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Criminology 2006 Highlights
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Marie Gottschalk, University of Pennsylvania
Over the last three decades the United States has built a carceral state that is unprecedented among Western countries and in US history. Nearly one in 50 people, excluding children and the elderly, is incarcerated today, a rate unsurpassed anywhere else in the world. What are some of the main political forces that explain this unprecedented reliance on mass imprisonment? Throughout American history, crime and punishment have been central features of American political development. This book examines the development of four key movements that mediated the construction of the carceral state in important ways: the victims' movement, the women's movement, the prisoners' rights movement, and opponents of the death penalty. This book argues that punitive penal policies were forged by particular social movements and interest groups within the constraints of larger institutional structures and historical developments that distinguish the United States from other Western countries.
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Edited by Alfred Blumstein, H. John Heinz School of Public Management
Edited by Joel Wallman, Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation
Violent crime in America shot up sharply in the mid-1980s and continued to climb until 1991, after which something unprecedented occurred. The crime level declined to a level not seen since the 1960s. This revised edition of The Crime Drop in America focuses first on the dramatic drop in crime rates in America in the 1990s, and then, in a new epilogue, on the patterns since 2000. The separate chapters written by distinguished experts cover the many factors affecting crime rates: policing, incarceration, drug markets, gun control, economics, and demographics. Detailed analyses emphasize the mutual effects of changes in crack markets, a major focus of youth violence, and the drop in rates of violence following decline in demand for crack. The contrasts between the crime-drop period of the 1990s and the period since 2000 are explored in the new epilogue, which also reviews major new developments in thinking about the causes and control of crime.
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Bruce Jacobs, University of Texas, Dallas
Richard Wright, University of Missouri, St Louis
Street criminals live in a dangerous world, but they cannot realistically rely on the criminal justice system to protect them from predation by fellow lawbreakers; they are on their own when it comes to dealing with crimes perpetrated against them and often use retaliation as a mechanism for deterring and responding to victimization. Although retaliation lies at the heart of much of the violence that plagues many inner-city neighborhoods across the United States, it has received scant attention from criminologists. As a result, the structure, process, and forms of retaliation in the real world setting of urban America remain poorly understood. Street Justice: Retaliation in the Criminal World explores the face of modern day retaliation from the perspective of currently active criminals who have experienced it first hand, as offenders, victims, or both.
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Charles M. Katz, Arizona State University
Vincent J. Webb, Arizona State University
Describing the assumptions, issues, problems, and events that characterize, shape, and define the police response to gangs in America today, the primary focus of this book is on gang unit officers and the environment in which they work. The book is broadly focused on describing how gang units respond to community gang problems, and answers such questions as: Why do police agencies organize their responses to gangs in certain ways? Who are the people who elect to police gangs? What are their jobs really like? How do their responses to the gang problem compare with other policing strategies, such as community policing?
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Doris Layton MacKenzie, University of Maryland, College Park
What Works in Corrections examines the impact of correctional interventions, management policies, treatment and rehabilitation programs on the recidivism of offenders and delinquents. The book reviews different strategies for reducing recidivism and describes how the evidence for effectiveness is assessed. Thousands of studies were examined in order to identify those of sufficient scientific rigor to enable conclusions to be drawn about the impact of various interventions, policies and programs on recidivism. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses were performed to further examine these results. This book assesses the relative effectiveness of rehabilitation programs (e.g., education, life skills, employment, cognitive behavioral), treatment for different types of offenders (e.g. sex offenders, batterers, juveniles), management and treatment of drug-involved offenders (e.g., drug courts, therapeutic communities, outpatient drug treatment) and punishment, control and surveillance interventions (boot camps, intensive supervision, electronic monitoring). Through her extensive research, MacKenzie illustrates which of these programs are most effective and why.
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Terance D. Miethe, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Hong Lu, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
This book identifies and examines the sources of similarities and differences in types of economic punishments, incapacitation devices and structures, and lethal and non-lethal forms of corporal punishment over time and place. The authors survey punishment responses to crime and deviance across different regions of the world and in specific countries like the United States, China, and Saudi Arabia.
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Neal Shover, Andrew Hochstetler
This systematic application of rational-choice theory to white-collar crime problems distinguishes ordinary and upperworld white-collar crime and presents reasons theoretically for believing that both have increased substantially over time. Reasons for the increase include the growing supply of white-collar lure and non-credible oversight. The book argues that measures and approaches used in the war on street crime have greater promise for reducing white-collar crime. Concluding with reasons for believing that problems of white-collar crime will continue unchecked in the increasingly global economy, it calls for strengthened citizen movements to rein in the increases.
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Edited by Jeremy Travis
Edited by Christy Visher
What are the public safety consequences of the fourfold increase in the number of individuals entering and leaving the nation's prisons each year? Many have speculated about the nexus between prisoner reentry and public safety. Law enforcement officials have attributed increases in violence in their communities to the influx of returning prisoners. Politicians have recommended policies that keep former prisoners out of high crime neighborhoods in the belief that crime would be reduced. The chapters in this book address these issues and suggest policies that will keep released prisoners from committing new crimes.
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Edited by David Weisburd, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Edited by Anthony A Braga, Harvard University, Massachusetts
Over the last three decades American policing has gone through a period of significant change and innovation. In what is a relatively short historical time frame the police began to reconsider their fundamental mission, the nature of the core strategies of policing, and the character of their relationships with the communities that they serve. This volume brings together leading police scholars to examine eight major innovations which emerged during this period. Including advocates and critics of the innovations, this comprehensive book assesses the impacts of police innovation on crime and public safety.
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Ronald Weitzer, George Washington University, Washington DC
Steven Tuch, George Washington University, Washington DC
Race and Policing in America is about relations between police and citizens, with a focus on racial differences. It utilizes both the authors' own research and other studies to examine Americans' opinions, preferences, and personal experiences regarding the police. Guided by group-position theory and using both existing studies and the authors' own quantitative and qualitative data (from a nationally representative survey of whites, blacks, and Hispanics), this book examines the roles of personal experience, knowledge of others' experiences (vicarious experience), mass media reporting on the police, and neighborhood conditions (including crime and socioeconomic disadvantage) in structuring citizen views in four major areas: overall satisfaction with police in one's city and neighborhood, perceptions of several types of police misconduct, perceptions of police racial bias and discrimination, and evaluations of and support for a large number of reforms in policing.
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