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This book represents a new approach to the study of punishment by explaining the causes and consequences of the prison boom from the perspective of the rural, southern towns most directly affected by prison building. Prison placement is often oversimplified as a dubious choice for rural community leaders: a way to secure jobs that may stigmatize their communities. By relocating from Chicago, Illinois to Forrest City, Arkansas I uncovered the challenges facing a community that pursued and secured a prison facility. Some rural leaders see attracting a prison as a way to achieve order in a changing world that seems to be beyond their control. This manuscript shows how collective memory and a shared sense of community are also vital in differentiating the instrumental purposes of a prison (jobs) from its symbolism. In Forrest City, racial violence and stigma marred the collective memory of towns leaders and shared meaning of community. Given the legacy of shame associated with prisons, the need to overcome stigma plays an important role in building a prison. Rural towns want to build prisons not simply for economic wellbeing, but also to protect and improve their reputations by managing ghetto stigma. Prison demand is nuanced, multifaceted, and depends on context. By unraveling why leaders in Forrest City secured placement of the Forrest City Federal Correctional Facility, we can begin to understand the social, political, and economic shifts that drove to United States—“the land of the free”—to triple prison construction in just over thirty years.

Politicians, citizens, and police agencies have long embraced community policing, hoping to reduce crime and disorder by strengthening the ties between urban residents and the officers entrusted with their protection. That strategy seems to make sense, but this book reveals the reasons why it rarely, if ever, works. Drawing on data collected in diverse Seattle neighborhoods from interviews with residents, observation of police officers, and attendance at community-police meetings, this book identifies the many obstacles that make effective collaboration between city dwellers and the police so unlikely to succeed. At the same time, the book shows that residents' pragmatic ideas about the role of community differ dramatically from those held by social theorists. The book provides a critical perspective not only on the future of community policing, but on the nature of state-society relations as well.

This book starts by considering the following: O. J. Simpson, the Central Park jogger, Bensonhurst, William Kennedy Smith, and Rodney King. These names mean more than crimes and criminals, more than court cases. They are cultural events that, for better or worse, gave concrete expression to latent social conflicts in American society. This book explores how these cases became conflated with larger social causes on a collective level and how this phenomenon has affected the law, the media, and social movements. An incisive chronicle of some of the most polarizing cases of the 1980s and 1990s, it shows that their landmark status results from the overlapping interaction of diverse participants. The merging of legal cases and social causes, the book argues, has wrought ambivalent effects on both social movements and the law. On the one hand, high-profile crimes offer important opportunities for emotional expression and raise awareness of social issues. But on the other hand, social problems cannot be resolved through the either/or determinations that are the goals of the legal system, creating frustration for those who look to the outcome of these cases for social progress. Guilt or innocence through the lens of the media leads to either defeat or victory for a social cause—a confounding situation that made the O. J. Simpson case, for example, unable to resolve the issues of domestic violence and police racism that it had come to symbolize.

This book examines the lives of formerly incarcerated individuals as they return to society, situating their experiences within the broader framework of US poverty and inequality. It considers the challenges these individuals face in securing stable employment, housing, transportation, and their struggles with stigma, parole supervision, mental health, and drug and alcohol addictions. The book argues that successful reintegration depends not only, or even primarily, on individuals’ traits and proclivities when they entered prison, but also on the family, neighborhood, and institutional contexts they encounter after prison and on the social roles, identities, and reentry narratives they construct for themselves after release, thereby moving beyond recidivism by examining reintegration more broadly. A central conclusion is that, in the current era of mass incarceration and racial exclusion, there is a profound mismatch between the resources available to the formerly incarcerated with which to rebuild their lives and the institutions and contexts in which they find themselves embedded after release, including high poverty neighborhoods, instant and cheap background checks, a brutal labor market for low-skill workers, and a highly punitive criminal justice system. Improving their prospects will require shifting resources from costly imprisonment toward educational and rehabilitation programs, supporting prisoners and their families during the critical period immediately after release, and removing formal barriers to reintegration in the housing and labor markets.

Why, even in the same high-crime neighborhoods, do robbery, drug dealing, and assault occur much more frequently on some blocks than on others? One popular theory is that a weak sense of community among neighbors can create conditions more hospitable for criminals, and another proposes that neighborhood disorder—such as broken windows and boarded-up buildings—makes crime more likely. But this study argues that we cannot fully understand the impact of these factors without considering that, because urban space is unevenly developed, different kinds of crimes occur most often in locations that offer their perpetrators specific advantages. Drawing on Chicago Police Department statistics and extensive interviews with both law-abiding citizens and criminals in one of the city's highest-crime areas, the author demonstrates that drug dealers and robbers, for example, are primarily attracted to locations with businesses like liquor stores, fast food restaurants, and check-cashing outlets. By accounting for these important factors of spatial positioning, he expands upon previous research to provide a comprehensive explanation of why crime occurs where it does.

Despite constant calls for reform, policing in the United States and Britain has changed little over the past thirty years. This book draws on decades of fieldwork to investigate how law enforcement works on the ground and in the symbolic realm, and why most efforts to reform the way police work have failed so far. The author begins by developing a model of policing as drama—a way of communicating various messages to the public in an effort to enforce moral boundaries. Unexpected outcomes, or contingencies, continually rewrite the plot of this drama, requiring officers to adjust accordingly. New information technologies, media scrutiny and representations, and community policing also play important roles, and the author studies these influences in detail. He concludes that their impacts have been quite limited, because the basic structure of policing—officer assessments based on encounters during routine patrols—has remained unchanged. For policing to really change, the author argues, its focus will need to shift to prevention.

On July 31, 1997, a six-man Emergency Service team from the NYPD raided a terrorist cell in Brooklyn and narrowly prevented a suicide bombing of the New York subway that would have cost hundreds, possibly thousands of lives. This book tells the dramatic story of that raid, the painstaking police work involved, and its paradoxical aftermath, which drew the officers into a conflict with other rank-and-file police and publicity-hungry top brass. The book draws on personal knowledge of the NYPD and a network of police contacts extending from cop to four-star chief, to trace the experience of three officers on the Emergency Service entry team and the two bomb squad detectives who dismantled the live device. The book follows their lives for five years, from that near-fatal day in 1997, through their encounters inside the brutal world of departmental politics, and on to 9/11, when they once again put their lives at risk in the fight against terrorism, racing inside the burning towers and sorting through the ash, debris, and body parts.

Queen Elizabeth (1503-1633) did not want “to make windows into men’s hearts and secret thoughts.” Yet as ruler she needed information about her subjects. Today’s surveillance society brings the same paradox. This book illustrates how and why surveillance is neither good nor bad, but context and comportment make it so. Explanation and evaluation require a common language and a map for the identification and measurement of surveillance's fundamental properties and contexts. The empirical richness of watching and being watched is disentangled and parsed into basic categories and dimensions. Terms such as surveillance, privacy, secrecy, confidentiality, anonymity, and personal borders are illustrated as well as the basic structures, processes, goals and cultures of surveillance. The book provides a way of conceptualizing and analyzing the new surveillance and draws on Marx’ several decades of empirical and theoretical studies on topics such as covert policing, computer matching and profiling, work monitoring, drug testing, location monitoring, Caller-ID, communication manners and surveillance in art and music. Normative chapters on the ethics of surveillance and techno-fallacies of the information age develop the implications for public policy. Through satirical fiction four distinct contexts of surveillance are illustrated: coercion (government and security), contracts (work), care (children) and that of unprotected “publicly” available data. The ironies, paradoxes, trade-offs and value conflicts which limit the best laid plans and which make the topic so interesting and challenging are identified.