Browse

Today, one out of every nine prisoners is serving a life sentence. Even though a proportion is serving a sentence of life without parole, the majority of lifers will at one point be released to society. We know, however, very little on what happens to those sentenced with life imprisonment after release. As they have been removed from society for decades, their re-entry process cannot be equated to that of other delinquents who have served much shorter prison sentences. To shed light on this question, this book discusses the life histories of more than sixty homicide offenders who completed a life sentence. Some were re-incarcerated, while others were able to build a life beyond bars. Against the backdrop of tough-on-crime policies, the book takes the reader on a journey into the lives of these men and women, the events that lead to their incarceration, and the struggles they faced upon release. The goal of this book is to offer the reader a unique insight into the lives of long-term incarcerated individuals and to provide them with a new understanding on how to explain their successes and failures post-release. Not only does the book move forward our theoretical understanding of crime throughout the life course, it also provides a basis for future discussion for policy and legislature changes in the context of the goals, costs and effects of long-term imprisonment.

The global financial crisis showed deep problems with mainstream economic predictions, as well as the vulnerability of the world's richest countries and the enormous potential of some poorer ones. China, India, Brazil, and other counties are growing faster than Europe or America and have weathered the crisis better. Is their growth due to following conventional economic guidelines or to strong state leadership and sometimes protectionism? These issues are basic to the question of which countries will grow in coming decades, as well as the likely conflicts over global trade policy, currency standards, and economic cooperation. This is the third part of a trilogy comprised of the first three books in the Possible Future series.

When United Airlines Flight 93, the fourth plane hijacked in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the gash it left in the ground became a national site of mourning. The flight's forty passengers became a media obsession, and countless books, movies, and articles told the tale of their heroic fight to band together and sacrifice their lives to stop Flight 93 from becoming a weapon of terror. This book argues that by memorializing these individuals as patriots, we have woven them into the much larger story of our nation—about what it means to be truly American. The book examines the symbolic impact and role of the Flight 93 disaster in the nation's collective consciousness, delving into the spontaneous memorialization efforts that blossomed in Shanksville immediately after news of the crash spread; the ad-hoc sites honoring the victims that in time emerged; and the creation of an official, permanent crash monument in Shanksville like those built for past American wars. The book also analyzes the cultural narratives that evolved in films and in books around the events on the day of the crash and the lives and deaths of its “angel patriot” passengers, uncovering how these representations of the event reflect the myth of the authentic American nation—one that Americans believed was gravely threatened in the 9/11 attacks. The book unveils how, in the wake of 9/11, America mourned much more than the loss of life.

This book brings together empirical work on polyamory on the one hand and feminist, queer, and critical race theory on the other fill a theoretical gap in understanding the role of monogamy in legitimating and perpetuating relations of social and cultural inequality. The two central theoretical goals in the book are to (1) begin unpacking the links between compulsory and institutionalized monogamy and heteromasculine privilege and dominance as it intersects with race and sexuality, and (2) develop a theoretical framework for identifying and cultivating what the author calls polyqueer sexualities—sexual and relationship intimacies that include more than two people and that, through plurality, open up possibilities to “undo” race and gender hierarchies in ways that would not otherwise arise within the context of dyadic sex or monogamy. Given the role of compulsory monogamy in legitimating and perpetuating race, gender, and sexual inequalities, the author argues that polyqueer challenges to mononormativity can, if done collectively, undo at least part of those systems of domination within the context of intimate relationships both in terms of their symbolic meaning and their embodied practice. The author does so by exploring narratives of cheating, constructions of the “Down Low,” and erotic threesomes, as well as her own experiences of polyamory.

This collection expands scholarly understandings of citizenship in an age in which the material body and its health, vitality, and natural and social environments not only create and discipline the citizen-subject, but also provide the conditions necessary for its recognition and political agency. Together, the chapters consider biocitizenship as a unique mode of biopolitical governance, but also as a response and sometimes a resistance to it. Looking closely at the ways in which the body and citizenship interanimate each other, the collection moves away from biocitizenship as a static form of biomedical subjectivity or category of belonging and redefines it as a dynamic and essential—sometimes generative, and sometimes limiting—element of biopolitics. The book has three primary goals: to serve as the first multidisciplinary forum on biocitizenship, bringing together a variety of voices from different fields (including voices from outside the academy); to redefine biocitizenship as a broad mode of political action linked to health, bodies, and life; and to critically interrogate both the “bio” and “citizenship” of biocitizenship.

In the current historical moment borders have taken on heightened material and symbolic significance, shaping identities and the social and political landscape. “Borders”—defined broadly to include territorial dividing lines as well as sociocultural boundaries—have become increasingly salient sites of struggle over social belonging and cultural and material resources. How do contemporary activists navigate and challenge these borders? What meanings do they ascribe to different social, cultural, and political boundaries, and how do these meanings shape the strategies in which they engage? Moreover, how do these social movements confront internal borders based on the differences that emerge within social change initiatives? This book explores these important questions through case studies situated in geographic contexts around the globe. By conceptualizing struggles over identity, social belonging, and exclusion as extensions of border politics, the book captures the complex ways in which geographic, cultural, and symbolic dividing lines are blurred and transcended, but also fortified and redrawn. The book places right-wing and social justice initiatives in the same analytical frame to identify patterns that span the political spectrum. It offers a lens through which to understand borders as sites of diverse struggles, as well as the strategies and practices used by diverse social movements in today's globally interconnected world.

Why are there so few women in science? This book uses the experiences of successful women scientists and engineers to answer the question of why elite institutions have so few women scientists and engineers tenured on their faculties. Women are highly qualified, motivated students, and yet they have drastically higher rates of attrition, and they are shying away from the fields with the greatest demand for workers and the biggest economic payoffs, such as engineering, computer sciences, and the physical sciences. The book shows that these continuing trends are not only disappointing, they are urgent: the U.S. can no longer afford to lose the talents of the women scientists and engineers, because it is quickly losing its lead in science and technology. Ultimately, these biases and barriers may lock women out of the new scientific frontiers of innovation and technology transfer, resulting in loss of useful inventions and products to society.

Brown Bodies, White Babies contributes to an active field of literature on reproductive technologies while addressing understudied aspects of surrogacy within this scholarship. With notable exceptions, feminist analyses of surrogacy have largely focused on the gendered implications of the practice and minimized the role of race. Brown Bodies, White Babies takes intersectionality as a crucial starting point, examining the ways in which identity categories come together to form nexuses of privilege and oppression. Fertility clinics, surrogacy agencies, and intended parents often dismiss the role of race in gestational surrogacy arrangements as inconsequential, particularly in comparison to the race of egg and sperm donors who will contribute their genetic material. A surrogate is measured instead by markers of appropriate femininity, including the completeness of her own biological family, and the perceived authenticity of her altruistic motivations. Yet gender identity is not isolated from socially identified race, and thus the race of the surrogate takes on varying levels of importance in relation to other intersectional constructs. As new media narratives of surrogacy are constantly being produced and innovations in reproductive technologies advance at a rapid rate, it is difficult, if not impossible, to keep pace. However, the arguments and theoretical frameworks that underpin this research remain relevant, largely because this project resonates beyond the specificity of ARTs and draws historicized comparisons that tap into a much longer tradition of cross-racial reproductive labor.

There are people dedicated to improving the way we eat, and people dedicated to improving the way we give birth. A Bun in the Oven is the first comparison of these two social movements. In this book Barbara Katz Rothman traces the food and the birth movements through three major phases over the course of the 20th century in the United States: from the early-20th-century era of scientific management; through to the consumerism of post–World War II with its “turn to the French” in making things gracious; to the late-20th-century counterculture midwives and countercuisine cooks. Katz Rothman then looks at today’s world of risk management in both arenas. The book explores the tension throughout all of these eras between the industrial demands of mass management and profit making, and the social movements—composed largely of women coming together from very different feminist sensibilities—that are working to expose the harmful consequences of industrialization, and make birth and food both meaningful and healthy. In both movements, issues of the natural, the authentic, and the importance of “meaningful” and “personal” experiences get balanced against discussions of what is sensible, convenient, and safe, operating in a context of commercial and corporate interests that place profit and efficiency above individual experiences and outcomes. A Bun in the Oven brings new insight into the relationship between our most intimate, embodied personal experiences, the industries that control them, and the social movements that resist the industrialization of life and seek to birth change.

This book situates the current crisis in the historical trajectory of the capitalist world-system, showing how the crisis was made possible not only by neoliberal financial reforms but by a massive turn away from manufacturing things of value towards seeking profit from financial exchange and credit. Much more basic than the result of a few financial traders cheating the system, this is a potential historical turning point. The book establishes why the system was ripe for crisis of the past, and yet why this meltdown was different. It concludes by asking whether as deep as the crisis is, it may contain seeds of a new global economy, what role the US will play, and whether China or other countries will rise to global leadership. This is the first part of a trilogy comprised of the first three books in the Possible Future series.

More than 1.3 million Korean Americans live in the United States, the majority of them foreign-born immigrants and their children, the so-called 1.5 and second generations. While many sons and daughters of Korean immigrants outwardly conform to the stereotyped image of the upwardly mobile, highly educated super-achiever, the realities and challenges that the children of Korean immigrants face in their adult lives as their immigrant parents grow older and confront health issues that are far more complex. This book explores how earlier experiences helping immigrant parents navigate American society have prepared Korean American children for negotiating and redefining the traditional gender norms, close familial relationships, and cultural practices that their parents expect them to adhere to as they reach adulthood. The book explores issues such as the children's childhood experiences, their interpreted cultural traditions and values in regards to care and respect for the elderly, their attitudes and values regarding care for aging parents, their observations of parents facing retirement and life changes, and their experiences with providing care when parents face illness or the prospects of dying. The book provides a new look at the linked lives of immigrants and their families, and the struggles and triumphs that they face over many generations.

Based on a multimethod study that centers on interviews with over 30 conservationists, field biologists, ecologists, paleontologists and over 3 years of my fieldwork on urban beaches in the New York City area, the Florida Keys, and international conferences, Catch and Release explores the interspecies relationships between humans and horseshoe crabs—our multiple sites of entanglement and enmeshment as we both come to matter. As I show, crabs and humans make each other in particular ways. Humans have literally harvested the life out of horseshoe crabs for multiple purposes; we interpret them for understanding geologic time, we bleed them for biomedical applications, we collect them for agricultural fertilizer, we eat them as delicacies, we rescue them for conservation, we capture them as bait, we categorize them as Endangered. In contrast, the crabs make humans matter by revealing our species vulnerability to endotoxins, offering opportunities for career opportunities and profiteering off of crab bodies, and fertilizing the soil of agricultural harvest for human food. In these acts of harvesting, I consider how horseshoe crabs and humans make meaning of events such as the Anthropocene (the epoch of geologic time that attributes climate change and species decline to human activities), global warming, and biomedical innovation.

This book explores the twenty-first-century consequences of immigration through an examination of how the so-called second generation is faring educationally in six countries: France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and the United States. This book brings together a team of renowned social science researchers from around the globe to compare the educational achievements of children from low-status immigrant groups to those of mainstream populations in these countries, asking what we can learn from one system that can be usefully applied in another. The chapters conclude that educational processes do, in fact, play a part in creating unequal status for immigrant groups in these societies. In most countries, the youth coming from the most numerous immigrant populations lag substantially behind their mainstream peers, implying that they will not be able to integrate economically and civically as traditional mainstream populations shrink. Despite this fact, the comparisons highlight features of each system that hinder the educational advance of immigrant-origin children, allowing the chapters to identify a number of policy solutions to help fix the problem. A comprehensive look at a growing global issue, the book represents a major achievement in the fields of education and immigration studies.

In a country long associated with the trade in opiates, the Chinese government has for decades applied extreme measures to curtail the spread of illicit drugs, only to find that the problem has worsened. Burma is blamed as the major producer of illicit drugs and conduit for the entry of drugs into China. Which organizations are behind the heroin trade? What problems and prospects of drug control in the so-called “Golden Triangle” drug-trafficking region are faced by Chinese and Southeast Asian authorities? This book examines the social organization of the trafficking of heroin from the Golden Triangle to China and the wholesale and retail distribution of the drug in China. Based on face-to-face interviews with hundreds of incarcerated drug traffickers, street-level drug dealers, users, and authorities, paired with extensive fieldwork in the border areas of Burma and China and several major urban centers in China and Southeast Asia, the book reveals how the drug trade has evolved in the Golden Triangle since the late 1980s. It also explores the marked characteristics of heroin traffickers; the relationship between drug use and sales in China; and how China compares to other international drug markets.

This is a hopeful but complicated era for those with ambitions to reform the juvenile courts and youth-serving public institutions in the United States. As advocates plea for major reforms, many fear the public backlash in making dramatic changes. This book provides a look at the recent trends in juvenile justice as well as suggestions for reforms and policy changes in the future. Should youth be treated as adults when they break the law? How can youth be deterred from crime? What factors should be considered in how youth are punished? What role should the police have in schools? This book focuses on the most pressing issues of the day: the impact of neuroscience on our understanding of brain development and subsequent sentencing, the relationship of schools and the police, the issue of the school-to-prison pipeline, the impact of immigration, the privacy of juvenile records, and the need for national policies—including registration requirements—for juvenile sex offenders.

The natural world is marked by an ever-increasing loss of varied habitats, a growing number of species extinctions, and a full range of new kinds of dilemmas posed by global warming. At the same time, humans are also working to actively shape this natural world through contemporary bioscience and biotechnology. This book posits that cloned endangered animals in zoos sit at the apex of these two trends, as humans seek a scientific solution to environmental crisis. Often fraught with controversy, cloning technologies significantly affect our conceptualizations of and engagements with wildlife and nature. By studying animals at different locations, the book explores the human practices surrounding the cloning of endangered animals. Ultimately, the book concludes that the act of recalibrating nature through science is what most disturbs us about cloning animals in captivity, revealing that debates over cloning become, in the end, a site of political struggle between different human groups. Moreover, the book explores the implications of the social role that animals at the zoo play in the first place—how they are viewed, consumed, and used by humans for our own needs. A unique study uniting sociology and the study of science and technology, the book demonstrates just how much bioscience reproduces and changes our ideas about the meaning of life itself.

For close to a century, the field of community criminology has examined the causes and consequences of community crime and delinquency rates. Nevertheless, there is still a lot we do not know about the dynamics behind these connections. This book argues that obstacles to deepening our understanding of community/crime links arise in part because most scholars have overlooked four fundamental concerns: how conceptual frames depend on the geographic units and/or temporal units used; how to establish the meaning of theoretically central ecological empirical indicators; and how to think about the causes and consequences of non-random selection dynamics. The book organizes these four conceptual challenges using a common meta-analytic framework. The framework pinpoints critical features of and gaps in current theories about communities and crime, connects these concerns to current debates in both criminology and the philosophy of social science, and sketches the types of theory testing needed in the future if we are to grow our understanding of the causes and consequences of community crime rates. It explains that a common meta-theoretical frame provides a grammar for thinking critically about current theories and simultaneously allows presenting these four topics and their connections in a unified manner. The book provides an orientation to current and past scholarship in this area by describing three distinct but related community crime sequences involving delinquents, adult offenders, and victims. These sequences highlight community justice dynamics thereby raising questions about frequently used crime indicators in this area of research.

The odyssey of Depo-Provera is a study of the politics of contraceptive drug risk management, which involves a lengthy struggle over the scientific assessment of the drug's health risk and acceptability of the injectable drug's use. In this struggle, the FDA, the federal government's drug licensing agency, has limited authority to manage the drug's risk and is one participant in a fragmented system of drug risk management that includes The Upjohn Company, physicians, and state judges and legislators. Depo-Provera's odyssey joins its national controversy over its contraceptive approval to its state civil and criminal legal experiences, which take the form of three overlapping stories told by Judith Weisz, Anne MacMurdo, and Roger Gauntlett. At the center of each of their stories is a trial.Judith Weisz chaired the FDA's Depo-Provera Public Board of Inquiry, a science court; Anne MacMurdo was the plaintiff in a state products liability suit against The Upjohn Company; and Roger Gauntlett, the defendant in a state statutory rape trial. Together their stories join the twenty-five-year national controversy over Upjohn's FDA application to have the drug licensed as a female contraceptive to the state medical malpractice and products liability issues raised by its contraceptive use and the criminal justice issues raised by its use as a probation and parole condition for sex offenders. Together they tell a collective story that provides an agenda for the principal participants to more effectively manage Depo-Provera's health risk and for the FDA to seriously consider banning the drug.

Convicted and Condemned is a critical assessment of how a felony conviction operates as an integral part of prisoner reentry. Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework and ethnographic data, the book advances knowledge about the connection among politics, racial animosity, history, public policies, and a felony conviction, which is rooted in historical notions of infamy and the political system of white supremacy. By applying social disability theory to the way a felony conviction functions outside of the criminal justice system, this book explores the evolution of a felony conviction, the common understanding of it, and the way it became shorthand for criminality and deviance specifically linked to black skin. On the basis of social practices, politicians took the common understanding of a felony conviction and extended its function beyond the boundaries of the criminal justice system so that a felony conviction is now embedded in policies that deny felons access to public housing, educational grants, and employment opportunities. Unique ethnographic and interview data reveal that because felons no longer can be physically exiled to faraway lands, a form of internal exile is performed when a felony conviction intersects with public policies, resulting in contemporary outlaws. The book argues that the punitive discourse around a felony conviction allows for the extension of the carceral state beyond the penitentiary to create socially disabled felons, and that the understanding of who and what a felon is shapes societal actions, reinforces the color line, and is a contributing factor undermining felons’ ability to reenter society successfully.

Despite being labeled as adults, the approximately 200,000 youth under the age of 18 who are now prosecuted as adults each year in criminal court are still adolescents, and the contradiction of their legal labeling creates numerous problems and challenges. This book takes a behind-the-scenes look at a unique judicial experiment called the Manhattan Youth Part, a specialized criminal court set aside for youth prosecuted as adults in New York City. Focusing on the lives of those coming through and working in the courtroom, the book is a study of a microcosm that reflects the costs, challenges, and consequences the “tough on crime” age has had, especially for male youth of color. It demonstrates how the court, through creative use of judicial discretion and the cultivation of an innovative courtroom culture, developed a set of strategies for handling “adult-juvenile” cases that embraced, rather than denied, defendants' adolescence.