February New Criminal Justice books

Confronting Humanity at Its Worst: Social Psychological Perspectives on Genocide

Confronting Humanity at Its Worst: Social Psychological Perspectives on Genocide: HV6322.7 .C66 2020
Author(s): Leonard S. Newman
New York, NY : Oxford University Press [2020]

How do otherwise ordinary people become perpetrators of genocide? Why are groups targeted for mass killing? How do groups justify these terrible acts? While there are no easy answers to these questions, social psychologists are especially well positioned to contribute to our understanding of genocide and mass killing. With research targeting key questions -such as how negative impressions of outgroups develop and how social influence can lead people to violate their moral principles and other norms - social psychologists have much to teach us about why groups of people attempt to exterminate other groups, why people participate in such atrocious projects, and how they live with themselves afterwards. By bringing together research previously available only to readers of academic journals, this volume sheds crucial light on human behavior at the extremes and in doing so, helps us take one more step towards preventing future tragedies.


• Terrorists as Monsters: The Unmanageable Other from the French Revolution to the Islamic State
  
  Terrorists as Monsters: The Unmanageable Other from the French Revolution to the Islamic State: HV6431 .P5625 2019
  Author(s): Marco Pinfari
  New York, NY : Oxford University Press [2019]
  
  From the chilling threats of the "ISIS vampire" to the view of al-Qaeda as the "Frankenstein the CIA created," terrorism seems to be inextricably bound with monstrosity. But why do the media and government officials often portray terrorists as monsters? And perhaps more puzzling, why do terrorists sometimes want to be perceived as such? This book, the first of its kind, examines the use of archetypal metaphors of monstrosity in relation to terrorism, from the gorgons of Robespierre's "reign of terror" to the dragons and lycanthropes of anarchism, the beasts and blood-licking demons of ethnonational terrorism, and the hydras and Frankenstein's monsters of Islamic jihadism. Marco Pinfari argues that politicians frame terrorists as unmanageable monsters not only in an effort at cultural "othering" and dehumanization, but also to secure popular backing for rule-breaking behavior in counter-terrorism. The book also explores the way that terrorists themselves impersonate monsters, showing that several groups have pursued such a tactic throughout the history of terrorism. It contributes to a number of ongoing public debates by highlighting how, even when actors like the Islamic State present themselves as mad and irrational, their tactics remain in essence rational. Pinfari also provides an original historical outlook on the roots of monster metaphors and discusses several types of terrorism, including state terrorism, left-wing terrorism, anarchism, ethnonationalist terrorism, and white supremacist groups. In unpacking the functions played by monster metaphors and by their impersonation, Terrorists as Monsters helps the reader understand the political processes that hide behind the fangs.
  
  
• The securitisation of Islam: Covert racism and affect in the United States post-9/11
  
  The securitisation of Islam: Covert racism and affect in the United States post-9/11: HV6432.7 .E76 2020
  Author(s): Clara Eroukhmanoff
  Manchester : Manchester University Press 2020.
  
  This book is about the securitisation of Islam in the United States from the Bush to the Trump administration. It explores the ways in which the securitisation is justified and felt when president G.W Bush, Barack Obama and (even) President Donald J. Trump have often securitised through deception and covert language rather than by mobilizing a security grammar. This book contributes to the debate on islamophobia and the construction of Islam as a threat to the liberal order since the 11 September attacks. Its approach is innovative by connecting covert racism and the securitisation of minority groups, through what the book calls ‘indirect securitisation’, and by introducing emotions and affect to securitisation studies. This book is of interest to a wide audience interested in Islamophobia in the US, security studies, the ‘emotions turn’ in International Relations, and scholars interested in theories of language.
  
  
• Gun Violence
  
  Gun Violence: HV7436 .S749 2020
  Author(s): Bradley Steffens
  San Diego, CA : ReferencePoint Press Inc [2020]
  
  More than one hundred people die from gunshot injuries every day, and the rate of gunshot deaths and injuries keeps climbing every year. Gun Violence looks at the contributing factors behind this public health crisis and uses anecdotes and first-person accounts to explore the short- and long-term effects it is having on survivors, the wounded, and society as a whole.
  
  
• Crime Lab Report: An Anthology on Forensic Science in the Era of Criminal Justice Reform
  
  Crime Lab Report: An Anthology on Forensic Science in the Era of Criminal Justice Reform: HV8073 .C63 2020
  Author(s): John M. Collins
  Amsterdam : Academic Press [2020]
  
  Crime Lab Report compiles the most relevant and popular articles that appeared in this ongoing periodical between 2007 and 2017. Articles have been categorized by theme to serve as chapters, with an introduction at the beginning of each chapter and a description of the events that inspired each article. The author concludes the compilation with a reflection on Crime Lab Report, the retired periodical, and the future of forensic science as the 21st Century unfolds. Intended for forensic scientists, prosecutors, defense attorneys and even students studying forensic science or law, this compilation provides much needed information on the topics at hand. Presents a comprehensive look ‘behind the curtain’ of the forensic sciences from the viewpoint of someone working within the field Educates practitioners and laboratory administrators, providing talking points to help them respond intelligently to questions and criticisms, whether on the witness stand or when meeting with politicians and/or policymakers Captures an important period in the history of forensic science and criminal justice in America
  
  
• The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence
  
  The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence: HV8148.C52 R35 2019
  Author(s): Laurence Ralph
  Chicago ; The University of Chicago Press 2019.
  
  Torture is an open secret in Chicago. Nobody in power wants to acknowledge this grim reality, but everyone knows it happens—and that the torturers are the police. Three to five new claims are submitted to the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission of Illinois each week. Four hundred cases are currently pending investigation. Between 1972 and 1991, at least 125 black suspects were tortured by Chicago police officers working under former Police Commander Jon Burge. As the more recent revelations from the Homan Square “black site” show, that brutal period is far from a historical anomaly. For more than fifty years, police officers who took an oath to protect and serve have instead beaten, electrocuted, suffocated, and raped hundreds—perhaps thousands—of Chicago residents. In The Torture Letters, Laurence Ralph chronicles the history of torture in Chicago, the burgeoning activist movement against police violence, and the American public’s complicity in perpetuating torture at home and abroad. Engaging with a long tradition of epistolary meditations on racism in the United States, from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Ralph offers in this book a collection of open letters written to protesters, victims, students, and others. Through these moving, questing, enraged letters, Ralph bears witness to police violence that began in Burge’s Area Two and follows the city’s networks of torture to the global War on Terror. From Vietnam to Geneva to Guantanamo Bay—Ralph’s story extends as far as the legacy of American imperialism. Combining insights from fourteen years of research on torture with testimonies of victims of police violence, retired officers, lawyers, and protesters, this is a powerful indictment of police violence and a fierce challenge to all Americans to demand an end to the systems that support it. With compassion and careful skill, Ralph uncovers the tangled connections among law enforcement, the political machine, and the courts in Chicago, amplifying the voices of torture victims who are still with us—and lending a voice to those long deceased.
  
  
• Excessive Force: Toronto's Fight to Reform City Policing
  
  Excessive Force: Toronto's Fight to Reform City Policing: HV8160.T6 M85 2018
  Author(s): Alok Mukherjee, Tim Harper
  Madeira Park, BC : Douglas & McIntyre [2018]
  
  Alok Mukherjee was the civilian overseer of the Toronto police between 2005 and 2015, during the most tumultuous decade the force had ever faced. In this provocative and highly readable collaboration with Tim Harper, former Toronto Star national affairs columnist, Mukherjee reveals how Police Chief Bill Blair changed the channel after the police-killing of Sammy Yatim. He explains how society has given police tacit approval to cull people in mental health crisis and pulls the curtain back on a police culture which avoids accountability, puts officer safety above public safety, colludes on internal investigations and pushes for use of force over empathy and crisis resolution. The book takes the reader inside the G20 debacle; the police push for an ever-growing budget; the battle over carding, which disproportionately targeted blacks; the police treatment of its own members in mental health distress; and the battles with an entrenched union that pushed back on Mukherjee’s every move toward reform. In spite of, or as a result of all this, Mukherjee played a leading role in shaping the national conversation about policing, sketching a way forward for a new type of policing that brings law enforcement out of the nineteenth century and into the twenty-first century. There is no shortage of “inside” police books written by former cops. Here is a rare title—not only in Canada but the Western world—written from the community’s perspective.
  
  
• The Politics of Police Reform: Society against the State in Post-Soviet Countries
  
  The Politics of Police Reform: Society against the State in Post-Soviet Countries: HV8224 .M337 2018
  Author(s): Erica Marat
  New York, NY : Oxford University Press [2018]
  
  There is a Russian saying that "police mirror society." The gist of this is that every society is policed to the extent that it allows itself to be policed. Centralized in control but decentralized in their reach, the police are remarkably similar in structure, chain of command, and their relationships with the political elite across post-Soviet nations--they also remain one of the least reformed post-communist institutions. As a powerful state organ, the Soviet-style militarized police have resisted change despite democratic transformations in the overall political context, including rounds of competitive elections and growing civil society. While consensus between citizens and the state about reform may be possible in democratic nations, it is considerably more difficult to achieve in authoritarian states. Across post-Soviet countries, such discussions most often occur between political elites and powerful non-state actors, such as criminal syndicates and nationalistic ethnic groups, rather than the wider citizenry. Even in countries where one or more rounds of democratic elections have taken place since 1991, empowered citizens and politicians have not renegotiated the way states police and coerce society. On the contrary, in many post-Soviet countries, police functions have expanded to serve the interests of the ruling political elites. What does it take to reform a post-Soviet police force? This book explores the conditions in which a meaningful transformation of the police is likely to succeed and when it will fail. Departing from the conventional interpretation of the police as merely an institution of coercion, this book defines it as a medium for state-society consensus on the limits of the state's legitimate use of violence. It thus considers policing not as a way to measure the state's capacity to coerce society, but rather as a reflection of a complex society bound together by a web of casual interactions and political structures. The book compares reform efforts in Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan, finding that bottom-up public mobilization is likely to emerge in the aftermath of transformative violence--an incident when the usual patterns of policing are interrupted with unprecedented brutality against vulnerable individuals. Ultimately, The Politics of Police Reform examines the various pathways to transforming how the state relates to society through policing.
  
  
• Solitary Confinement: Effects, Practices, and Pathways toward Reform
  
  Solitary Confinement: Effects, Practices, and Pathways toward Reform: HV8728 .R66 2020
  Author(s): Jules Lobel, Peter Scharff Smith
  New York, NY, United States of America : Oxford University Press [2020]
  
  The use of solitary confinement in prisons became common with the rise of the modern penitentiary during the first half of the nineteenth century and his since remained a feature of many prison systems all over the world. Solitary confinement is used for a panoply of different reasons although research tells us that these practices have widespread negative health effects. Besides the death penalty it is arguably the most punitive and dangerous intervention available to state authorities in democratic nations. Nevertheless, in the United States there is currently an estimated 80-100,000 prisoners in small cells for more than 22 hours per day with little or no social contact and no physical contact visits with family or friends. Even in Scandinavia, thousands of prisoners are placed in solitary confinement every year and with an alarming frequency. These facts have spawned international interest in this topic and a growing international reform movement, which includes researchers, litigators and human rights defenders as well as prison staff and prisoners. This book is the first to take a broad international comparative approach and to apply an interdisciplinary lens to this subject. In this volume neuroscientists, high level prison officials, social and political scientists, medical doctors, lawyers and former prisoners and their families from different countries will address the effects and practices of prolonged solitary confinement and the movement for its reform and abolition.