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Appealing to Justice is an unprecedented study of disputing in prison and a rare glimpse of daily life inside this most closed of institutions. The authors gained unique access to California prisoners and correctional officers, as well as to thousands of prisoners’ grievances. Quoting extensively from these data, they give voice to those who are rarely heard from. These voices unsettle conventional wisdoms in the literature—for example, about the reluctance of vulnerable populations to launch disputes—and they do it with sometimes striking poignancy. The book is at once an empirically rich portrayal of legal mobilization and legal consciousness behind bars and a theoretically driven analysis of the conflicting logics underlying the contemporary U.S. prison system and the (post) civil rights society into which it is inserted. In their sweeping but concise analysis, the authors argue that the confluence of rights consciousness and the culture of punitive control—two of the defining logics of our age—has set in motion a seismic tension that is found in its most primal form in the contemporary prison and its internal grievance system. Ultimately, Appealing to Justice reveals a system that is fraught with institutional and cultural dilemmas and that delivers neither justice nor efficiency nor constitutional conditions of confinement.

Caught Up follows the lives of 50 Latina girls in “El Valle” Juvenile Detention Center and “Legacy” community school located 40 miles outside of Los Angeles, CA. Their path through these two institutions reveals the accelerated fusion of California schools and institutions of confinement. For example, the connection between both of these sites is a concerted effort between Legacy Community School and El Valle administrators to provide young people with wraparound services. These well-intentioned services are designed to provide youth with support at home, at school and in the actual detention center. However, I argue that wraparound services more closely resemble a phenomenon that I call wraparound incarceration, where students cannot escape the surveillance of formal detention despite leaving the actual detention center. For young people in Legacy school, returning to El Valle became an unavoidable consequence of wraparound services.

“Rights” language and practices have been used increasingly in the last decade to address conditions of economic, social, and cultural marginalization. It is still unclear, however, whether such efforts have been effective at promoting transformative social change. Have rights - as embodied in constitutions, statutory and judicial law, international conventions, resolutions, and treaties - fostered demonstrative improvements in the lives of the excluded? When, where, how, and under what conditions? This volume explores these questions through a systematic comparison of the mechanisms, actors, and pathways (MAPs) operating in a diversity of cases, analyzed by established scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds. The MAPs comparative approach provides insights into the conditions under which, and institutions through which, rights “on the books” are more or less effectively translated into substantive rights realization. We suggest multiple pathways in which litigation may combine with non-legal mechanisms and strategies, including institutionalized and non-institutionalized politics and global and local networks and advocacy. The volume is unique in its synthesis and advancement of parallel issues and debates across different disciplines and geographic regions; it likewise brings into dialogue scholars of economic, social and cultural rights with the scholarship on civil and political rights. These cross-fertilizations allow us to conclude by proposing a series of testable hypotheses about how economic and social rights might be realized, as well as an agenda for future research to broaden and deepen empirical integration and theoretical synthesis in ways that can facilitate human rights realization worldwide.

Most people often think decriminalization happens by repealing a law, but Sex, Sports, and the Politics of Consensual Violence challenges this view showing that social decriminalization must precede legal change. Social decriminalization requires four conditions: 1) an organized group who participates in a similar activity; 2) a shared legal consciousness; 3) an established set of rules and norms that appeal to a Weberian legal-rational authority; and 4) a social context where the activity is not too morally verboten. This book features two case studies where groups engage in acts of consensual violence – mixed-martial arts and sexual sadomasochism – to demonstrate how both develop rules and norms around the notion of consent to render their activities legally and socially tolerable. Social decriminalization is a conceptual tool that can help us better understand social and legal change from a constructivist lens.

Control and Protect explores the meaning and significance of efforts designed to combat sex trafficking in the United States. A striking ethnographic case study of new ways in which law enforcement agents, social service providers, and nongovernmental advocates have joined forces to fight domestic sex trafficking, it reveals how these collaborations consolidate state power, resulting in carceral protectionism. This book examines how such partnerships have blurred the boundaries between punishment and protection, victim and offender, and state and nonstate authority. Girls and women deemed “at-risk” of domestic sex trafficking may nonetheless experience punishment such as arrest, detention, and networked surveillance, even as they receive protection including victim-centered identification and social service referrals. Technology also plays a critical role in expanding antitrafficking interventions and fostering state and nonstate collaborations. Such technology extends the powers of the state and creates new ways for state and nonstate actors to collaborate on law-enforcement issues. Tracing the implications of carceral protection strategies on people deemed “at risk” of sex trafficking, Control and Protect calls for better systems of protection not tied to punishment as a means of addressing the economic, gendered, and racial systems of domination contributing to the exploitation of sex-trafficked individuals.

For one hundred years, criminologists have studied crime and intelligence, concluding that offenders possess IQ scores eight to ten points below those of non-offenders. Although the criminal genius is one of the most cherished villains in history, literature, and film, little is actually known about the criminal behavior of those with above-average IQ scores. This study provides some of the first empirical information about the self-reported crimes of adults with genius-level IQ scores. The study combines quantitative data about seventy-two different offenses with qualitative data from forty-four follow-up interviews to describe nine different types of offending: violent crime, property crime, sex crime, drug crime, white-collar crime, professional misconduct, vehicular crime, justice-system crime, and miscellaneous crime. Contrary to expectations, 465 high-IQ respondents reported higher rates of prevalence and incidence than 756 controls. They were also more tough-minded, emotional, and less empathic than people matched for sex and age. Interview data were consistent with theories that explain crime via weakened social bonds. Some of the crimes in the study were described by prisoners who had been caught and punished, but most—up to and including homicide—were described by offenders who got away with them. In the study, high-IQ respondents avoided detection, arrest, and conviction better than controls.

The expansion of organized crime across national borders has become a key security concern for the international community. This book examines some of the most widespread myths about the so-called Albanian Mafia. Among the questions tackled are the following: Is there a nation-wide Albanian Mafia that is hierarchically structured, highly secretive, and based on ethnic ties? Has the re-emergence of the Albanian customary Kanun laws led to increase in violent and organized crime in Albania? Is organized crime as much about emotions as it is about poverty, possessing, and wealth? What drives Albanian offenders to commit brutal crimes and remain silent about them? Are Albanian organized crime groups able to gain control of foreign territories? The narratives presented in this book are about the dynamic relationship between culture, politics, and transnational organized crime, and are based on more than a decade of empirical and ethnographic research on the causes, codes of conduct, activities, migration, and structure of Albanian organized crime groups in the Balkans, Western Europe, and the U.S. The book features interviews with victims, offenders, and law enforcement across ten countries, as well as court files and confidential intelligence reports. This book contributes to the cultural and critical dimension of criminological and sociological theory, as well as to the debate on organized crime. It sheds light on the rational and normative-affective considerations of organized crime offenders, and studies culture, conflict, incomplete modernization, and emotions in an effort to better understand human choices.

A Dream Denied: Incarceration, Recidivism, and Young Minority Men in America shows how the narrative of American dream shapes the offending trajectories of twenty-three young Latino and African American men in Boston and Chicago. Believing in the American dream helps the teenagers cope with the pains of incarceration. However, without the ability to experience themselves as creative actors, reproducing the rhetoric of American meritocracy leaves the teenagers unprepared to negotiate the complex and frustrating process of desistance and reentry.

The United States currently has the largest prison population on the planet. Over the last four decades, structural unemployment, concentrated urban poverty, and mass homelessness have also become permanent features of the political economy. These developments are without historical precedent, but not without historical explanation. This book traces the rise of the neoliberal carceral state through a series of turning points in US history including the Watts insurrection in 1965, the Detroit rebellion in 1967, the Attica uprising in 1971, the Los Angeles revolt in 1992, and events in post-Katrina New Orleans in 2005. The book argues that these dramatic events coincided with the emergence of neoliberal capitalism and the state's attempts to crush radical social movements. Through an examination of the poetic visions of social movements—including those by James Baldwin, Marvin Gaye, June Jordan, José Ramírez, and Sunni Patterson—it also suggests that alternative outcomes have been and continue to be possible.

Based on a nine years of ethnographic research, the authors examine multiple inequalities that underscore youth violence. They feature the experiences of inner city as well as rural girls and boys in Hawai‘i who face racism, sexism, poverty, and political neglect in the context of two hundred years of American colonial control in the Pacific. The authors highlight how legacies injustice endure as challenges in the present, prompting teens to fight for dignity and the chance to thrive in America – a nation that the youth described as inherently “jacked up” and “unjust.” While the story begins with the youth battling multiple contingencies, it ends on a hopeful note, as we see many of the teens overcome numerous hardships, often with the help of steadfast, caring adults.