MAY CONTAIN MARKUP

Katherine Beckett and Theodore Sasson

The U.S. crime rate has dropped steadily for more than a decade, yet the rate of incarceration continues to skyrocket. Today, more than 2 million Americans are locked in prisons and jails with devastating consequences for poor families and communities, overcrowded institutions and overburdened taxpayers. How did the U.S. become the world′s leader in incarceration? Why have the numbers of women, juveniles, and people of color increased especially rapidly among the imprisoned?

The Politics of Injustice: Crime and Punishment in America, Second Edition is the first book to make widely accessible the new research on crime as a political and cultural issue. Katherine Beckett and Theodore Sasson provide readers with a robust analysis of the roles of crime, politics, media imagery and citizen activism in the making of criminal justice policy in the age of mass incarceration.

Features of this text:

• Critical Approach. Debunks myths about crime in the U.S., challenges many current anticrime policies that became harsher in the 1990s, and illuminates the political implications of crime and punishment.

• Contemporary. Updated throughout with particular attention to Chapter 5, "Crime in the Media," including research and analyses of crime in the news, crime as entertainment, and the interplay of news media, entertainment, and crime.

• Comprehensive Research. Draws on a wide range of scholarship, including research on crime′s representation in political discourse and the mass media, public opinion, crime-related activism, and public policy.

• Consistent and Accessible. A great source to communicate new research to both non-specialists and specialists in accessible language with riveting, real-life examples.

Intended as a supplement for use in any criminal justice or criminology course, especially in the punishment, corrections and policy areas, The Politics of Injustice, Second Edition will appeal to those who take a critical approach to crime issues.

Pine Forge Press. Thousand Oakls, Califoria. 2000. 201p.

By Rachel E. Barkow and Mark Osler

The federal government and most American states provide for some form of clemency that allows the president or the governor to reduce a sentence or pardon a conviction. Although most US presidents and some governors have made great use of this power in the past, it has long been in decline. Diagnosing the reasons for this decline proves easier than providing solutions to reinvigorate this practice. A great deal of scholarship explores the causes and offers solutions, and this review catalogs the main lines of argument. It also explains why clemency's renewal remains urgent, even in regimes dedicated to the rule of law, to serve the best purposes of punishment and check the excesses of criminal law and punishment that are inevitable given the political process and enforcement practices.

Annual Review of Criminology, Volume 7, Page 311 - 327