By Clarence Darrow

An Address Delivered to the Prisoners in the Chicago County Jail. “Some of my good friends have insisted that while my theories are true, I should not have even them to inmates of a jail. Realizing the force of the suggestion that the truth should not be spoken to all people, I have caused these remarks to be printed on rather good paper and in a somewhat expensive form. In this way the truth does not become cheap and vulgar, and is only placed before those whose intelligence and affluence will prevent their being influenced by it. “ Clarene Darrow, Preface.

Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1910. 36p.

By Carolijn Terwindt.

Politics and Law in Liberal Democracies.How does protest become criminalised? Applying an anthropological perspective to political and legal conflicts, Carolijn Terwindt urges us to critically question the underlying interests and logic of prosecuting protesters. The book draws upon ethnographic research in Chile, Spain, and the United States to trace prosecutorial narratives in three protracted contentious episodes in liberal democracies. Terwindt examines the conflict between Chilean landowners and the indigenous Mapuche people, the Spanish state and the Basque independence movement, and the United States' criminalisation of 'eco-terrorists.' Exploring how patterns and mechanisms of prosecutorial narrative emerge through distinct political, social and democratic contexts, Terwindt shines a light on how prosecutorial narratives in each episode changed significantly over time. Challenging the law and justice system and warning against relying on criminal law to deal with socio-political conflicts, Terwindt's observations have implications for a wide range of actors and constituencies, including social movement activists, scholars, and prosecutors.

London: Pluto Press, 2020. 305p.

Edited by Stefan Amirell, Hans Hägerdal, Bruce Buchan.

In a modern global historical context, scholars have often regarded piracy as an essentially European concept which was inappropriately applied by the expanding European powers to the rest of the world, mainly for the purpose of furthering colonial forms of domination in the economic, political, military, legal and cultural spheres. By contrast, this edited volume highlights the relevance of both European and non-European understandings of piracy to the development of global maritime security and freedom of navigation. It explores the significance of ‘legal posturing’ on the part of those accused of piracy, as well as the existence of non-European laws and regulations regarding piracy and related forms of maritime violence in the early modern era. The authors in Piracy in World History highlight cases from various parts of the early-modern world, thereby explaining piracy as a global phenomenon.

Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021. 290p.

Edited by Carolyn Côté-Lussier, David Moffette, and Justin Piché.

Contemporary Criminological Issues tackles some of today’s most pressing social issues, from the criminalization of Indigenous peoples to interpersonal violence, border control, and armed conflicts. This book advances cutting-edge theories and methods, with the aim of moving beyond the scholarship that reproduces insecurity and exclusion. The breadth of approaches encompasses much of the current critical criminological scholarship, serving as a counterpoint to the growth of managerial and administrative criminologies and the rise of explicitly exclusionary and punitive state policies and practices with respect to ‘crime’ and ‘security.’ This edited collection featuring two books, one in English and one in French, includes important contributions to knowledge and public policy by eminent experts and emerging scholars.

Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2020. 322p.

Edited by Hans-Jörg Albrecht, Jörg-Martin Jehle.

Nationale Rückfallstatistiken und -untersuchungen in Europa. Recidivism belongs to the main categories of criminology, crime policy and criminal justice. If the target of preventing offenders from reoffending is taken seriously crime policy should be measured by success of certain penal sanctions in terms of relapses. Also institutions that deal directly with crime and offenders need to get basic information on the consequences of their actions; particularly general knowledge about offender groups at risk of reoffending. All these are reasons why representative recidivism studies are needed. Meanwhile a lot of European countries gather systematic and comprehensive information on recidivism, periodically and on a national level. This volume presents an exemplary collection of such endeavors: Austria, Estonia, France, Germany, Switzerland and a comparative study of England and Wales, the Netherlands and Scotland.

Universitätsverlag Göttingen 2014, 249p.

Edited by Marceli Aebi, et al..

Sixth Edition. This is the sixth edition of a data collection initiative that started in 1993 under the umbrella of the Council of Europe and has been continued since 2000 by an international group of experts. These experts also act as regional coordinators of a network of national correspondents whose contribution has been decisive in collecting and validating data on a variety of subjects from 42 countries. The Sourcebook is composed of six chapters. The first five cover the current main types of national crime and criminal justice statistics – police, prosecution, conviction, prison, and probation statistics – for the years 2011 to 2016, providing detailed analysis for 2015. The sixth chapter covers national victimization surveys, providing rates for the main indicators every five years from 1990 to 2015. As with every new edition of the Sourcebook, the group has tried to improve data quality as well as comparability and, where appropriate, increase the scope of data collection. This new edition will continue to promote comparative research throughout Europe and make European experiences and data available worldwide.

Gottinggen, GER: Göttingen University Press, 2021. 502p.

By Sytske Besemer.

The apple doesn't fall far from the tree', 'Like father like son', 'Chip off the old block'. All these idioms seem to suggest that offspring resemble their parents and this also applies to criminal behaviour. This dissertation investigates mechanisms that might explain why children with criminal parents have a higher risk of committing crime. Several explanations for this intergenerational transmission have been contrasted, such as social learning (imitation of behaviour), official bias against certain families, and transmission of risk factors. Sytske Besemer investigated this in England as well as in the Netherlands. She answers questions such as: does it matter when the parents committed crime in the child's life? Do more persistent offenders transmit crime more than sporadic offenders? Do violent offenders specifically transmit violent behaviour or general crime to their children? Might the police and courts be biased against certain families? Could a deprived environment explain why parents as well as children show criminal behaviour? Does parental imprisonment pose an extra risk? This dissertation is the first study to specifically investigate these mechanisms of intergenerational continuity. The study is scientifically relevant because of its breadth, integration of conviction data as well as data on self-reported offending and environmental risk factors, its comparative design and the long periods over which transmission is investigated. Furthermore, the dissertation has important policy implications. It demonstrates how penal policy designed to reduce criminal behaviour might actually increase this behaviour in the next generation. This is especially important since Western countries such as the United Kingdom and the Netherlands show an increasing trend towards more punitive policies.

Leiden: Sidestone Press, 2012. 198p.

By Sanne Muurling.

Female protagonists are commonly overlooked in the history of crime; especially in early modern Italy, where women’s scope of action is often portrayed as heavily restricted. This book redresses the notion of Italian women’s passivity, arguing that women’s crimes were far too common to be viewed as an anomaly. Based on over two thousand criminal complaints and investigation dossiers, Sanne Muurling charts the multifaceted impact of gender on patterns of recorded crime in early modern Bologna. While various socioeconomic and legal mechanisms withdrew women from the criminal justice process, the casebooks also reveal that women – as criminal offenders and savvy litigants – had an active hand in keeping the wheels of the court spinning.

Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2021. 265p.

By John Braithwaite.

How can power over others be transformed to ‘power with’? It is possible to transform many institutions to build societies with less predation and more freedom. These stretch from families and institutions of gender to the United Nations. Some societies, times and places have crime rates a hundred times higher than others. Some police forces kill at a hundred times the rate of others. Some criminal corporations kill thousands more than others. Micro variables fail to explain these patterns. Prevention principles for that challenge are macrocriminological.

Freedom is conceived in a republican way as non-domination. Tempering domination prevents crime; crime prevention reduces domination. Many believe a high crime rate is a price of freedom. Not Braithwaite. His principles of crime control are to build freedom, temper power, lift people from poverty and reduce all forms of domination. Freedom requires a more just normative order. It requires cascading of peace by social movements for non-violence and non-domination. Periods of war, domination and anomie cascade with long lags to elevated crime, violence, inter-generational self-violence and ecocide. Cybercrime today poses risks of anomic nuclear wars.

Braithwaite’s proposals refine some of criminology’s central theories and sharpen their relevance to all varieties of freedom. They can be reduced to one sentence. Strengthen freedom to prevent crime, prevent crime to strengthen freedom.

Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2022. 814p.

By Bruce D. Cristina.

What are the unstated theoretical and philosophical assumptions that underlie the modern study of criminology? Given the awful state of crime, justice and punishment in modern civilization, maybe it's time to rethink the whole enterprise? DiCristina did just that back in 1995. Maybe we should revisit his thinking, pause for a moment and ask ourselves if there is a better way? DiCristina courageously concludes that anarchy is the solution. Or maybe the field has already reached that condition? You decide!

NY. Harrow and Heston Publishers. 2012.

Edited by Graeme R. Newman, Michael J. Lynch and David H. Galaty.

From W. Byron Groves. This rare book brings together the writings of Casey Byron Groves, possibly the most brilliant criminologist in America during the 1990s. Casey's approach was unique, unorthodox for the 1990s, and quite frankly, 'in your face." From "organizational perversion" to "punishing the privileged", the topics he covered were diverse, and the scholars on whose shoulders he stood were equally diverse, from Habermas and Hegel to van den Haag and Herrnstein. Only 200 copies of this book were ever printed.

Harrow and Heston Publishers. NY. 1993, 2012. 320p.

The last Sourcebook of the classic series original funded by the U.S. Department of Justice. Contains the original print edition and a Table of Contents with live links to all tables downloadable as CVS or pdf files. A Read-Me.Org imprint. Bureau of Justice Statistics. 2014.

Download Live Table of Contents
Download Section 1-Characteristics of the criminal justice systems
Download Section 2-Public attitudes toward crime and criminal justice-related topics
Download Section 3-Nature and distribution of known offenses
Download Section 4-Characteristics and distribution of persons arrested
Download Section 5-Judicial processing of defendants
/Download Section 6 -Persons under correctional supervision

By John F. Macleod, Peter G. Grove and David P. Farrington

Implications for Justice Policy. Explaining Criminal Careers presents a simple quantitative theory of crime, conviction and reconviction, the assumptions of the theory are derived directly from a detailed analysis of cohort samples drawn from the “UK Home Office” Offenders Index .

Clarendon Press (2012) 273 pages.

By Havelock Ellis.

The “science” of criminality as presented by the famous psychiatrist Havelock Ellis. Lavishly illustrated with empirical and physical evidence to support his theories, findings and other truth claims. In this 4th edition (1910) of The Criminal first published in 1890, Ellis is pleased that there is “an approximation to general agreement” concerning his findings.

London. New York. Walter Scott Publishing. (1910) 494 pages.

By Pankhuri Agarwal.

Working with a simplistic notion of release from bondage as “freedom”, mainstream anti-trafficking activists focus on rescue. They argue that victims of trafficking are “free” once removed from their employers. Critics contest this approach and argue that significantly less attention is paid to the role of the state and the NGOs in producing conditions due to which people remain vulnerable. This research lends empirical support to this critical position through a multi-sited ethnography of informal migrant workers, sex workers, and law enforcement officers, traversing through courtrooms, police stations, district welfare offices, worksites, shelter homes, and offices of NGOs, in New Delhi, India. It corroborates that the authority of law is compromised ‘on ground’ and is actively negotiated within the legal space of anti-trafficking efforts. Instead of being instantly transported to “freedom”, the workers end up in protracted legal proceedings, ranging two to thirty-seven years, to seek justice and rights. Their rights are neglected due to a Kafkaesque bureaucracy. Their mobility is restricted due to improper documentation. Their suffering is intensified through an evasive legal system. The result – arbitrary, unjust legal outcomes after an endless wait and dependence on intermediaries. In fact, their journey through the system, with cost and time overruns, has no direct or precise chronology, and often moves in a circle rather than reaching an end. The workers resemble the class of people that Denise Ferreira da Silva (2009) describes as “nobodies”. They continue to struggle to achieve the rights and recognition that would allow them to escape this status. The combination of empirical data, doctrinal analysis, and socio-legal theory in this research provide an insight on the harm and limits of the anti-trafficking discourse with reference to India.

Bristol, UK: University of Bristol, 2021. 233p.

By Cesare Lombroso.

From the Preface: “Just as giants pay a heavy ransom for their stature in sterility and relative muscular and mental weakness, so the giants of thought expiate their intellectual force in degeneration and psychoses. It is thus that the signs of degeneration are found more frequently in men of genius than even in the insane.”

NY. Harrow and Heston Classic Reprint. (1891) 403 pages.

By M. J. L. Hardy.

And the Payment of Blood Money in The Middle East. The classic text on feuding, violence and the rules of engagement. “…traces the history of a distinctive legal institution in Arab society, that of settling of blood feuds and the payment of blood money following cases of violent death of physical injury.”

Beirut (1963) 101p.

By Elizabeth T. Hurren.

In this discipline-redefining book, Elizabeth T. Hurren maps the post-mortem journeys of bodies, body parts, organs and brains, inside the secretive culture of modern British medical research after WWII as the bodies of the deceased were harvested as bio-commons. Often the human stories behind these bodies were dissected, discarded or destroyed in death. Hidden Histories of the Dead recovers human faces and supply-lines in the archives that medical science neglected to acknowledge. It investigates the medical ethics of organ donation, the legal ambiguities of a lack of fully informed consent and the shifting boundaries of life and re-defining of medical death in a biotechnological era. Hurren reveals the implicit, explicit and missed body disputes that took second place to the economics of the national and international com modification of human material in global medical sciences of the Genome era. This title is also available as open access.

Cambridge University Press. (2021) 350 pages.

By Gregg Barak.

Th author takes a broad-gauged cultural studies approach to understanding the "trial of the century." A ground-breaking work on the cultural study of news reporting, entertainment, and the administration of criminal justice. This book defined the field in the emerging area of news-making criminology.

NY. Harrow and Heston Publishers. 2012. 382p.

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By Helena Machado and Rafaela Granja. The introductory chapter offers a detailed description of the themes that the reader can expect to find in this book, and a discussion of the social and academic relevance of the role and use of forensic genetic technologies in the criminal justice system. This introductory chapter provides the key concepts for the discussion of how developments in the application of forensic genetics can be understood as part of wider shifts in how the governance of criminality is enacted and made visible through the symbolic power invested in science and technology. Palgrave (2020) 120p.p.