With the close proximity of gangs and the easy access to drugs, keeping urban neighborhoods safe from crime has long been a central concern for residents. In Clean Streets, Patrick Carr draws on five years of research in a white, working-class community on Chicago’s South side to see how they tried to keep their streets safe. Carr details the singular event for this community and the resulting rise of community activism: the shootings of two local teenage girls outside of an elementary sch...

Two sociologists reveal how small towns in Middle America are exporting their most precious resource—young people—and share what can be done to save these dwindling communitiesIn 2001, with funding from the MacArthur Foundation, sociologists Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas moved to Iowa to understand the rural brain drain and the exodus of young people from America’s countryside. They met and followed working-class “stayers”; ambitious and college-bound “achie...

Just outside Toronto, a 14-year-old Canadian girl was auctioned on the internet for men to purchase by the hour. A young woman was taken by slave traders from an African war zone to Edmonton to earn greater profits by exploiting her in prostitution. A gang called Wolfpack recruited teenagers in Quebec and sold them for sex to high-profile men in the community.The global problem of human trafficking is only beginning to be recognized in Canada, even though it has been hidden in plai...

Honorable Mention, 2014 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva Outstanding Book Award presented by the Society for the Study of Social Problems2012 Best Book Award, Latino/a Sociology Section, presented by the American Sociological Association2012 Finalist, C. Wright Mills Book Award presented by the Study of Social ProblemsA classic ethnography that reveals how urban police criminalize black and Latino boysVictor Rios grew up in the ghetto of Oakland, Calif...

Compared to much of the rest of the world, America and its citizens are rich. But many people are also deeply miserable—at work, at home, or both. In this provocative book, author John Brueggemann unpacks why so many people are struggling, both emotionally and financially, in a nation that looks so prosperous on the surface. From a hospital patient reduced to a balance sheet to a parent working such long hours that he misses dinner, Brueggemann argues that market thinking has permeated eve...

A comprehensive, readable analysis of the key issues of the Black Lives Matter movement, this thought-provoking and compelling anthology features essays by some of the nation’s most influential and respected criminal justice experts and legal scholars.“Somewhere among the anger, mourning and malice that Policing the Black Man documents lies the pursuit of justice. This powerful book demands our fierce attention.” —Toni MorrisonPolicing the Blac...

A provocative history that reveals how sex workers have been at the vanguard of social justice movements for the past fifty years while building a movement of their own that challenges our ideas about labor, sexuality, feminism, and freedomFifty countries treat sex work as a legitimate job, and it has been legalized (with restrictions) in eleven others. The United States is one of the few industrialized nations that continues to criminalize prostitution and, as Mel...

The first comprehensive work to turn a “queer eye” on the criminal justice system, providing an eye-opening study of LGBTQ+ rights and equality.Drawing on years of research, activism, and legal advocacy, Queer (In)Justice is a searing examination of queer experiences as “suspects,” defendants, prisoners, and survivors of crime. The authors unpack queer criminal archetypes—from “gleeful gay killers” and “lethal lesbians” to “disease spreaders” and “deceptiv...

In Violence Against Women, award-winning author Walter S. DeKeseredy offers a passionate but well-documented sociological overview of a sobering problem. He starts by outlining the scope of the challenge and debunks current attempts to label intimate violence as gender neutral. He then lays bare the structural practices that sustain this violence, leading to a discussion of long- and short-term policies to address the issue. DeKeseredy includes an examination of male complicity an...

“A passionate, incisive critique of the many ways in which women and girls of color are systematically erased or marginalized in discussions of police violence.” —Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim CrowInvisible No More is a timely examination of how Black women, Indigenous women, and women of color experience racial profiling, police brutality, and immigration enforcement. By placing the individual stories of Sandra Bland, Rekia Boyd, Daje...

One out of every hundred adults in the U.S. is in prison. This book provides a crash course in what drives mass incarceration, the human and community costs, and how to stop the numbers from going even higher. Collected in this volume are the three comic books published by the Real Cost of Prisons Project. The stories and statistical information in each comic book are thoroughly researched and documented.Prison Town: Paying the Price tells the story of how the financing an...

Cost-effective methods for improving crime control in AmericaSince the crime explosion of the 1960s, the prison population in the United States has multiplied fivefold, to one prisoner for every hundred adults—a rate unprecedented in American history and unmatched anywhere in the world. Even as the prisoner head count continues to rise, crime has stopped falling, and poor people and minorities still bear the brunt of both crime and punishment. When Brute Force ...