a past or current felony conviction. In several American states, 1 in 4 black men cannot vote due to a felony conviction. I…
In the early 1990s, Chicago, the nation's third largest city, instituted the nation's largest community policing initiative. Wesley G. Skogan here provides the first comprehensive evaluation of that citywide program, examining its impact on crime, n…
"Tried as an adult." The phrase rings with increasing frequency through America's courtrooms. In Michigan, an 11-year-old is charged with first-degree homicide in the shooting death of a playmate. A mentally disabled boy in Florida faces armed robbe…
100 billion dollars. That is the annual cost of gun violence in America according to the authors of this landmark study, a book destined to change the way Americans view the problem of gun-related violence. Until now researchers have assessed the bu…
Relying on previously undisclosed confessions of former mafia members now cooperating with the police, Letizia Paoli provides a clinically accurate portrait of mafia behavior, motivations, and structure in Italy. The mafia, Paoli demonstrates, are e…
