Stacy Horn, "Damnation Island: Poor, Sick, Mad, and Criminal in 19th-Century New York" (Algonquin Books, 2019)
Conceived as the most modern, humane incarceration facility the world had ever seen, New York's Blackwell's Island, site of a lunatic asylum, two prisons, an almshouse, and a number of hospitals, quic...
27 Juni 202529min
American Gangster
American Gangster (2007) is Ridley Scott’s homage to The French Connection: it’s got the right cars, clothes, and colors and is based on another true story of an obsessed cop trying to take down a dru...
23 Juni 202522min
Ben Snyder on Spy Plane: Inside Baltimore’s Surveillance Experiment
In this 100th episode (!!!) of Peoples & Things, host, Lee Vinsel, talks with Benjamin H. Snyder, Associate Professor of Sociology at Williams College, about his recent book, Spy Plane: Inside Baltimo...
16 Juni 202555min
Jeffrey P. Rogg, "The Spy and the State: The History of American Intelligence" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Intelligence is all around us. We read about it in the news, wonder who is spying on us through our phones or computers, and want to know what is happening in the shadows. The US Intelligence Communit...
9 Juni 20251h 3min
Brittany Friedman, "Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons" (UNC Press, 2025)
In Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons, Dr. Brittany Friedman delves into how the California Department of Corrections deployed various official, clandestine, and at ti...
5 Juni 202543min
Daniel Karpowitz, "College in Prison: Reading in an Age of Mass Incarceration" (Rutgers UP, 2017)
Over the years, American colleges and universities have made various efforts to provide prisoners with access to education. However, few of these outreach programs presume that incarcerated men and wo...
1 Juni 20251h 15min
Polly Jones, "Gulag Fiction: Labour Camp Literature from Stalin to Putin" (Bloombury, 2024)
Gulag Fiction: Labour Camp Literature from Stalin to Putin (Bloombury, 2024) is a unique exploration of Russian prose fiction about the Soviet labour camp system since the Stalin era compares represen...
26 Apr 20251h 16min
Philip V. McHarris, "Beyond Policing" (Legacy Lit, 2024)
What would happen if policing disappeared? Would we be safe? This book imagines a world without police.It's evident that policing is a problem. But what is the best way forward? In Beyond Policing, di...
22 Apr 202546min
