Criminal Justice

Showing 33–62 of 62 results

  • Start Here  cover

    Start Here

    A Road Map to Reducing Mass Incarceration
    Greg Berman
    $24.99

    As heard on NPR’s Fresh Air

    Recommended by The New York Times‘ Sam Roberts

    Start Here is an urgent and timely primer on the approaches that are working and don’t require federal approval or political revolution to end one of the most pressing justice issues the country faces today.”
    Brooklyn Daily Eagle

    A bold agenda for criminal justice reform based on equal parts pragmatism and idealism, from the visionary director of the Center for Court Innovation, a leader of the reform movement

    Everyone knows that the United States leads the world in incarceration, and that our political process is gridlocked. What can be done right now to reduce the number of people sent to jail and prison? This essential book offers a concrete roadmap for both professionals and general readers who want to move from analysis to action. In this forward-looking, next-generation criminal justice reform book, Greg Berman and Julian Adler of the Center for Court Innovation highlight the key lessons from these programs—engaging the public in preventing crime, treating all defendants with dignity and respect, and linking people to effective community-based interventions rather than locking them up. Along the way, they tell a series of gripping stories, highlighting gang members who have gotten their lives back on track, judges who are transforming their courtrooms, and reformers around the country who are rethinking what justice looks like.

    While Start Here offers no silver bullets, it does put forth a suite of proven reforms—from alternatives to bail to diversion programs for mentally ill defendants—that will improve the lives of thousands of people right now. Start Here is a must-read for everyone who wants to start dismantling mass incarceration without waiting for a revolution or permission. Proceeds from the book will support the Center for Court Innovation’s reform efforts.

  • Decarcerating America  cover

    Decarcerating America

    From Mass Punishment to Public Health
    Ernest Drucker
    $27.95

    “A powerful call for reform.”
    NPR

    An all-star team of criminal justice experts present timely, innovative, and humane ways to end mass incarceration

    Mass incarceration will end—there is an emerging consensus that we’ve been locking up too many people for too long. But with more than 2.2 million Americans behind bars right now, how do we go about bringing people home? Decarcerating America collects some of the leading thinkers in the criminal justice reform movement to strategize about how to cure America of its epidemic of mass punishment.

    With sections on front-end approaches, as well as improving prison conditions and re-entry, the book includes pieces by leaders across the criminal justice reform movement: Danielle Sered of Common Justice describes successful programs for youth with violent offenses; Robin Steinberg of the Bronx Defenders argues for more resources for defense attorneys to diminish plea bargains; Kathy Boudin suggests changes to the parole model; Jeannie Little offers an alternative for mental health and drug addiction issues; and Eric Lotke offers models of new industries to replace the prison economy. Editor Ernest Drucker applies the tools of epidemiology to help us cure what he calls “a plague of prisons.”

    Decarcerating America will be an indispensable roadmap as the movement to challenge incarceration in America gains critical mass—it shows us how to get people out of prisons, and the more appropriate responses to crime. The ideas presented in this volume are what we are fighting for when we fight against the New Jim Crow.

  • Hell Is a Very Small Place  cover

    Hell Is a Very Small Place

    Voices from Solitary Confinement
    Jean Casella
    $17.95

    NOW IN PAPERBACK The “elegant but harrowing” (San Francisco Chronicle) collection of writing from solitary confinement that lifts the veil on this widespread modern-day form of torture

    On any given day in America, over 80,000 people are held in solitary confinement—held in utter isolation for twenty-three or twenty-four hours a day, moved there from the general population without any legal process or justification. In a “potent cry of anguish from men and women buried way down in the hole” (Kirkus Reviews), Hell Is a Very Small Place offers rare accounts from the people who are now or have been in solitary confinement. As Chelsea Manning wrote from her own solitary confinement cell, “The personal accounts by prisoners are some of the most disturbing that I have ever read.”

    These firsthand accounts are supplemented by the writing of noted experts exploring the psychological, legal, ethical, and political dimensions of solitary confinement, and a comprehensive introduction by Solitary Watch co-founders James Ridgeway and Jean Casella. Sarah Shourd, herself a survivor of more than a year of solitary confinement, writes eloquently in a preface about an experience that changed her life.

  • El color de la justicia cover

    El color de la justicia

    La nueva segregación racial en Estados Unidos
    Michelle Alexander
    $19.99$21.99

    En este revolucionario trabajo que ha permanecido por más de dos años en la lista de los libros más vendidos del New York Times, Michelle Alexander argumenta que “no hemos erradicado las castas raciales en Estados Unidos; las hemos meramente rediseñado”. Al apuntar a hombres negros por medio de la Guerra contra las Drogas y diezmando las comunidades de gente de color, el sistema de justicia criminal de Estados Unidos funciona como un sistema contemporáneo de control racial—al relegar a millones de personas a un estatus de segunda clase—incluso mientras éste se adhiere al principio de ceguera para los colores.

    Los hispanoamericanos están ampliamente representados en este sistema de encarcelamiento masivo que Alexander describe: 15 por ciento de todos los latinos en Estados Unidos dicen que ellos o alguien de su familia inmediata ha sido arrestado dentro de los últimos cinco años; y que cerca del 25 por ciento de los latinos de entre 18 y 29 años comparten esta experiencia. Los latinos representan cerca de la mitad de todos los convictos en las prisiones federales, y en California (uno de los pocos estados que cuenta con información sobre esto), los latinos componen un 40 por ciento de todos los arrestos.

    Catedráticos tales como Tom Romero han sugerido que The New Jim Crow provee de los fundamentos esenciales para comprender el “nuevo sistema Jim Crow” de inmigración y detención en los Estados Unidos al día de hoy. Millones de familias de habla hispana afectadas por este sistema apreciarán contar con una edición en español de este libro que ha sido considerado como “invaluable” por el Daily Kos y “explosivo” por Kirkus Reviews.

  • Pushout  cover

    Pushout

    The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools
    Monique Couvson
    $18.95$28.99

    The “powerful” (Michelle Alexander) exploration of the harsh and harmful experiences confronting Black girls in schools, and how we can instead orient schools toward their flourishing



    On the day fifteen-year-old Diamond from the Bay Area stopped going to school, she was expelled for lashing out at peers who constantly harassed and teased her for something everyone on the staff had missed: she was being trafficked for sex. After months on the run, she was arrested and sent to a detention center for violating a court order to attend school.

    In a work that Lisa Delpit calls “imperative reading,” Monique W. Morris chronicles the experiences of Black girls across the country whose complex lives are misunderstood, highly judged—by teachers, administrators, and the justice system—and degraded by the very institutions charged with helping them flourish. Painting “a chilling picture of the plight of black girls and women today” (The Atlantic), Morris exposes a world of confined potential and supports the rising movement to challenge the policies, practices, and cultural illiteracy that push countless students out of school and into unhealthy, unstable, and often unsafe futures.

    At a moment when Black girls are the fastest growing population in the juvenile justice system, Pushout is truly a book “for everyone who cares about children” (Washington Post).

    Book cover photograph by Brittsense/brittsense.com.

  • When We Fight

    When We Fight, We Win

    Twenty-First-Century Social Movements and the Activists That Are Transforming Our World
    Greg Jobin-Leeds
    $21.99

    Real stories of hard-fought battles for social change, told by those on the front lines—with clear lessons and tips for activists on gaining power from the ground up

    “As protests and demonstrations sprout across the land, young organizers and activists need to know why and how movements are sustained and how they grow. That resource has arrived.” —Mumia Abu-Jamal, author and activist

    In this visually rich and deeply inspiring book, the leaders of some of the most successful movements of the past decade—from the legalization of same-sex marriage to the Black Lives Matter movement—distill their wisdom, sharing lessons of what makes transformative social change possible.

    Longtime social activist Greg Jobin-Leeds joins forces with AgitArte, a collective of artists and organizers, to capture the stories, philosophy, tactics, and art of today’s leading social movements. When We Fight, We Win! weaves together interviews with today’s most successful activists and artists from across the country and beyond—including Patrisse Cullors, Bill McKibben, Clayton Thomas-Muller, Karen Lewis, Favianna Rodriguez, Rea Carey, and Gaby Pacheco, among others—with narrative recountings of their inspiring strategies and campaigns alongside full-color photos. It includes a foreword by Rinku Sen and an afterword by Antonia Darder.

    The recent nationwide explosion of protests has shown the power the people have when we join together with a common goal and compelling message. When We Fight, We Win! will give a whole generation of readers the road map to building resilient movements that can achieve real social justice.

  • Understanding Mass Incarceration  cover

    Understanding Mass Incarceration

    A People's Guide to the Key Civil Rights Struggle of Our Time
    James Kilgore
    $17.99$20.99

    A brilliant overview of America’s defining human rights crisis and a “much-needed introduction to the racial, political, and economic dimensions of mass incarceration” (Michelle Alexander)

    Understanding Mass Incarceration offers the first comprehensive overview of the incarceration apparatus put in place by the world’s largest jailer: the United States.

    Drawing on a growing body of academic and professional work, Understanding Mass Incarceration describes in plain English the many competing theories of criminal justice—from rehabilitation to retribution, from restorative justice to justice reinvestment. In a lively and accessible style, author James Kilgore illuminates the difference between prisons and jails, probation and parole, laying out key concepts and policies such as the War on Drugs, broken windows policing, three-strikes sentencing, the school-to-prison pipeline, recidivism, and prison privatization. Informed by the crucial lenses of race and gender, he addresses issues typically omitted from the discussion: the rapidly increasing incarceration of women, Latinos, and transgender people; the growing imprisonment of immigrants; and the devastating impact of mass incarceration on communities.

    Both field guide and primer, Understanding Mass Incarceration is an essential resource for those engaged in criminal justice activism as well as those new to the subject.

  • Mass Incarceration on Trial  cover

    Mass Incarceration on Trial

    A Remarkable Court Decision and the Future of Prisons in America
    Jonathan Simon
    $17.99$26.95
    In this “impassioned plea for human dignity” (Kirkus Reviews) Jonathan Simon—called “one of the outstanding criminologists of his generation” by Nikolas Rose of the London School of Economics—charts a surprising path to end mass incarceration in America. Using the landmark Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Plata on overcrowding in California prisons as his starting point, Simon suggests that incarcerating people on a “mass” scale simply cannot be accomplished in comportment with the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

    In an argument that the Los Angeles Review of Books calls “unique,” Simon contends that because we cannot offer meaningful health care, mental health care, or safe and reasonable prison conditions when prisons are run at many times their maximum capacity, “mass incarceration is fundamentally incompatible with humane treatment.”

    Todd Clear, former dean of Rutgers School of Criminal Justice, calls Mass Incarceration on Trial “highly readable, stunning,” Slate says the book “could mark the beginning of a new era in American jurisprudence,” and David Cole in the New York Review of Books calls Simon’s work a “sign of the new optimism about criminal justice reform.”
  • Burning Down the House  cover

    Burning Down the House

    The End of Juvenile Prison
    Nell Bernstein
    $19.99$26.95

    The nationally acclaimed “engrossing, disturbing, at times heartbreaking” (Van Jones) book that shines a harsh light on the abusive world of juvenile prisons, by the award-winning journalist

    “Nell Bernstein’s book could be for juvenile justice what Rachel Carson’s book was for the environmental movement.” —Andrew Cohen, correspondent, ABC News

    When teenagers scuffle during a basketball game, they are typically benched. But when Brian got into it on the court, he and his rival were sprayed in the face at close range with a chemical similar to Mace, denied a shower for twenty-four hours, and then locked in solitary confinement for a month.

    One in three American children will be arrested by the time they are twenty-three, and many will spend time locked inside horrific detention centers that defy everything we know about what motivates young people to change. In what the San Francisco Chronicle calls “an epic work of investigative journalism that lays bare our nation’s brutal and counterproductive juvenile prisons and is a clarion call to bring our children home,” Nell Bernstein eloquently argues that there is no right way to lock up a child. The very act of isolation denies children the thing that is most essential to their growth and rehabilitation: positive relationships with caring adults.

    Bernstein introduces us to youth across the nation who have suffered violence and psychological torture at the hands of the state. She presents these youths all as fully realized people, not victims. As they describe in their own voices their fight to maintain their humanity and protect their individuality in environments that would deny both, these young people offer a hopeful alternative to the doomed effort to reform a system that should only be dismantled. Interwoven with these heartrending stories is reporting on innovative programs that provide effective alternatives to putting children behind bars.

    A landmark book, Burning Down the House sparked a national conversation about our inhumane and ineffectual juvenile prisons, and ultimately makes the radical argument that the only path to justice is for state-run detention centers to be abolished completely.

  • Race to Incarcerate  cover

    Race to Incarcerate

    A Graphic Retelling
    Marc Mauer
    $17.99$22.95
    “Do not underestimate the power of the book you are holding in your hands.”
    —Michelle Alexander




    More than 2 million people are now imprisoned in the United States, producing the highest rate of incarceration in the world. How did this happen? As the director of The Sentencing Project, Marc Mauer has long been one of the country’s foremost experts on sentencing policy, race, and the criminal justice system. His book Race to Incarcerate has become the essential text for understanding the exponential growth of the U.S. prison system; Michelle Alexander, author of the bestselling The New Jim Crow, calls it “utterly indispensable.” Now, Sabrina Jones, a member of the World War 3 Illustrated collective and an acclaimed author of politically engaged comics, has collaborated with Mauer to adapt and update the original book into a vivid and compelling comics narrative. Jones’s dramatic artwork adds passion and compassion to the complex story of the penal system’s shift from rehabilitation to punishment and the ensuing four decades of prison expansion, its interplay with the devastating “War on Drugs,” and its corrosive effect on generations of Americans.


    With a preface by Mauer and a foreword by Alexander, Race to Incarcerate: A Graphic Retelling presents a compelling argument about mass incarceration’s tragic impact on communities of color—if current trends continue, one of every three black males and one of every six Latino males born today can expect to do time in prison. The race to incarcerate is not only a failed social policy, but also one that prevents a just, diverse society from flourishing.
  • Chasing Gideon  cover

    Chasing Gideon

    The Elusive Quest for Poor People’s Justice
    Karen Houppert
    $18.95$26.95
    First published to mark the fifty-year anniversary of the Supreme Court decision Gideon v. Wainwright, which guaranteed the right to legal counsel for all criminal defendants, Chasing Gideon is “a hugely important book” (New York Law Journal) that gives us a visceral, unforgettable experience of our systemic failure to fulfill this basic constitutional right. Written in the tradition of Gideon’s Trumpet, by the late Anthony Lewis, this is “a book of nightmares,” as Leonard Pitts wrote in the Miami Herald, because it shows that the “‘justice system’ too often produces the opposite of what its name suggests, particularly for its most vulnerable constituents.”

    Following its publication, Chasing Gideon, which ACLU director Anthony Romero said “illustrates the scope and seriousness of the indigent defense crisis,” became an integral part of a growing national conversation about how to reform indigent defense in America, coordinated with an HBO documentary and a website to promote the book and the movie. The effort spread news about Chasing Gideon directly to public defenders offices nationwide and drove a national conversation about what Eric Holder called the “shameful state of affairs” of indigent defense (in the Washington Post).

  • Crimes Against Humanity  cover

    Crimes Against Humanity

    The Struggle for Global Justice
    Geoffrey Robertson
    $44.99$45.00
    When it was first published in 1999, Crimes Against Humanity called for a radical shift from diplomacy to justice in international affairs. In vivid, non-legalese prose, leading human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson made a riveting case for holding political and military leaders accountable in international courts for genocide, torture, and mass murder.

    Since then, fearsome figures such as Charles Taylor, Laurent Gbagbo, and Ratko Mladic have been tried in international criminal court, and a global movement has rallied around the human rights framework of justice. Any such legal framework requires constant evolution in order to stay relevant, and this newly revised and expanded volume brings the conversation up to date. In substantial new chapters, Robertson covers the protection of war correspondents, the problem of piracy, crimes against humanity in Syria, nuclear armament in Iran, and other challenges we are grappling with today. He criticizes the Obama administration’s policies around “targeted killing” and the trials of Khalid Sheik Mohammed and other “high value” detainees. By rendering a complex debate accessible, Robertson once again provides an essential guide for anyone looking to understand human rights and how to work toward a more complete blueprint for justice.
  • The New Jim Crow cover

    The New Jim Crow

    Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
    Michelle Alexander
    $19.95$27.99

    One of the New York Times’s Best Books of the 21st Century


    Named one of the most important nonfiction books of the 21st century by Entertainment Weekly‚ Slate‚ Chronicle of Higher Education‚ Literary Hub, Book Riot‚ and Zora

    A tenth-anniversary edition of the iconic bestseller—"one of the most influential books of the past 20 years," according to the Chronicle of Higher Education—with a new preface by the author

    "It is in no small part thanks to Alexander’s account that civil rights organizations such as Black Lives Matter have focused so much of their energy on the criminal justice system."
    —Adam Shatz, London Review of Books

    Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

    Most important of all, it has spawned a whole generation of criminal justice reform activists and organizations motivated by Michelle Alexander’s unforgettable argument that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." As the Birmingham News proclaimed, it is "undoubtedly the most important book published in this century about the U.S."

    Now, ten years after it was first published, The New Press is proud to issue a tenth-anniversary edition with a new preface by Michelle Alexander that discusses the impact the book has had and the state of the criminal justice reform movement today.

  • A Plague of Prisons cover

    A Plague of Prisons

    The Epidemiology of Mass Incarceration in America
    Ernest Drucker
    $18.99$26.95

    The public health expert and prison reform activist offers “meticulous analysis” on our criminal justice system and the plague of American incarceration (The Washington Post).

    An internationally recognized public health scholar, Ernest Drucker uses the tools of epidemiology to demonstrate that incarceration in the United States has become an epidemic—a plague upon our body politic. He argues that imprisonment, originally conceived as a response to the crimes of individuals, has become “mass incarceration”: a destabilizing force that damages the very social structures that prevent crime.

    Drucker tracks the phenomenon of mass incarceration using basic public health concepts—“incidence and prevalence,” “outbreaks,” “contagion,” “transmission,” “potential years of life lost.” The resulting analysis demonstrates that our unprecedented rates of incarceration have the contagious and self-perpetuating features of the plagues of previous centuries.

    Sure to provoke debate and shift the paradigm of how we think about punishment, A Plague of Prisons offers a novel perspective on criminal justice in twenty-first-century America.

    “How did America’s addiction to prisons and mass incarceration get its start and how did it spread from state to state? Of the many attempts to answer this question, none make as much sense as the explanation found in [this] book.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  • The Big Eddy Club cover

    The Big Eddy Club

    The Stocking Stranglings and Southern Justice
    David Rose
    $17.95$25.95
    Called a “dazzlingly reported, supremely elegant” work by The Observer, The Big Eddy Club is an award-winning journalist’s exposé of race, injustice, and serial murder in the Deep South—Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil with an investigative edge. Over eight bloody months in the mid-1970s, a serial rapist and murderer terrorized Columbus, Georgia, killing seven affluent, elderly white women—almost all members of the Big Eddy social club for the town’s elite. Carlton Gary, an African American man currently on death row for what came to be known as “the stocking stranglings,” came within four hours of being executed in December 2009.

    The Big Eddy Club connects Gary’s late-twentieth-century trial with racially charged trials in Columbus of a previous era, to explore the broad topic of racial justice in the American South. This paperback edition includes an all-new afterword detailing the recent discovery of potentially exonerating evidence, which led to Gary’s last-minute stay of execution and will likely result in a new trial.

  • Prison Profiteers  cover

    Prison Profiteers

    Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration
    Tara Herivel
    $19.95$21.95

    “No country in history has ever handed over so many inmates to private corporations. This book looks at the consequences” (Eric Schlosser, bestselling author of Fast Food Nation).
     
    In Prison Profiteers, coeditors Tara Herivel and Paul Wright “follow the money to an astonishing constellation of prison administrators and politicians working in collusion with private parties to maximize profits” (Publishers Weekly). From investment banks, guard unions, and the makers of Taser stun guns to health care providers, telephone companies, and the US military (which relies heavily on prison labor), this network of perversely motivated interests has turned the imprisonment of 1 out of every 135 Americans into a lucrative business.
     
    Called “an essential read for anyone who wants to understand what’s gone wrong with criminal justice in the United States” by ACLU National Prison Project director Elizabeth Alexander, this incisive and deftly researched volume shows how billions of tax dollars designated for the public good end up lining the pockets of those private enterprises dedicated to keeping prisons packed.
     
    “An important analysis of a troubling social trend” that is sure to inform and outrage any concerned citizen, Prison Profiteers reframes the conversation by exposing those who stand to profit from the imprisonment of millions of Americans (Booklist).
     
    “Indispensable . . . An easy and accessible read—and a necessary one.” —The San Diego Union-Tribune
     
    “This is lucid, eye-opening reading for anyone interested in American justice.” —Publishers Weekly
     
    “Impressive . . . A thoughtful, comprehensive and accessible analysis of the money trail behind the prison-industrial-complex.” —The Black Commentator

  • All Alone in the World  cover

    All Alone in the World

    Children of the Incarcerated
    Nell Bernstein
    $16.95$25.95

    A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year. “An urgent invitation to care for all children as our own.” —Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, author of Random Family

    In this “moving condemnation of the U.S. penal system and its effect on families”, award-winning journalist Nell Bernstein takes an intimate look at parents and children—over two million of them—torn apart by our current incarceration policy (Parents’ Press). Described as “meticulously reported and sensitively written” by Salon, the book is “brimming with compelling case studies . . . and recommendations for change” (Orlando Sentinel).

    Our Weekly Los Angeles calls it “a must-read for lawmakers as well as for lawbreakers.”

    “In terms of elegance, breadth and persuasiveness, All Alone in the World deserves to be placed alongside other classics of the genre such as Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities, Alex Kotlowitz’s There Are No Children Here and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family. But to praise the book’s considerable literary or sociological merit seems beside the point. This book belongs not only on shelves but also in the hands of judges and lawmakers.” —San Francisco Chronicle

    “Well researched and smoothly written, Bernstein’s book pumps up awareness of the problems, provides a checklist for what needs to be done and also cites organizations like the Osborne Society that provide parenting and literacy classes, counseling and support. The message is clear: taking family connections into account ‘holds particular promise for restoring a social fabric rent by both crime and punishment.’” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

  • Conspiracy in the Streets  cover

    Conspiracy in the Streets

    The Extraordinary Trial of the Chicago Seven
    Jon Wiener
    $17.99

    THE TRIAL THAT IS NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE

    Reprinted to coincide with the release of the new Aaron Sorkin film, this book provides the political background of this infamous trial, narrating the utter craziness of the courtroom and revealing both the humorous antics and the serious politics involved

    Opening at the end of 1969—a politically charged year at the beginning of Nixon’s presidency and at the height of the anti-war movement—the Trial of the Chicago Seven (which started out as the Chicago Eight) brought together Yippies, antiwar activists, and Black Panthers to face conspiracy charges following massive protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, protests which continue to have remarkable contemporary resonance.

    The defendants—Rennie Davis, Dave Dellinger, John Froines, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale (the co-founder of the Black Panther Party who was ultimately removed from the trial, making it seven and not eight who were on trial), and Lee Weiner—openly lampooned the proceedings, blowing kisses to the jury, wearing their own judicial robes, and bringing a Viet Cong flag into the courtroom. Eventually the judge ordered Seale to be bound and gagged for insisting on representing himself. Adding to the theater in the courtroom an array of celebrity witnesses appeared, among them Timothy Leary, Norman Mailer, Arlo Guthrie, Judy Collins, and Allen Ginsberg (who provoked the prosecution by chanting “Om” on the witness stand).

    This book combines an abridged transcript of the trial with astute commentary by historian and journalist Jon Wiener, and brings to vivid life an extraordinary event which, like Woodstock, came to epitomize the late 1960s and the cause for free speech and the right to protest—causes that are very much alive a half century later. As Wiener writes, “At the end of the sixties, it seemed that all the conflicts in America were distilled and then acted out in the courtroom of the Chicago Conspiracy trial.”

    An afterword by the late Tom Hayden examines the trial’s ongoing relevance, and drawings by Jules Feiffer help recreate the electrifying atmosphere of the courtroom.

  • Good Cops  cover

    Good Cops

    The Case For Preventive Policing
    David A. Harris
    $25.95

    Police departments across the country have begun to embrace a new approach to law enforcement based on accountability to citizens, better leadership, and collaboration with the communities they serve. Standing in marked contrast to “Ashcroft policing,” these new strategies are exactly what police need both to make the streets of our cities and towns safer, and to prevent terrorism.

    David Harris, law professor and nationally known expert on police profiling, has spent the last five years visiting police forces across the country, collecting examples of smart, progressive law enforcement. Drawing on successful strategies currently in use in Detroit, Boston, San Diego, and other cities and towns all over the country, all of which have reduced crime without infringing on civil rights, Harris here unveils the concept of “preventive policing,” a term he has coined to meld these strategies into a new vision for good cops.

    From preventive policing’s founding principles to its real-world applications, Harris shows that the solutions to reducing crime, fighting terror, and preserving civil liberties are within reach—if only the Department of Justice will listen.


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    Guantanamo

    David Rose
    $14.95$21.95
  • Enemy Aliens  cover

    Enemy Aliens

    Double Standards And Constitutional Freedoms In The War On Terrorism
    David Cole
    $16.95$24.95

    When David Cole was first writing Enemy Aliens, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the anti-immigrant brand of American patriotism was at a fever pitch. Now, as the pendulum swings back, and court after court finds the Bush administration’s tactics of secrecy and assumption of guilt unconstitutional, Cole’s book stands as a prescient and critical indictment of the double standards we have applied in the war on terror.

    Called “brilliantly argued” by Edward Said and “the essential book in the field” by former CIA director James Woolsey, Enemy Aliens shows why it is a moral, constitutional, and practical imperative to afford every person in the United States the protections from government excesses that we expect for ourselves.


  • Invisible Punishment  cover

    Invisible Punishment

    The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment
    Meda Chesney-Lind
    $18.95$26.95
    In a series of newly commissioned essays from the leading scholars and advocates in criminal justice, Invisible Punishment explores, for the first time, the far-reaching consequences of our current criminal justice policies. Adopted as part of “get tough on crime” attitudes that prevailed in the 1980s and ’90s, a range of strategies, from “three strikes” and “a war on drugs,” to mandatory sentencing and prison privatization, have resulted in the mass incarceration of American citizens, and have had enormous effects not just on wrong-doers, but on their families and the communities they come from. This book looks at the consequences of these policies twenty years later.
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    Bombs and Bandwidth

    Robert Latham
    $17.95

    Bombs and Bandwidth, a project of the Social Science Research Council, assembles leading scholars in a range of disciplines to explore the new nature of IT-related threats, the new power structures emerging around IT, and the ethical and political implications arising from this complex and important field.

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    Zero Tolerance

    Resisting the Drive for Punishment in Our Schools :A Handbook for Parents, Students, Educators, and Citizens
    William Ayers
    $20.95

    “Zero tolerance” began as a prohibition against guns, but it has quickly expanded into a frenzy of punishment and tougher disciplinary measures in American schools. Ironically, as this timely collection makes clear, recent research indicates that as schools adopt more zero tolerance policies they in fact become less safe, in part because the first casualties of these measures are the central, critical relationships between teacher and student and between school and community.

    Zero Tolerance assembles prominent educators and intellectuals, including the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, Sr., Michelle Fine, and Patricia Williams, along with teachers, students, and community activists, to show that the vast majority of students expelled from schools under new disciplinary measures are sent home for nonviolent violations; that the rush to judge and punish disproportionately affects black and Latino children; and that the new disciplinary ethos is eroding constitutional protections of privacy, free speech, and due process. Sure to become the focus of controversy, Zero Tolerance presents a passionate, multifaceted argument against the militarization of our schools.


  • Legal Lynching  cover

    Legal Lynching

    The Death Penalty and America's Future
    Jesse Jackson
    $22.95

    With public opinion polls showing opposition to the death penalty at its highest level in twenty years, this timely book by two of America’s most important civil rights leaders and the Nation’s criminal justice reporter makes a passionate and persuasive case against capital punishment. Combining a powerful moral argument with recent, overwhelming evidence of systematic legal error and widespread racial bias in death penalty cases, Legal Lynching directly attacks the basic claims of those—including our new president—who continue to insist on execution as a punitive solution for an increasing number of crimes. With the abolition of the death penalty in South Africa, the United States has become the last industrialized democracy to persist in state-sponsored execution.

    Grounded in stories of those who were unjustly convicted and left to languish on death row, Legal Lynching is a moving, human book by America’s leading death penalty abolitionists.


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    Making a Killing

    Tom Diaz
    $14.95$25.00
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    No Equal Justice

    Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System
    David Cole
    $16.95$25.00

    No Equal Justice is the seminal work on race- and class-based double standards in criminal justice. Hailed as a “shocking and necessary book” by The Economist, it has become the standard reference point for anyone trying to understand the fundamental inequalities in the American legal system. The book, written by constitutional law scholar and civil liberties advocate David Cole, was named the best nonfiction book of 1999 by the Boston Book Review and the best book on an issue of national policy by the American Political Science Association.

    No Equal Justice examines subjects ranging from police behavior and jury selection to sentencing, and argues that our system does not merely fail to live up to the promise of equality, but actively requires double standards to operate. Such disparities,Cole argues, allow the privileged to enjoy constitutional protections from police power without paying the costs associated with extending those protections across the board to minorities and the poor.


  • Black Judges on Justice  cover

    Black Judges on Justice

    Perspectives from the Bench
    Linn Washington
    $17.00
    Black Judges on Justice is the first book to present the views of leading African American judges on the way our judicial system works. From pioneers such as Leon Higginbotham and Constance Baker Motley (the first black female federal judge) to such outspoken and well-known mavericks as Bruce Wright, the testimony of these judges provides penetrating analysis of the role of the jurist, of the daily malfunctioning of the courts, and of the future of the judicial system itself.
  • Edge of the Knife  cover

    Edge of the Knife

    Police Violence in the Americas
    Paul Chevigny
    $14.00

    In Edge of the Knife, noted authority Paul Chevigny draws on years of field research to investigate torture and the use of deadly force, in addition to less drastic forms of violence, in New York, Los Angeles, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and Kingston. Chevigny, author of the classic Police Power, examines the sources of official violence and offers possibilities for controlling it. What emerges from his work is an image of police violence as a reflection of the larger order of a city, and a convincing argument for persistent government action against crime—including accountability for police violence.


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