This book provides in-depth, orignal and critical analyses by leading scholars of the penal systems of 16 nations around the world, focusing on changes in social structure, culture and punishment since 1975. Contributors provide an international and comparative context in which to understand the impact of recent profound economic, social and political changes on penal theory and practice.

Today it is usually not long before a problem gets expressed as a human rights issue. Indeed, human rights law continues to gain increasing attention internationally, and must move quickly in order to keep up with a social world that changes so rapidly. This Very Short Introduction, in its second edition, brings the issue of human rights up to date, considering the current controversies surrounding the movement. Discussing torture and arbitrary detention in the context of counter ...

In the globalized world an extensive process of international migration has developed. The resulting conundrum of issues when examining crime and migration makes for a bitterly complex and intriguing set of debates.In this compelling account, Dario Melossi provides an authoritative take on the theory and research examining the connection of crime, migration and punishment. Through a socio-historical and criminological approach, he shows that the core questions of migrants′ criminal...

Across America today gated communities sprawl out from urban centers, employers enforce mandatory drug testing, and schools screen students with metal detectors. Social problems ranging from welfare dependency to educational inequality have been reconceptualized as crimes, with an attendant focus on assigning fault and imposing consequences. Even before the recent terrorist attacks, non-citizen residents had become subject to an increasingly harsh regime of detention and deportation, and p...

Research and real-life examples that "lucidly connect some of the divisive social issues confronting us today to that thing we call 'the law'" ( Law and Politics Book Review).Law and society is a rapidly growing field that turns the conventional view of law as mythical abstraction on its head. Kitty Calavita brilliantly brings to life the ways in which law is found not only in statutes and courtrooms but in our institutions and interactions, while inviting ...

The punitive turn of penal policy in the United States after the acme of the Civil Rights movement responds not to rising criminal insecurity but to the social insecurity spawned by the fragmentation of wage labor and the shakeup of the ethnoracial hierarchy. It partakes of a broader reconstruction of the state wedding restrictive “workfare” and expansive “prisonfare” under a philosophy of moral behaviorism. This paternalist program of penalization of poverty aims to curb...

The deeply entrenched patterns of racial inequality in the United States simply do not square with the liberal notion of a nation-state of equal citizens. Uncovering the false promise of liberalism, State of White Supremacy reveals race to be a fundamental, if flexible, ruling logic that perpetually generates and legitimates racial hierarchy and privilege.Racial domination and violence in the United States are indelibly marked by its origin and ongoing development as an em...

In a series of newly commissioned essays from the leading scholars and advocates in criminal justice, Invisible Punishment explores, for the first time, the far-reaching consequences of our current criminal justice policies. Adopted as part of “get tough on crime” attitudes that prevailed in the 1980s and '90s, a range of strategies, from “three strikes” and “a war on drugs,” to mandatory sentencing and prison privatization, have resulted in the mass incarceration of American citi...

This book examines the question of whether justice or security is the primary virtue of 21st-century society.The issue of enhancing security without undermining justice – managing risk without undermining the rule of law – has always been problematic. However, recent developments such as new counter-terrorism measures, the expanding scope of criminal law, harsher migration control and an increasingly pronounced concern with public safety, have posed new challenges. The key element ...

`The quite extraordinary phenomenon of mass imprisonment in the USA needs, above all, to be identified.David Garland and his excellent range of criminological contributors go well beyond this by showing how to start thinking (and arguing) about what these unprecedented statistics might mean for all modern societies′ - Professor Stan Cohen, Department of Sociology, LSEThis major new volume of papers by leading criminologists, sociologists and histor...

International crime and justice is an emerging field that covers international and transnational crimes that have not been the focus of mainstream criminology or criminal justice. This book examines the field from a global perspective. It provides an introduction to the nature of international and transnational crimes and the theoretical perspectives that assist in understanding the relationship between social change and the waxing and waning of the crime opportunities resulting from globa...

The Qualities of a Citizen traces the application of U.S. immigration and naturalization law to women from the 1870s to the late 1960s. Like no other book before, it explores how racialized, gendered, and historical anxieties shaped our current understandings of the histories of immigrant women. The book takes us from the first federal immigration restrictions against Asian prostitutes in the 1870s to the immigration "reform" measures of the late 1960s. Throughout this period, top...