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This book provides scholars, students, practitioners, and policy makers with a comprehensive review of the most up-to-date social scientific literature on lethal and nonlethal forms of male-to-female violence during and after separation and divorce. Special attention is devoted to reviewing theoretical perspectives on the topic and the ways in which various technologies are used by men to hurt the women who want to leave them, have begun to emotionally separate, are trying to leave them, in the process of leaving them, or who have left them. This book also provides solutions that cover a broad range of approaches: legal and criminal justice reforms; social services; economic policies; feminist men’s efforts; and new electronic technologies. Throughout the book are the voices of women who have experienced much pain and suffering, as well as the voices of abusive men. These narratives are derived from extensive research done over the past thirty years by the three authors.

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.

The United States currently maintains the world’s largest migration and deportation system. Yet there has been no systematic account of its construction. Boats, Borders, and Bases traces the rise of detention through Cold War efforts to deter Haitian and Cuban migrants from arriving in the United States by boat. Caribbean migration and deterrence efforts are related to much-better-known policies that have shaped the U.S.-Mexico boundary. This account situates both the Caribbean and U.S.-Mexico boundary within maritime and territorial grounds of U.S. empire. Drawing on extensive archival research, this account brings together histories of refugee resettlement, asylum, and criminalization to explore the racialization and interrelations in these policies. The turn to criminalize migration in the 1980s built upon both domestic crime politics and efforts to prevent the arrival of asylum seekers. The location of detention facilities in relatively remote places is not determined by formal policy or proximity to international boundaries, but rather by the contingent outcome of political negotiations. Boats, Borders, and Bases shows how the location of migration detention commonly builds on prison and military geographies. The expansion of jails, prisons, and restructuring of military bases contributed to the expansion of migration detention space.

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.

This is a book about drift and drifters—about the ways in which dislocation and disorientation can become phenomena in their own right. Locating drift within social, political, and spatial theory, the book also situates contemporary drift within the contested politics of the present day. Here the book explores the ways in which contemporary arrangements of power both promote and police drift; it also explores the experiential and collective politics of drift as a form of resistance to power. The book, in turn, highlights a distinctly North American form of drift—that of the train-hopping itinerant—via historical analysis of the hobo and the hobo’s collective politics, and through the author’s own train-riding immersion in the contemporary world of gutter punks and train hoppers. In conclusion, the book considers drift as a methodology and epistemology attuned to the contemporary world. It argues that we can better understand the world that has emerged around us by abandoning traditional, slab-like approaches to social inquiry and, instead, by learning the theoretical and methodological lessons offered by drift. In this context, the book reconsiders the photodocumentary tradition and explores the potential of ghost method and ghost images, absences, aftermaths, ruins, residues, and mistakes.

Hurt: Chronicles of the Drug War Generation weaves engaging first-person accounts of baby boomer drug users, including the account of the author’s own brother, a heroin addict. The compelling stories are set in their historical context, from the cultural influence of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n' roll to the contemporary discourse that pegs drug addiction as a disease punished by incarceration. Boeri writes with penetrating insight and conscientious attention to the intersectionality of race, gender, and class as she analyzes the impact of an increasingly punitive War on Drugs on a hurting generation. The chapters narrate the life course of men and women who continued to use cocaine, heroin, or methamphetamine after age thirty-five. They were supposed to stop drug use as they assumed adult roles in life—as the generation before them had—but the War on Drugs led to mass imprisonment of drug users, changing the social landscape of aging. As one former inmate hauntingly said, America’s drug policy left scars that may rival those of the slavery and genocide in America’s past. The findings call for new responses to drug use problems and strategies that go beyond coerced treatment programs and rehabilitation initiatives focused primarily on changing the person. Linking tales from the field with sociological perspectives, Boeri presents an exposé as disturbing as a dystopian dream, warning that future generations will have an even harder time maturing out of drug use if the War on Drugs is not stopped and social recovery efforts begun. The book ends with an appendix that details how the research was conducted, the data collected and analyzed, and the results were drawn. It describes the ethnographic methods, fieldwork, participant-recruitment strategies, and the innovative mixed method approach—a combination of data science techniques with qualitative data collection. It includes a description of the data visualization images used to illustrate each participant’s life and drug trajectory in graphic simplicity. This appendix offers insight into how to conduct careful quality control at each phase of data collection, team coding of the qualitative data, and why Boeri selected the stories to include in this book.

Based on extensive mixed-methods data, this book examines gendered violence and conflict in women’s prisons. Conflict and violence in the prison are located in intersectional inequalities and cumulative disadvantage, reflecting their pathways to prison. Women in prison share common characteristics, many mediated by structural, historical, and cumulative disadvantage. T pathways approach is expanded to include women’s experience within these structural clusters of intersectional inequalities. In their search for safety, women must negotiate these inequities through developing forms of prison capital. The history and philosophies underpinning women’s imprisonment, the gendered impact of prison and drug policy, and the variations in rates of imprisonment for differentially-situated women are also used to contextualizes the imprisonment of women. Prison conditions, aggravated by crowding, inadequate medical and mental health care and the lack of gender-informed operational practice, contribute to the gendered harm of imprisonment. A women’s search for safety is described through the lens of prison capital, forms of human, social and cultural capital women leverage to combat the gendered harm of imprisonment. Forms of capital combine with the intersectional inequality of imprisonment to condition the context for trouble and harm among women and with staff. The harm of women’s imprisonment can be located in human rights violations inside. The way forward is found in implementing international human rights standards in U. S. prisons, focusing on the promise of the Bangkok Rules.

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.

This book focuses on the understudied topic of long-term (over five years) survivors of intimate partner violence and abuse (IPV/A) and the resiliency they experience as they negotiate life after (physical) separation from abusive partners. Drawing on participant observation research and semi-structured interviews with women years after relationship termination, the study informs us about their trials and tribulations and the factors facilitating their success on the road to survivorship, which can involve gaining inner strength, personal transformation, and crucial help from individuals and social institutions. Through a sociological lens, the women’s life experiences are explored in a theoretical framework that draws upon trauma, identity construction, the notions of victim and survivor, resiliency, agency, and meaning making. Based on the analysis of common themes that run through the narratives of long-term survivors of IPV/A, the book also offers practical recommendations for improving the lives of abused women and the responses to them by social service agencies and justice institutions. The book is useful for university students, and it will inform criminal justice and social service professionals, policy makers, and inspire others who are victims/survivors of IPV/A.

Many nations today recognize intimate partner violence (IPV) in romantic-sexual relationships as a major public health threat, yet not all victims are treated equally. Contrary to myths, lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, and queer (LGBTQ) people are more likely to experience IPV than heterosexual-cisgender people. Unfortunately, LGBTQ victims face major barriers to reaching safety in a world that too often stigmatizes their identities and overlooks their relationships when forming victim services and policies. Offering a roadmap forward, LGBTQ Intimate Partner Violence: Lessons for Policy, Practice, and Research is the first book to synthesize nearly all existing research from the past forty years on this pressing issue. At once highly organized and engaging, it provides evidence-based tips for academic and nonacademic audiences alike.

Lost Childhoods focuses on the life-course histories of thirty young men serving time in the adult prison system in Pennsylvania for crimes they committed when they were minors. The narratives of these young men, their friends, and relatives reveal the invisible yet deep-seated connection between the childhood traumas they suffered and the violent criminal behavior they committed during adolescence. By living through domestic violence, poverty, the crack epidemic, and other circumstances, these men were forced to grow up fast, while familial ties that should have sustained them were broken at each turn. The book connects large-scale social policy decisions and their effect on family dynamics, and it demonstrates the limits of punitive justice.

Methamphetamine: A Love Story presents an insider’s view into the lived experience of immersion in the world of methamphetamine. In-depth interviews were conducted with thirty-three adults formerly immersed in using, dealing, and manufacturing. Detailed accounts bring insight into the intoxicating aspects of the lifestyle, including sex, money, power, and the ability to create methamphetamine. Social networks and environment play an important role in shaping and influencing drug-related decisions. The transformation of the lifestyle from one that is intoxicating to one that becomes risky and ultimately dark explains its unsustainability and the challenges of exiting the life. This book is recommended for those wanting to understand this problem and why it is unlikely to be eradicated any time soon.

At the heart of “Punishing Disease” is a central question: Why punishment? Although public health and medical institutions are designed to manage epidemics and viruses, punishment as an institution is built to manage crime. The tools designed for one job—pills versus handcuffs, hospitals versus prisons—are not effective for the other. The tool for punishing deviance is a hammer ill-suited for managing disease. In criminalizing sickness, HIV exposure and disclosure laws threaten to erode the boundary between sickness and crime, paving the way for a new era of criminalization that targets disease