Showing 1-10 of 60 items.
Imprisoned Minds
Lost Boys, Trapped Men, and Solutions from Within the Prison
Rutgers University Press
Imprisoned Minds tells the stories of men in prison that few people ever hear. Six gripping, first-person narratives of unimaginable childhood trauma and neglect set the men on a pathway for prison or death. We finally hear their stories because the author is in prison alongside them—incarcerated for life at the age of 21.
Race and Police
The Origin of Our Peculiar Institutions
By Ben Brucato
Rutgers University Press
In the United States, race and police were founded along with a capitalist economy dependent on the enslavement of workers of African descent. Race and Police builds a critical theory of American policing by analyzing a heterodox history of policing, drawn from the historiography of slavery and slave patrols. Beginning by tracing the historical origins of the police mandate in British colonial America, the book shows that the peculiar institution of racialized chattel slavery originated along with a novel, binary conception of race. On one side, for the first time Europeans from various nationalities were united in a single racial category. Inclusion in this category was necessary for citizenship. On the other, Blacks were branded as slaves, cast as social enemies, and assumed to be threats to the social order.
Policing Victimhood
Human Trafficking, Frontline Work, and the Carceral State
Rutgers University Press
Policing Victimhood analyzes semi-structured interviews with 54 service providers in the Midwestern US, a region that, though colloquially understood as “flyover country,” regularly positions itself as a leader in state-level anti-trafficking policies and collaborative networks. These frontline workers’ perceptions and narratives are informed by their interpersonal, day-to-day encounters with exploited or trafficked persons. Their insights underscore how anti-trafficking policies are put into practice and influenced by specific ideologies and stereotypes. Extending the reach of street-level bureaucracy theory to anti-trafficking initiatives, Corinne Schwarz demonstrates how frontline workers are uniquely positioned to perpetuate or radically counter punitive anti-trafficking efforts.
Murder Town, USA
Homicide, Structural Violence, and Activism in Wilmington
Rutgers University Press
Far too many poor Black communities struggle with gun violence and homicide. The result has been the unnatural contortion of Black families and the inter-generational perpetuation of social chaos and untimely death. Young people are repeatedly ripped away from life by violence, while many men are locked away in prisons. In neighborhoods like those of Wilmington, Delaware, residents routinely face the pressures of violence, death, and incarceration. Murder Town, USA is thus a timely ethnography with an innovative structure: the authors helped organize fifteen residents formerly involved with the streets and/or the criminal justice system to document the relationship between structural opportunity and experiences with violence in Wilmington's Eastside and Southbridge neighborhoods.
When Are You Coming Home?
How Young Children Cope When Parents Go to Jail
Rutgers University Press
When Are You Coming Home? answers questions about how young children cope when parents go to jail. Told through the real stories of children, caregivers, and parents navigating parental incarceration, this book delves into the nuances that comprise children’s well-being and family relationships. In doing so, it calls out contextual vulnerabilities while emphasizing resilience processes that shape how children make sense of being separated from parents and await their likely reunification.
Way Down in the Hole
Race, Intimacy, and the Reproduction of Racial Ideologies in Solitary Confinement
Rutgers University Press
Based on ethnographic observations and interviews with inmates, correctional officers, and civilian staff that conducted in solitary confinement units, Way Down in the Hole explores the myriad ways in which daily, intimate interactions between those locked up twenty-four hours a day and the correctional officers charged with their care, custody, and control produce and reproduce hegemonic racial ideologies.
Shattered Justice
Crime Victims' Experiences with Wrongful Convictions and Exonerations
Rutgers University Press
Shattered Justice presents original crime victims’ experiences with violent crime, investigations and trials, and later exonerations in their cases. Cook reveals how homicide victims’ family members and rape survivors describe the painful impact of the primary trauma, the secondary trauma of the investigations and trials, and then the tertiary trauma associated with wrongful convictions and exonerations.
Cultures of Resistance
Collective Action and Rationality in the Anti-Terror Age
Rutgers University Press
Cultures of Resistance brings new insight to a key question: do government efforts to repress social movements effectively repress dissent, or do they spur mobilization? Through analyses of activists’ experiences of repression and resistance, the book uncovers processes that shape how individuals understand the risks of participating in collective action. Reynolds-Stenson demonstrates how individual rationality is collectively constructed.
Rape by the Numbers
Producing and Contesting Scientific Knowledge about Sexual Violence
Rutgers University Press
Rape by the Numbers explores scientists’ approaches to studying rape over more than forty years in the United States and Canada. In addition to investigating how scientists come to know the scope, causes, and consequences of rape, this book delves into the politics of rape research. Scholars who study rape often face a range of social pressures and resource constraints, including some that are unique to feminized and politicized fields of inquiry. Collectively, these matters have far-reaching consequences.
Out of the Red
My Life of Gangs, Prison, and Redemption
Rutgers University Press
A pathbreaking story of how social forces and personal choices thrust a boy into gangs, prison, and the long path of redemption as a felon in an unforgiving society. Brilliantly told through a sociological lens, Bolden’s story is vulnerable, honest, and leaves readers enlightened and moved to action.
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