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Over the past few decades, debates about policing in poor urban areas have shifted from analyzing the state’s neglect and abandonment to documenting its harsh interventions and punishing presence. Most of this research has focused on the overt actions and inactions of the state. Yet we know very little about the covert world of state action that is hidden from public view. The Ambivalent State offers an unprecedented look into the clandestine relationships between police officers and drug dealers in Argentina. Drawing on a unique combination of ethnographic research and documentary evidence, including hundreds of pages of wiretapped phone conversations, sociologists Javier Auyero and Katherine Sobering analyze the inner workings of “police-criminal collusion” and its connections to drug markets and the depacification of daily life. Through rich descriptions of the actual clandestine interactions between drug dealers and police, they argue that an up-close examination of covert state action exposes the workings of an “ambivalent state”: one that enforces the rule of law while at the same time and in the same place functions as a partner to what it defines as criminal behavior. The Ambivalent State develops a political sociology of violence that focuses on not only what takes place in police stations, criminal courts, and poor neighborhoods, but also the clandestine actions and interactions of police agents, judges, and politicians that structure daily life at the urban margins. By way of empirical demonstration, the book makes an urgent call for scholars to incorporate clandestine action into understandings of the state.

The idea of American exceptionalism has made frequent appearances in discussions of criminal justice policies—as it has in many other areas—to help portray or explain problems that are especially acute in the United States, including mass incarceration, retention of the death penalty, racial and ethnic disparities in punishment, and the War on Drugs. While scholars do not universally agree that it is an apt or useful framework, there is no question that the United States is an outlier compared with other industrialized democracies in its punitive and exclusionary criminal justice policies. This book deepens the debate on American exceptionalism in crime and punishment through comparative political, economic, and historical analyses, working toward forward-looking prescriptions for American law, policy, and institutions of government. The chapters expand the existing American Exceptionalism literature to neglected areas such as community supervision, economic penalties, parole release, and collateral consequences of conviction; explore claims of causation, in particular that the history of slavery and racial inequality has been a primary driver of crime policy; examine arguments that the framework of multiple governments and localized crime control, populist style of democracy, and laissez-faire economy are implicated in problems of both crime and punishment; and assess theories that cultural values are the most salient predictors of penal severity and violent crime. The book asserts that the largest problems of crime and justice cannot be brought into focus from the perspective of a single jurisdiction and that comparative inquiries are necessary for an understanding of the current predicament in the United States.

This volume discusses criminology and policy analysis of adolescence. The focus is on the principles and policy of a separate and distinct system of juvenile justice. The book opens with an introduction of the creation of adolescence, presenting a justification for the category of the juvenile or a period of partial responsibility before full adulthood. Subsequent sections include empirical investigations of the nature of youth criminality and legal policy towards youth crime. At the heart of the book is an argument for a penal policy that recognizes diminished responsibility and a youth policy that emphasizes the benefits of letting the maturing process continue with minimal interruption. The book concludes with applications of the core concerns to five specific problem areas in current juvenile justice: teen pregnancy, transfer to criminal court, minority overrepresentation, juvenile gun use, and youth homicide.

With urban poverty rising and affordable housing disappearing, the homeless and other “disorderly” people continue to occupy public space in many American cities. Concerned about the alleged ill effects their presence inflicts on property values and public safety, many cities have wholeheartedly embraced “zero-tolerance” or “broken window” policing efforts to clear the streets of unwanted people. Through an almost completely unnoticed set of practices, these people are banned from occupying certain spaces. Once zoned out, they are subject to arrest if they return—effectively banished from public places. This book offers an exploration of these new tactics that dramatically enhance the power of the police to monitor and arrest thousands of city dwellers. Drawing upon an extensive body of data, the chapters chart the rise of banishment in Seattle, a city on the leading edge of this emerging trend, to establish how it works and explore its ramifications. They demonstrate that, although the practice allows police and public officials to appear responsive to concerns about urban disorder, it is a highly questionable policy—it is expensive, does not reduce crime, and does not address the underlying conditions that generate urban poverty. Moreover, interviews with the banished themselves reveal that exclusion makes their lives and their path to self-sufficiency immeasurably more difficult. At a time when ever more cities and governments in the U.S. and Europe resort to the criminal justice system to solve complex social problems, the book provides a challenge to exclusionary strategies that diminish the life circumstances and the rights of those it targets.

The history of criminal justice in the United States is often described as a pendulum, swinging back and forth between strict punishment and lenient rehabilitation. While this view is common wisdom, it is wrong. In Breaking the Pendulum, Philip Goodman, Joshua Page, and Michelle Phelps debunk the pendulum perspective, showing that it distorts how and why criminal justice changes. The pendulum model blinds us to the blending of penal orientations, policies, and practices, as well as the struggle among actors who shape laws, institutions, and how we think about crime, punishment, and related issues.Through a reanalysis of more than 200 years of penal history, starting with the rise of penitentiaries in the nineteenth century and ending with ongoing efforts to roll back mass incarceration, the authors offer an alternative approach to conceptualizing penal development. Their agonistic perspective posits that struggle is the motor force of criminal justice history. Punishment expands, contracts, and morphs because of contestation between real people in real contexts, not a mechanical “swing” of the pendulum. This alternative framework is far more accurate and empowering than metaphors that ignore or downplay the importance of struggle in shaping criminal justice.This clearly written, engaging book is an invaluable resource for teachers, students, and scholars seeking to understand the past, present, and future of criminal justice in the United States. By demonstrating the central role of struggle in generating major transformations, Breaking the Pendulum encourages combatants to keep fighting to change the system.

An unrelenting prison boom, marked by large racial disparities in the risk of incarceration, characterized the latter third of the 20th century. Drawing on broadly representative survey data and qualitative interviews, Children of the Prison Boom describes the devastating effects of America’s experiment in mass incarceration for a generation of vulnerable children. Parental imprisonment has been transformed from an event affecting only the unluckiest of children—children of parents whose involvement in crime would have been quite serious—to one that is remarkably common, especially for black children. Even for children at high risk of problems, Children of the Prison Boom shows that paternal incarceration makes a bad situation worse and substantially increases family instability and racial inequality in child well-being.

For the past several decades, the United States has witnessed a profound transformation in what Americans do with the guns they own. While hunting used to dominate American gun culture, now the top reason for owning a gun is protection, and today, there are over eleven million concealed carry licensees. Why are millions of Americans—disproportionately American men—choosing to carry guns as part of their everyday lives? And what are the effects of gun carry on contemporary notions of citizenship, governance, and crime? This book examines these questions. Focusing on southeastern Michigan, particularly Metro Detroit, as a window into broader processes of socioeconomic decline in the United States, the book analyzes how men use guns to navigate contexts of social insecurity and how men’s use of guns is shaped by socio-legal structures supported by the National Rifle Association (NRA). The book draws on in-depth interviews with gun carriers and NRA-certified instructors and ethnography at firearms classes, activist events, and shooting ranges; and online gun forums. The author also obtained a concealed-pistol license, carried a gun on a regular basis, and became certified as an NRA instructor.

The 40% drop in crime that occurred across the U.S. from 1991 to 2000 largely remains an unsolved mystery. Even more puzzling then is the crime rate drop in New York City, which lasted twice as long and was twice as large. This 80% drop in crime over nineteen years represents the largest crime decline on record. This book sets off in search of the reason for the New York difference through a detailed and comprehensive statistical investigation into the city's falling crime rates and possible explanations. If you listen to City Hall, aggressive police created a zero tolerance law enforcement regime that drove crime rates down. Is this self-serving political sound bite true? Are the official statistics generated by the police accurate? The book shows the numbers are correct and argues that some combination of more cops, new tactics, and new management can take some credit for the decline, but zero tolerance policing and quality of life were never a consistent part of the NYPD's strategy. That the police can make a difference in preventing crime overturns decades of conventional wisdom for criminologists, but the book points out that the New York experience challenges the major assumptions dominating American crime and drug control policies that almost everyone else has missed. First, imprisonment in actually New York decreased significantly from 1990 to 2009 and was well below the national average, proving that it is possible to have substantially less crime without increases in incarceration. Second, the NYPD sharply reduced drug violence (over 90%) without any reduction in hard drug use. In other words, they won the war on drug violence without winning the war on drugs. Finally, the stability of New York's population, economy, education, demographics, or immigration patterns calls into question the long-accepted cultural and structural causes of violence in America's cities. That fact that high rates of crime are not hard wired into modern city life is welcome news for policy makers, criminal justice officials, and urban dwellers everywhere.

Evidence-based, prevention-oriented, and community-driven approaches are advocated to improve public health and reduce youth behavior problems, but there are few effective models for doing so. This book advances knowledge about this topic by describing the conditions and actions necessary for effective community-based prevention. The chapters review the ways in which communities can promote readiness to engage in prevention among local stakeholders; build and maintain diverse, well-functioning prevention coalitions; conduct local needs and resource assessments; collectively decide on prevention priorities; select evidence-based interventions that are a good fit with prioritized community needs, resources, and context; and implement evidence-based interventions (EBIs) with fidelity and sustain them over time. The Communities That Care (CTC) prevention system is described in detail to illustrate effective community-based prevention. CTC is a coalition-based prevention system shown to promote healthy youth development and reduce youth behavior problems community wide. It does so by assisting communities to: (1) increase awareness of and support for EBIs; (2) encourage positive interactions between community residents and youth; (3) conduct local needs assessments and collectively decide on priorities to target with EBIs; (4) implement EBIs that are matched to prioritized needs; and (5) ensure that EBIs are coordinated across community organizations, implemented with fidelity, widely disseminated, and evaluated. The book describes the development and evaluation of the CTC system, including how its developers used community-based participatory research to ensure that CTC could be feasibly implemented and employed rigorous research methods to assess the degree to which use of the system reduced adolescent behavior problems.

The study of crime has focused primarily on why particular people commit crime or why specific communities have higher crime levels than others. This book presents a new and different way of looking at the crime problem by examining why specific streets in a city have specific crime trends over time. Based on a sixteen-year longitudinal study of crime in Seattle, Washington, the book focuses our attention on small units of geographic analysis-micro communities, defined as street segments. Half of all Seattle crime each year occurs on just 5–6% of the city's street segments, yet these crime hot spots are not concentrated in a single neighborhood and street by street variability is tremendous. This book sets out to explain why. It shows how much essential information about crime is inevitably lost when we focus on larger units like neighborhoods or communities. Reorienting the study of crime by focusing on small units of geography, the book identifies a large group of possible crime risk and protective factors for street segments and an array of interventions that could be implemented to address them.

Data-driven criminal justice operations creates millions of criminal records each year in the United States. Documenting everything from a police stop to a prison sentence, these records take on a digital life of their own as they are collected and posted by police, courts, and prisons; reposted on social media, online news, and mugshot galleries; and bought and sold by data brokers as an increasingly valuable data commodity. The result is “digital punishment,” where mere suspicion or a brush with the law can have lasting consequences. This analysis describes the transformation of criminal records into millions of data points; the commodification of these data into a valuable digital resource; and the impact of this shift on people, society, and public policy. The consequences of digital punishment, as described in hundreds of interviews detailed in this book, lead people to purposefully opt out of society as they cope with privacy and due process violations.

Why do many juveniles stop offending when they grow up? Why are juvenile delinquents dealt with differently in the courts than adult criminals, and should young adults be dealt with differently than older adults? And what is special about the 18th birthday when the jurisdiction of the juvenile justice system in most states and most European countries, offering protection and rehabilitation, ends and the more punitive and less rehabilitative criminal justice system for adults starts? Since most juveniles take longer than age 18 to mature and become less impulsive, what is a more realistic distinction between adolescence and adulthood and justice response to adolescents and young adults? These and many other questions pertaining to the transition between adolescence and adulthood are addressed in this volume. The volume is based on hundreds of scientific studies, which are summarized in 11 chapters. The chapters deal with criminal careers, particularly desistance from and persistence in offending, explanatory factors of persistence and desistance, such as, for example, early individual differences in self-control, brain maturation, social risk and protective factors, mental illnesses, changes in life circumstances, neighborhood factors, and juvenile justice response. The volume also highlights the best evaluated and cost-effective programs that prevent juveniles from becoming persistent offenders in adulthood, and reduce recidivism among known delinquents. Finally, the volume addresses the advantages and disadvantages of legislators increasing or decreasing the age of adulthood with an eye on improving public safety.

The major lesson from the 1990s is that relatively superficial changes in the character of urban life can be associated with up to 75% drops in the crime rate. Crime can drop even if there is no major change in the population, the economy or the schools. Offering the most reliable data available, this book documents the decline in the 1990s in American crime as the longest and largest since World War II. It ranges across both violent and non-violent offenses, all regions, and every demographic. All Americans, whether they live in cities or suburbs, whether rich or poor, are safer today. Casting a critical and unerring eye on current explanations, the book demonstrates that both long-standing theories of crime prevention and recently generated theories fall far short of explaining the drop in the 1990s. A careful study of Canadian crime trends reveals that imprisonment and economic factors may not have played the role in the U.S. crime drop that many have suggested. A combination of factors rather than a single cause produced the decline. It is clear that declines in the crime rate do not require fundamental social or structural change, but that smaller shifts in policy can make large differences. The significant reductions in crime rates, especially in New York, where crime dropped twice the national average, suggests that there is room for other cities to repeat this astounding success.

What is at stake in the modern combatting of hate in liberal democratic societies? This book takes up the question and offers a critical exploration of the basic assumptions, ideals and agendas behind the fighting of hate, as expressed for example through anti-hate speech and anti-hate crime initiatives. Most research on hate crime, on hatred as such, and on the -isms and -phobias with which it is commonly connected (racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia etc.) are written and published in what might be called a “preventionalist” spirit. That is, such studies are undertaken in order to prevent hate or to strengthen the combating of the harms and crimes with which it is associated. This book is different in so far as it insists upon a more theoretically distanced and exploratory approach to the topic of hatred. It asks questions such as: what are the normative presuppositions, the ideological roots, the promises, the limits, and—not least—the blind spots of the modern fighting of hate? When and why did it become necessary or legitimate to fight it? What is the meaning of “hate”? And how does the modern and public use of the term relate to the longer and broader history of the concept? In this book, a group of distinguished scholars explore these questions and offer a range of explanatory and normative perspectives on what is at stake in the awkward relationship between hate and liberal democracy.

This book is about building credible science to address the challenge of criminal recidivism. It does so by drawing upon a unique natural experiment that presented an opportunity to witness an alternate reality. More than 625,000 individuals are released from prison in the United States each year, and roughly half of these individuals will be back in prison within just three years. A likely contributor to the churning of the same individuals in and out of prison is the fact that many released prisoners return home to the same environment with the same criminal opportunities and criminal peers that proved so detrimental to their behavior prior to incarceration. This study uses Hurricane Katrina as a natural experiment for examining the question of whether residential relocation away from an old neighborhood can lead to desistance from crime. Many prisoners released soon after Katrina could not go back to their old neighborhoods, as they normally would have done. Their neighborhoods were devastated by a once-in-a-generation storm that damaged the vast majority of housing units in New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina provided a rare opportunity to investigate what happens when individuals move not just a short distance, but to entirely different cities, counties, and social worlds. This study draws upon both quantitative and qualitative evidence to reveal where newly released prisoners resided in the wake of the Katrina, the effect of residential relocation on the likelihood of reincarceration through eight years post-release, and the mechanisms revealing why residential change is so important after release from prison.

At no time in history, and certainly in no other democratic society, have prisons been filled so quickly and to such capacity than in the United States. And nowhere has this growth been more concentrated than in the disadvantaged—and primarily minority—neighborhoods of America's largest urban cities. In the most impoverished places, as much as 20% of the adult men are locked up on any given day, and there is hardly a family without a father, son, brother, or uncle who has not been behind bars. While the effects of going to and returning home from prison are well-documented, little attention has been paid to the impact of removal on neighborhoods where large numbers of individuals have been imprisoned. In the first detailed, empirical exploration of the effects of mass incarceration on poor places, this book demonstrates that in high doses incarceration contributes to the very social problems it is intended to solve—it breaks up family and social networks; deprives siblings, spouses, and parents of emotional and financial support; threatens the economic and political infrastructure of already struggling neighborhoods; and destabilizes the community, thus further reducing public safety. Especially at risk are children who, research shows, are more likely to commit a crime if a father or brother has been to prison. Demonstrating that the current incarceration policy in urban America does more harm than good, from increasing crime to widening racial disparities and diminished life chances for youths, the book argues that we cannot overcome the problem of mass incarceration concentrated in poor places without incorporating an idea of community justice into our failing correctional and criminal justice systems.

The phenomenal growth of penal confinement in the United States in the last quarter of the twentieth century is still a public policy mystery. Why did it happen when it happened? What explains the unprecedented magnitude of prison and jail expansion? Why are the current levels of penal confinement so very close to the all-time peak rate reached in 2007? What is the likely course of levels of penal confinement in the next generation of American life? Are there changes in government or policy that can avoid the prospect of mass incarceration as a chronic element of governance in the United States? This study is organized around four major concerns: What happened in the 33 years after 1973? Why did these extraordinary changes happen in that single generation? What is likely to happen to levels of penal confinement in the next three decades? What changes in law or practice might reduce this likely penal future?

5.4 million Americans—one in every forty voting age adults—are denied the right to participate in democratic elections because of a past or current felony conviction. In several American states, one in four black men cannot vote due to a felony conviction. In a country that prides itself on universal suffrage, how did the United States come to deny a voice to such a large percentage of its citizenry? What are the consequences of large-scale disenfranchisement—both for election outcomes, and for public policy more generally? This book exposes one of the most important, yet little known, threats to the health of American democracy today. It reveals the centrality of racial factors in the origins of these laws, and their impact on politics today. Marshalling the first real empirical evidence on the issue to make a case for reform, this analysis informs all future policy and political debates on the laws governing the political rights of criminals.

Relying on previously undisclosed confessions of former mafia members now cooperating with the police, this book provides a clinically accurate portrait of mafia behavior, motivations, and structure in Italy. It shows that the mafia are essentially multifunctional ritual brotherhoods focused above all on retaining and consolidating their local political power base. An interdisciplinary work of history, politics, economics, and sociology, the book reveals in detail the true face of one of the world's most mythologized criminal organizations.

The United Kingdom has more than 4.2 million public closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras—one for every fourteen citizens. Across the United States, hundreds of video-surveillance systems are being installed in town centers, public transportation facilities, and schools at a cost exceeding $100 million annually, and now other Western countries have begun to experiment with CCTV to prevent crime in public places. In light of this expansion and the associated public expenditure, as well as pressing concerns about privacy rights, there is an acute need for an evidence-based approach to inform policy and practice. This book assesses the effectiveness and social costs of not only CCTV, but also other surveillance methods to prevent crime in public space, such as improved street lighting, security guards, place managers, and defensible space. It goes beyond the question of “Does it work?” and examines the specific conditions and contexts under which these methods may have an effect on crime as well as the mechanisms that bring about a reduction in crime. At a time when cities need cost-effective methods to fight crime and the public gradually awakens to the burdens of sacrificing their privacy and civil rights for security, the authors provide this guide to the most effective and non-invasive uses of surveillance to make public places safer from crime.