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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.

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.

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.

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.

Coveredin Ink’s main objective is to present the experience of heavily tattooed women: their love of ink as well as their experiences of prejudice from strangers, family, employers, and media representations. While other books and media focus exclusively on the tattoo designs, Covered Women takes a macro-sociological approach to understanding heavily tattooed women in society as they struggle with gender norms, employment discrimination, family rejection, and social stigma. Women’s experiences within the tattoo community are so very rarely mentioned within tattoo books; therefore, a book devoted to their place in this subculture is imperative. Covered in Ink is based upon five years of ethnographic research in the United States’ tattooing community. Utilizing participant observation, interviews, and visual sociological artifacts (photography and documentary video), this book provides an insight into the world of women and tattooing in their own words; it is the only book on the topic based upon such in-depth, empirical, nationwide, and visual research.

The United States currently is deporting more people than ever before: 4 million people have been deported since 1997—twice as many as all people deported prior to 1996. There is a disturbing pattern in the population deported: 97% of deportees are sent to Latin America or the Caribbean, and 88% are men, many of whom were originally detained through the U.S. criminal justice system. Weaving together hard-hitting critique and moving first-person testimonials, Deported tells the intimate stories of people caught in an immigration law enforcement dragnet that serves the aims of global capitalism. Tanya Golash-Boza uses the stories of 147 of these deportees to explore the racialized and gendered dimensions of mass deportation in the United States, showing how this crisis is embedded in economic restructuring, neoliberal reforms, and the disproportionate criminalization of black and Latino men. In the United States, outsourcing creates service sector jobs and more of a need for the unskilled jobs that attract immigrants looking for new opportunities, but it also leads to deindustrialization, decline in urban communities, and, consequently, heavy policing. Many immigrants are exposed to the same racial profiling and policing as native-born blacks and Latinos. Unlike the native born, though, when immigrants enter the criminal justice system, deportation is often their only way out. Ultimately, Golash-Boza argues that deportation has become a state strategy of social control, both in the United States and in the many countries that receive deportees.

From Deportation to Prison traces the punitive turn in immigration and border policy to the Department of Homeland Security’s Criminal Alien Program (CAP), originally designed to purge noncitizens from jails and prisons and ushering in enforcement priorities that process immigrants according to criminal history and risk. Macías-Rojas argues that new enforcement priorities under the Criminal Alien Program, rooted in the post–civil rights era of mass incarceration and prison overcrowding, fundamentally transformed detention and deportation in ways that merged the immigration and criminal justice systems. Deportation and immigrant detention, then, are no longer merely vehicles to purge noncitizens from jails and prisons, as was CAPS’s original mission; they are now the chief mechanisms driving federal criminal prosecution and imprisonment for immigration offenses. From a political analysis of policymaking at the congressional level, Macías-Rojas turns to a street-level ethnographic account of how new enforcement priorities take hold on the Arizona-Mexico border, capturing the ways in which border agents, local law enforcement, activists, border residents, and migrants themselves contend with criminal enforcement priorities that distinguish between rights-bearing “victims” and rightsless “criminals.” Combining history and ethnography, this book shows how, when implemented on the U.S.-Mexico border, the Department of Homeland Security’s criminal enforcement priorities have created an enforcement context that recognizes rights for some undocumented migrants deemed “worthy” of state protection, while aggressively punishing and criminally branding others. In this post–civil rights enforcement context, criminalization goes hand in hand with “humanitarianism” centered on “victims’ rights.”

Since the dawn of Hip Hop graffiti writing in the late ‘60s, graffiti writers have inscribed their tag names on cityscapes across the globe to claim public space and mark their presence. In the absence of knowing the writer’s identity, the onlooker’s imagination defaults to the gendered, classed, and racialized conventions framing a public act that requires bodily strength and a willingness to take legal, social, and physical risks. Graffiti subculture is thus imagined as a “boys club” and consequently the graffiti grrlz fade from the social imagination. Utilizing a queer feminist perspective, this book is a transnational ethnography that tells an alternative story about Hip Hop graffiti subculture from the vantage point of over 100 women who write graffiti in 23 countries. Grounded in 15 years of research, each chapter examines a different site and process of transformation. Under the radar of feminist movement, they’ve remodeled Hip Hop masculinity, created an affective digital network, challenged androcentric graffiti history and reshaped subcultural memory, sustained all-grrl community, and strategically deployed femininity to transform their subcultural precarity. By performing feminism across the diaspora, graffiti grrlz have elevated their subcultural status and resisted hetero/sexist patriarchal oppression.

In 2010, President Barack Obama signed a law repealing one of the most controversial policies in American criminal justice history: the 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack cocaine and powder whereby someone convicted of “simply” possessing five grams of crack—the equivalent of a few sugar packets—had been required by law to serve no less than five years in prison. This book draws on various sources to examine the profound symbolic consequences of America's reliance on this punishment structure, tracing the rich cultural linkages between America's war on drugs, and the creative contributions of those directly affected by its destructive effects. Focusing primarily on lyrics that emerged in 1990s New York rap, which critiqued the music industry for being corrupt, unjust, and criminal, the book shows how many rappers began drawing parallels between the “rap game” and the “crack game.” The book argues that the symbolism of crack in rap's stance towards its own commercialization represents a moral debate that is far bigger than hip hop culture, highlighting the degree to which crack cocaine—although a drug long in decline—has come to represent the entire paradoxical predicament of punishment in the United States today.

Drugs, bribes, falsifying evidence, unjustified force and kickbacks: there are many opportunities for cops to act like criminals. This book studies the nature and causes of police misconduct. While police departments are notoriously protective of their own—especially personnel and disciplinary information—the authors gained unprecedented, complete access to the confidential files of NYPD officers who committed serious offenses, examining the cases of more than 1,500 NYPD officers over a twenty year period that includes a fairly complete cycle of scandal and reform, in the largest, most visible police department in the United States. The authors explore both the factors that predict officer misconduct, and the police department's responses to that misconduct, providing a comprehensive framework for understanding the issues. The conclusions they draw are important not just for what they can tell us about the NYPD but for how we are to understand the very nature of police misconduct.

The number of people incarcerated in the United States now exceeds 2.3 million, due in part to the increasing criminalization of drug use: over 25 percent of people incarcerated in jails and prisons are there for drug offenses. This book examines this increased criminalization of drugs and the medicalization of addiction in the United States by focusing on drug courts, where defendants are sent to drug treatment instead of prison. It explores how advocates of these courts make their case for what they call “enlightened coercion,” detailing how they use medical theories of drug addiction to justify increased criminal justice oversight of defendants who, through this process, are defined as both “sick” and “bad.” The book shows how these courts fuse punitive and therapeutic approaches to drug use in the name of a “progressive” and “enlightened” approach to addiction. It argues that the medicalization of addiction has done little to stem the punishment of drug users because of a key conceptual overlap in the medical and punitive approaches—that habitual drug use is a problem that needs to be fixed through sobriety. The book presses policymakers to implement humane responses to persistent substance use that remove its control entirely from the criminal justice system and ultimately explores the nature of crime and punishment in the United States today.

Among developed nations, the United States has one of the most extreme and harsh criminal justice systems in the world—there is overwhelmingly more violence, more punishment, and more incarceration for both adults and juveniles here. But while American scholars may have extensive knowledge about other justice systems around the world and how adults are treated, juvenile justice systems and the plight of youth who break the law throughout the world is less often studied. This book fills a gap in the study of juvenile justice by providing an unprecedented comparison of criminal justice and juvenile justice systems across the world, looking for points of comparison and policy variance that can lead to positive change in the United States. The chapters cover countries from Western Europe to rising powers like China, India, and countries in Latin America. The book discusses important issues such as the relationship between political change and juvenile justice, the common labels used to unify juvenile systems in different regions and in different forms of government, the types of juvenile systems that exist and how they differ, and the impact of national characteristic differences on outcomes of treatment. Furthermore, the book uses its data on criminal versus juvenile justice in a wide variety of nations to create a new explanation of why separate juvenile and criminal courts are felt to be necessary.

Juveniles possess less maturity, intelligence, and competence than adults, heightening their vulnerability in the justice system. For this reason, states try juveniles in separate courts and use different sentencing standards than for adults. Yet, when police bring kids in for questioning, they use the same interrogation tactics they use for adults, including trickery, deception, and lying to elicit confessions or to produce incriminating evidence against the defendants. This book offers the first report of what actually happens when police question juveniles. Drawing on remarkable data, the book analyzes interrogation tapes and transcripts, police reports, juvenile court filings and sentences, and probation and sentencing reports, describing in rich detail what actually happens in the interrogation room. Contrasting routine interrogation and false confessions enables police, lawyers, and judges to identify interrogations that require enhanced scrutiny, to adopt policies to protect citizens, and to assure reliability and integrity of the justice system.

While street prostitutes comprise only a small minority of sex workers, they have the highest rates of physical and sexual abuse, arrest and incarceration, drug addiction, and stigmatization, which stem from both their public visibility and their dangerous work settings. Exiting the trade can be a daunting task for street prostitutes; despite this, many do try at some point to leave sex work behind. Focusing on four different organizations based in Chicago, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and Hartford that help prostitutes get off the streets, this book explores the difficulties, rewards, and public responses to female street prostitutes' transition out of sex work. The book illuminates their pathways into the trade and their experiences while in it, and the host of organizational, social, and individual factors that influence whether they are able to stop working as prostitutes altogether. The book also looks at organizations that aid street prostitutes, and assesses the techniques used to help these women develop self-esteem, healthy relationships with family and community, and workplace skills. The book paints a full picture of the difficulties these women face in moving away from sex work and the approaches that do and do not work to help them transform their lives. Further, it offers recommendations to help improve the quality of life for these women. The book provides an essential understanding of getting out and staying out of sex work.

Community policing structures erected in the wake of rising crime rates and civil disorder throughout the 1990s were supposed to provide civilians a platform from which to influence law enforcement policy. Yet the fires that burned in Ferguson in 2014 raise doubts about how much influence the public has on police, particularly in marginalized communities. This book challenges the common narrative that community policing has democratized the police, when there is ample evidence that US police powers have expanded alongside the proliferation of community-based strategies. It reveals how community governance works to limit civilian power and turn residents into appendages of the state—their “eyes and ears” on the street as well as their mouthpieces during crises. Further, the authors argue that disputes about who does and does not count as community complicate mobilization. Finally, they argue that until police departments are forced to adapt directly to the needs of communities of color, grassroots organizations should lead initiatives that purport to be community based.

The Little Old Lady Killer focuses on the female serial killer Juana Barraza Samperio, a Mexican lucha libre wrestler who, disguised as a government nurse, strangled sixteen elderly women in Mexico City. The search for the Mataviejitas (the killer of old women) was the first ever undertaken for a serial killer in Mexico. Following international profiling norms for serial killers, the police were initially looking for an ordinary-looking man, but after witness accounts described the Mataviejitas as wearing a wig and makeup, police changed their focus and began to search for a “travesti.” The book undertakes an analysis of the classed, gendered, and sexed transitions described in police reports and media accounts in relation to international criminological discourses and Mexican popular culture. On January 26, 2006, Juana Barraza was arrested as she fled the home of an elderly woman who had just been strangled with a stethoscope. Two years later, Barraza was convicted and sentenced to 759 years and 17 days; she remains in Santa Martha Acatitla to this day. I argue that La Dama del Silencio, Barraza’s masked wrestling identity, more than the woman herself became figured in official and popular discourse as the serial killer, La Mataviejitas. This displacement of personas reinforces national imaginaries of masculinity, femininity, and criminality. The national imaginaries of what constitutes a criminal female or male, in turn, determine crucial notions of mexicanidad within the country’s pigmentocratic culture, who counts as a victim, and how a criminal is constructed.

Stories are much more than a means of communication, stories help us shape our identities, make sense of the world, and mobilize others to action. This book examines stories that animate offending. From an examination of how criminals understand certain types of crime to be less moral than others, to how violent offenders and drug users each come to understand or resist their identity as “criminals,” to how cultural narratives motivate genocidal action, the case studies in this book cover a wide array of crimes and justice systems throughout the world. The chapters scrutinize narrative structure and meaning by analyzing genres, plots, metaphors, and other components of storytelling. In doing so, they reveal the cognitive, ideological, and institutional mechanisms by which narratives promote harmful action. Finally, they consider how offenders’ narratives are linked to and emerge from those of conventional society or specific subcultures. Each chapter reveals important insights and elements for the development of a framework of narrative criminology as an important approach for understanding crime and criminal justice. The book introduces a new field of study on the role of stories in motivating and legitimizing harm.

In the early 2000s, New York City began to experience a surge in “stop, question, and frisks”—a police tactic that became a distinctive feature of the New York Police Department. Young black and Latino men disproportionately became the focus of this approach, which targets residents of selected neighborhoods throughout the five boroughs. Nowhere is this issue more critical than in the Bronx, which became “ground zero” for many of these stops. This book draws from approximately three years of intensive ethnographic fieldwork, beginning in 2011 (the year stops would reach their highest point) and conducted in and around the 40th, 42nd, and 44th Precincts of the southwest Bronx. Relying primarily on participant observation, informal interviews, focus groups, and life-history interviews, this book examines how community members make sense of aggressive policing tactics and explores the strategies and sources of resilience these individuals use to cope. This book takes a close look at residents’ (re)conception of what it means to be a citizen and just how their right to public space has been transformed by aggressive policing tactics. Findings suggest a substantial erosion of faith in local and state institutions. Moreover, these aggressive policing tactics discourage the formation of social ties in the neighborhood—the very networks needed to get ahead.