Joshua Dubler, “Down in the Chapel: Religious Life in an American Prison” (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013)
In almost every prison movie you see, there is a group of fanatically religious inmates. They are almost always led by a charismatic leader, an outsized father-figure who is loved by his acolytes and ...
19 Mars 20141h 6min
Jarrod Gilbert, “Patched: The History of Gangs in New Zealand” (Auckland UP, 2013)
Jarrod Gilbert is very lucky that he comes from a country the size of New Zealand. With only 4 million people he could carry out a project that would be beyond the abilities of someone from a large na...
6 Feb 201441min
David Garland, “Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition” (Harvard UP, 2010)
Why is it that the United States continues to enforce the death penalty when the rest of the Western world abolished its use a little over three decades ago? That question, along with many other equal...
5 Aug 201353min
Michael F. Armstrong, “They Wished they were Honest: The Knapp Commission and New York City Police Corruption” (Columbia Press, 2012)
Anyone who studies police corruption will be aware of the Knapp Commission that examined allegations of police corruption in New York City in the 1970s. Not only was this famous because of the movie S...
19 Juni 20131h
Christopher Browning, “Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave Labor Camp” (W. W. Norton, 2010)
Christopher Browning is one of the giants in the field of Holocaust Studies. He has contributed vitally to at least two of the basic debates in the field: the intentionalist/functionalist discussion a...
18 Juni 20131h 2min
Marc Mauer, “Race to Incarcerate” (New Press, 2013)
The American penitentiary model began as not merely a physical construct, but as a philosophical and religious one. Prisoners were to use their time in silence and isolation to contemplate their crime...
18 Juni 201340min
Kathleen J. Frydl, “The War on Drugs in America, 1940-1973” (Cambridge UP, 2013)
In 1971, President Richard Nixon declared a “War on Drugs.” We are still fighting that war today. According to many people, we’ve lost but don’t know it. Rates of drug use in the US remain, by histori...
9 Maj 20131h 3min
Paul Lieberman, “Gangster Squad: Covert Cops, the Mob, and the Battle for Los Angeles” (St. Martin’s Press, 2012)
Gangster Squad (St. Martin’s Press, 2012) the book is not Gangster Squad the movie. One is a detailed and thoroughly researched account of organized crime in Los Angeles and the other is a movie. If y...
17 Apr 201354min
