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.

Edited by Zeb Tortorici and Neil L. Whitehead.

Ethnopornography collects essays that both develop and critique the concept that gives the book its name. Ethnopornography, a term first coined by British anthropologist Walter Roth in the late nineteenth century, refers to the often eroticized observation—for supposedly scientific or academic purposes—of those deemed “other” by the observer. In Roth’s case, he was concerned that the descriptions and images he recorded of the bodily and sexual practices of the Aboriginal people he studied were inappropriate for lay readers who might find them vulgar—or worse, titillating. The editors of this collection focus on what it is that creates the slippage between the pornographic and the scientific. In particular, they attend to the importance of race within the colonially created and maintained worlds of both research—ethnography in particular—and pornography.

Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2020. 281p.

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.

Babbage, the polymath and father of the modern computer, having designed in 1822 a Difference engine” that could mechanically compute mathematical tables of many kinds, couldn’t stand street noise, so he wrote a chapter on it. Our guess is that noise pollution has become much worse than in his day.

As Used in Great Britain and Ireland.by J.G. Garson. “The warrant appointing the Committee directed them to inquire (a) into the method of registering and identifying habitual criminals then in use in England; (b) into the “ Anthropometric ” system of classified registration and identification in use in France and other countries; (c) into the suggested system of identification by means of a record of finger -marks; to report whether the anthropometric system or the finger-mark system could, with advantage, be adopted into England, either in substitution for, or to supplement the then existing methods, and, if so, what arrangements should be adopted for putting them into practice, and what rules should be made under Section 8 of the Penal Servitude Act, 1891, for the photographing and measuring of prisoners.” London: Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. 1900. 38p.

By John Klofas Irshan Altheimer Nicholas Petitti

This guide begins by describing the problem of retaliatory violent disputes and reviewing factors that increase the risks of such disputes. It then identifies a series of questions to help you analyze your local retaliatory violent disputes problem. Finally, it reviews responses to the problem and what is known about them from evaluative research and police practice. This guide addresses the particular problem of retaliatory violent disputes which includes retaliatory gang violence, retaliatory family feuds, and retaliatory interpersonal violence.

Problem-Oriented Guides for Police. Problem-Specific Guide Series, 2019. No. 74. 45p