Books like The Costs of Crime and Justice

Benson and Simpson use the opportunity perspective – assuming that crimes often depend on offenders recognizing an opportunity to commit an offense – to uncover the processes and situational conditions that induce white-collar crimes. 

They offer solutions to this persistent and widespread social problem, recognizing the difficulties of control.

The treatment is thoroughly researched and empirically supported. 

Controlling Crime uses an economic approach to examine ways to reduce crime without sacrificing public safety.

Topics include criminal justice system reform, social policy, government policies affecting alcohol and drug abuse, and private crime prevention approaches.

 Attention is paid to the respective roles of both the private sector and government agencies.

Through a broad conceptual framework and a careful review of the relevant literature, this volume provides insight into the effectiveness of a wide variety of interventions to reduce crime. 

This book presents contrasting views on the privatization of policing: whether it is mostly a good thing, its downsides, and which aspects of policing lend themselves to privatization. 

Forst argues that a blend of public and private policing can provide a more equitable and efficient delivery of policing services than can public police alone.  

Manning, unfriendly to economics and management efficiency, takes a dramaturgical perspective, concluding that those paradigms are fundamentally at odds with the traditional policing mandate, which confers on the government a monopoly on the use of coercion. 

This book applies economic theory and econometric methods to problems in criminology.

It is divided into three parts. Part I discusses models of criminal recidivism. Part II describes the economic model of crime. Part III estimates cost functions for prisons.

Specific chapters cover statistical analysis of qualitative outcomes; analysis of two measures of criminal activity – the arrest rate and the conviction rate; and long-run estimates of cost functions for a group of Federal Correctional Institutions. 

This is a classic, pioneering study of the major elements of southern crime and punishment at a time that saw the formation of the fundamental patterns of class and race—and how they shaped the South’s criminal justice system. Ayers studies the inner workings of the police, prison, and judicial systems, and the nature of crime, while at the same time adeptly linking the antebellum with the post-bellum criminal justice system. 

Mariama Kaba’s book stands alongside Emily L. Thuma’s All Our Trials as essential reading to understand the long history of ordinary people taking action to help liberate women from a system designed to punish those who dare to survive men’s violence.

This book is instructive, inspirational, and urgently needed in our current political climate. It’s a reminder that collective organizing is where citizens hold power, and Mariame Kaba is a leader who can help show us the way. 

I cannot get Shayne’s story out of my mind! It tells the stories of six very different individuals from diverse backgrounds with various access to health care and other resources. All six struggle with mental illness. And all six end up incarcerated and, finally, dead. But it’s Shayne’s story that I (and my students) can’t stop thinking about.

Shayne was a bright and beautiful child who grew up in a close and loving family. By the time she was eleven, Shayne had begun to make inappropriate comments, sneak out of her house at night, and lose interest in school. At age fourteen, she was found in a park with a young man and some beer. She refused to tell her therapist what she had been doing there but mentioned that she felt people could read her mind. A physician who met her just the one time diagnosed her as psychotic… show more.

We’ve all seen those movies about courtroom battles and a determined prosecutor, speaking up for innocent victims. In Nazir Afzal we have the real deal. Coming from a working-class, migrant family, he knows what it’s like for the powerless. As Chief Prosecutor he won milestone cases involving criminals, honour killings, domestic violence, human trafficking, and many others. This engrossing book takes us behind the scenes. Nazir Afzal is recognised as a man who changed British justice for the better. 

A gripping collage of moving stories of the poor, the wrongly convicted, and the marginalized, and Bryan Stevenson’s efforts to fight for their freedom. In this compelling Young Adult edition, Stevenson engages readers with his riveting storytelling. The author, who won relief for dozens of condemned prisoners, makes complicated legal issues understandable for young people. I picked this book because I believe every student should read it to understand the American judicial system. Many will find Bryan Stevenson so inspiring that they want to follow in Stevenson’s footsteps.

You may remember the hysteria that formed in the US in the early eighties involving childcare workers and child molestation charges. This story occurred in the early nineties, well after those earlier cases, but contains many of the same elements that led to countless false convictions in those earlier child molestation trials.

It begins in 1993 with an accusation of child molestation by a black man named Joeseph Allen. The accusation by the child’s mother also included a claim against a bus driver, Nancy Smith, who was accused of driving the four-year-old child to the home where the molestation took place.

From this first accusation and the initial investigation, Author David Miraldi follows this tragic story for the next three decades. When you think things can’t get any worse for Joseph Allen and Nancy Smith, they do. Then, to top it off, there is an ending that you won’t see… show more.