Social Justice and Diversity Collection in the LexisNexis Digital Library

Extending Justice: Strategies to Increase Inclusion and Reduce Bias

by Bernice B. Donald and Sarah E. Redfield

Extending Justice: Strategies to Increase Inclusion and Reduce Bias offers expert perspective and actionable tools for interrupting bias. The first book in this series, Enhancing Justice: Reducing Bias, was written to increase awareness of implicit bias and serve as a benchbook for judges. This book goes the next step to be useful to a wider audience with virtually every chapter offering thoughtful context and practical strategies for interrupting unintentional bias. Edited by two proven leaders in the field, with twenty-six chapters written by fifty diverse authors, the voices here combine to provide wide-ranging and user-friendly science and tools.

Perspective comes from authors who are diverse in gender, gender orientation, race and ethnicity, age, ability, education, and profession. Fields covered are also diverse, including law, health, education, artificial intelligence, nonprofits, education, the military, and disability. Thought-provoking essays and interviews on healthcare, extremism, courage, and the silence and invisibility of the Native American community further enrich the work. The chapters are written to stand alone but build on each other for a strong collective whole. Readers will find the book useful in their own disciplines and beyond. Teachers, students, judges, and professionals in all fields can use this work for inspiration and reference as they apply its strategies and thinking to enhance their accomplishments in achieving diversity, equity, and inclusion, individually and systemically.

Poverty Law and Advocacy in America: Readings and Materials

By Steven M. Virgil and Sherri Lawson Clark

Poverty Law and Advocacy in America: Readings and Materials begins by engaging students in thinking about what it is like to be poor and questioning commonly held conceptions about the poor. Part II of the book considers the needs of the poor and how these needs are met through the implementation of federal and state policy. This section demonstrates that while programs may effectively become stop-gap measures preventing families from falling into utter destitution, they do not enable families to effectively leave poverty. Part III discusses the structures for advocacy in the legal system and the role of lawyers who represent the poor.

Mobilities of Wellbeing: Migration, the State and Medical Knowledge

By Anne Sigfrid Grønseth and Jonathan Skinner

What new varieties of wellbeing and misfortune are emerging in this post-9/11, postmodern, neoliberal era of travel and mobility? What is the future of movement for leisure and medical necessity, for human dignity and mutuality, for wellbeing and suffering in its many dimensions? This volume examines the relationship between movement and wellbeing from patient mobility to asylum seeker wellbeing, from public health care provision for marginalized peoples to arts care festivals for all. It demonstrates how knowledge is created between and within social relations, imaginations and persons, and uses detailed ethnographic examples from around the world to explore how citizens, migrants and nation states calculate and act upon issues of health and wellbeing. The goal is to show just how diverse and mobile experiences of misfortune, suffering and wellbeing can be.

When Justice Fails: Causes and Consequences of Wrongful Convictions
By Robert J. Norris, Catherine L. Bonventre, and James R. Acker

Wrongful convictions have become a prominent concern in state and federal systems of justice. As thousands of innocent prisoners have been freed in the United States in the past few decades, social science researchers and legal actors have produced a wealth of new insights about how and why mistakes occur and what can be done to help prevent further injustices.

When Justice Fails surveys the field of innocence scholarship to offer an overview of the key research, legal, and policy issues associated with wrongful convictions. Topics include the leading sources of error, no-crime wrongful convictions, the detection and correction of miscarriages of justice, the aftermath of wrongful convictions, and more. The volume includes references to historic and contemporary instances of miscarriages of justice and presents information gleaned from media sources about the cases and related policy issues. The book is ideally suited for use in undergraduate classes which focus on wrongful convictions and the administration of justice, and can be used in graduate classes, as well.

The second edition includes a new chapter on the social context of wrongful convictions, including historical and contemporary issues related to politics, race, and gender. Also, there are now separate chapters for false confessions and pleas (rather than one combined chapter, as in the first edition). The text has been updated throughout with revisions to case narratives, research summaries, and legal and policy issues. Finally, new material has been added focusing on conviction integrity units, the risk of wrongful executions, juvenile justice, and additional future challenges confronting innocence researchers and policymakers.

Flawed Criminal Justice Policies: At the Intersection of the Media, Public Fear and Legislative Response
By Frances P. Reddington and Gene Bonham, Jr.

This edited volume examines the concept of flawed policies in the criminal justice arena. The authors address the costs of faulty criminal justice policy and offer suggestions for the creation of sound, evidence-based policy. The second edition offers new and updated content on many significant issues facing the criminal justice system today. New chapters include Police and the Use of Force: Dilemmas in Policy Making, Solitary Confinement, and Conceal and Carry on College Campuses. In addition, the new edition includes an online chapter entitled Policy Watch Special Issue: Treatment of Pregnant Incarcerated Women (see link above). Specific topics highlighted include:

The Process of Creating Policy
Police and Use of Force
The War on Drugs
Immigration Laws
Sentencing Guidelines
Solitary Confinement
Capital Punishment
Mental Illness
“Get Tough” Juvenile Policy
Conceal and Carry on College Campuses
Sex Offender Laws

Courses appropriate for this textbook include upper-level undergraduate and graduate-level criminal justice courses dealing with public policies, the media impact on lawmaking, public fear of crime, and the legislative response. Other disciplines will also find this book an excellent supplement to their courses in Psychology, Political Science, and Public Administration and Policy.

Why Law Enforcement Organizations Fail: Mapping the Organizational Fault Lines in Policing
By Patrick O’Hara and Vincenzo Sainato

Why Law Enforcement Organizations Fail dissects headline cases to examine how things go wrong in criminal justice agencies. The third edition features new cases in each chapter including coverage of LaQuan McDonald’s death; excessive force in Baltimore and during the Ferguson riots; and the death of Deborah Danner, a mentally ill woman in New York.

Highlight cases that remain from earlier editions include New Orleans’ Danziger Bridge after Hurricane Katrina; the death of Amadou Diallo; the Jon Benet Ramsey murder investigation; and the conflagration that ended the siege at the MOVE house in Philadelphia. These human tragedies and organizational debacles serve as starting points for exploring how common structural and cultural fault lines in police organizations set the stage for major failures.

The author provides a framework for sorting through these cases to help readers recognize the distinct roles of operational mechanics, organizational structures, rank and file culture and executive hubris in making criminal justice agencies vulnerable to failure. The book examines how dysfunctions such as institutional racism, sexual harassment, systems abuse and renegade enforcement become established and then readily blossom into major scandals.

Why Law Enforcement Organizations Fail also shows how managers and oversight officials can spot malignant individuals, identify perverse incentives, neutralize deviant cultures and recognize when reigning managerial philosophies or governing policies are producing diminishing or negative returns.

This book is jargon-free and communicates plainly with students and criminal justice professionals. This is a highly-teachable book that also provides pragmatic long-term guidance for how to deal with crises, prevent their recurrence and restore organizational legitimacy. This book is an excellent centerpiece for any class on police organization and management, criminal justice policy or police-community relations.

Why American Prisons Fail: How to Fix Them without Spending More Money (Maybe Less)
by Peyton Paxson and George H. Watson

In Why American Prisons Fail: How to Fix Them without Spending More Money (Maybe Less), two former law school classmates, Peyton Paxson, a criminal justice professor, and George H. Watson, a past federal inmate and former attorney, address the issues currently facing our corrections system. They begin by describing how events in the late twentieth century caused the U.S. to have the highest incarceration rate in the world today. They go on to discuss how Watson found himself in prison and his observations of how prisons fail to do their job—to rehabilitate prisoners and prepare them for reintegration back into society.

The book provides brief surveys of the history of criminological theory and American prisons and compares U.S. penology with that of other Western democracies. The authors also examine the political and economic factors that drive today’s mass incarceration phenomenon. They conclude with a discussion of existing best practices and proposed reforms to move away from expensive and unsuccessful mass incarceration toward a more effective system. Why American Prisons Fail is particularly timely, as there are rising bipartisan calls in Washington and among the states to adopt a different response to crime.

This second edition updates the first, which was written during the end of the Obama administration. The authors compare and contrast the policies of that administration and the current Trump administration, while maintaining the bipartisan nature of the discussion.

Criminal Victimization in Higher Education: College Students as Crime Victims
By Bradford W. Reyns and Billy Henson

Criminal Victimization in Higher Education offers a unique perspective of crime and victimization by focusing on college students as a distinct population of crime victims. It reviews concepts central to campus crime and student victimization in a way that is relatable, interesting, and approachable for students and other readers. The book highlights crime and victimization as social issues impacting college students, campuses, and communities by drawing on and synthesizing decades of research involving college students.

Divided into three sections, this text addresses college campuses as crime contexts, college student victimization patterns, and the aftermath and prevention of college student victimization. Across these sections, such topics as legislative responses to campus crime, sexual victimization, cybercrime victimization, the consequences of victimization, victim services, bystander intervention, and situational crime prevention, among others, are reviewed. In addition to covering these content areas, readers will gain an understanding of the research process that has informed this area of social inquiry.

Published at a time when appreciation of these cultural issues among the next generation of policy-makers is more important than ever, this book provides a useful primary or secondary text for courses addressing these issues and was written specifically with college students and stakeholders in mind.

Juvenile Delinquency and Justice in the United States
By Lee Michael Johnson, Kimberly A. DeTardo-Bora, and Frances P. Reddington

Juvenile Delinquency and Justice in the United States recognizes both the distinction and overlap between the subjects of juvenile delinquency and juvenile justice. Its twelve chapters are divided into two parts. Part I contains six chapters where the problem of delinquency itself is defined—primarily the nature, extent, and explanation of juvenile offending. Part II contains six chapters that describe formal social control of juvenile offending—primarily the components of the “juvenile justice system,” current juvenile justice issues, and reform efforts.

Part I describes what delinquency is exactly, how much of it occurs (and its relative seriousness), why it happens, and why it doesn’t happen (social control). Since there are many possible causes of delinquency that operate in complex ways, three chapters are dedicated to them. These chapters focus on theories and factors that receive significant research support. Much attention is given to life course and developmental theories, given their prominent place in contemporary criminology and that child development has long been a focus in understanding delinquency.

Part II describes what the juvenile justice system is doing, and possibly should do, to solve the problem of delinquency. Here, a major feature of the book is that it goes beyond formal justice system structure and processes (policing, courts, and corrections) to address the major role that human/social service workers and agencies play in juvenile justice processes. This is important as most system-involved juveniles are not serious chronic offenders deeply entangled in the system; most are sanctioned in the community and may deal more with social service agents. Social services also play a major role in treating serious offenders. Thus, much attention is given to treatment and rehabilitation issues. Further, broader issues of social justice and human rights are addressed. Unique to this book is a chapter (Chapter 11) devoted solely to juvenile justice reform.

Teaching Justice
By Michael Braswell and John Whitehead

Teaching Justice encourages teachers and students to examine the different relationships they share in learning about criminal and social justice. It promotes the value of critical thinking in addressing justice-related themes as well as pursuing a more just and ethical future. The different roles of the teacher as scholar, communicator, mentor, philosopher, and artist are explored in depth. In addition, each chapter includes “Suggestions for the Classroom,” which offer a variety of activities and assignments designed to stimulate thinking and discussion among students.

Sociology of Law
By Dragan Milovanovic

Sociology of Law introduces readers to an interdisciplinary understanding of law. It orients the reader to the field and encourages critical dialog. The earlier chapters develop key conceptual tools in studying the content of chapters that follow. Part 1 includes orientations, law in action and the three classic thinkers—Emile Durkheim, Max Weber and Karl Marx. Part 2 includes chapters on sociological jurisprudence, critical legal studies and their offsprings, structural functionalism, semiotics and law, socio-legal semiotics, postmodernism and post-postmodernism.

The orientation of the book is critically constructive, with an eye toward examining what is, particularly the included and excluded voices in law, and how things can be otherwise. It challenges conventional understanding of how law functions, situating the field in a historically evolving context and particular political economies. It can be used both at the undergraduate and graduate levels as well as in law school. Readers seeking a general understanding, as well as researchers seeking a reference resource for a comprehensive statement with which to engage, will find the book essential reading.

The fourth edition of Sociology of Law has been greatly revised. Many new developments in the field have necessitated a wider framework and significant updating.

Criminal Injustice: How Politics and Ideology Distort American Ideals
By Matthew B. Robinson

Criminal Injustice examines the influence of politics and ideology on criminal justice practice. Politics refers to governing decisions about how to deal with social problems and distribute resources in society, and ideology means the beliefs and values that guide political decisions and underlie our societal institutions. The book clearly illustrates that criminal justice practice is directly and meaningfully impacted by politics and ideology, beginning with law-making.

The main argument of Criminal Injustice is that politics and ideology distort America’s ideal goals of crime control and due process, oftentimes resulting in ineffective and unfair criminal justice policies. That is, politics and ideology distort the ideals of Americans found in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. In the book, the author demonstrates how this is true, and he argues that the main problem with criminal justice practice is that it does not target the most harmful acts in America; instead it focuses heavily on a handful of harmful acts committed by certain groups of people under certain circumstances. This occurs because of who makes the law and who pays for it: these people create laws and policies that benefit them and their financial backers rather than “the people” more generally. Further, media coverage of crime and criminal justice reinforces myths of crime (including who is dangerous and who is not), which helps maintain the focus of criminal justice agencies on street crime rather than on other forms of harmful behavior that actually cause far more damage to society.

Disproportionate Minority Contact: Current Issues and Policies
By Nicolle Parsons-Pollard

Disproportionate Minority Contact: Current Issues and Policies focuses on a variety of topics related to minority overrepresentation and disparity in the criminal and juvenile justice systems. The goal of this edited volume is to provide an assortment of information on overrepresentation and disparity in one collection. This volume is capable of serving as a standalone text or works well as a supplement to a traditional textbook on race and crime. Likewise, this volume is written in such a way that it is also practical enough for those working in the justice system to use it as a tool for exploring and implementing change in their jurisdiction.

For the second edition, nine of the original chapters were revised and three chapters were added. All of the revisions and writing took place after the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri.

Hate Crimes: Typology, Motivations, and Victims
By Robin Maria Valeri and Kevin Borgeson

Hate Crimes: Typology, Motivations, and Victims offers a fresh perspective on the study of hate crimes. With separate chapters on LGBT, race, religion, and gender motivated hate crimes, the book focuses on the various targets of these crimes and examines the theories and motivations that drive perpetrators to commit these acts of hate. To address the increase in hate crimes occurring on campuses and in cyberspace, the book also includes chapters on campus hate crimes and virtual hate. Editors Robin Valeri and Kevin Borgeson and their contributors draw on theories from criminology, psychology, and sociology to explore the ideologies of hatemongers and extremist groups. No competing text offers such in-depth and nuanced coverage of hate and the contributing factors to one of the fastest growing social problems in America.

A core text for courses on hate crimes as well as an excellent supplement for any social problems class, Hate Crimes: Typology, Motivations, and Victims brings its singular focus to the growth and evolution in the field of hate crimes and hate studies. The chapter themes make this a highly readable text for criminal justice, psychology, or sociology professors as well as practitioners in the field.

Policing in a Diverse Society: Another American Dilemma
By Mary S. Jackson, Jerry A. Cameron, Timothy M. Hathaway, and Jerry L. Shoemaker

Policing in a Diverse Society provides an in-depth look at historical events that have shaped the thinking of both minority groups and law enforcement officers. Many stereotypes and myths have evolved as a result of lack of understanding, and this book utilizes a historical perspective as a means of closing the gap between the law enforcement officers and the communities they serve and protect. The text offers the reader an opportunity to gain a better understanding of the “rift” that may exist between law enforcement and citizens. This discussion impresses upon the reader the need for officers in training to arm themselves with more than guns and a badge; knowledge about issues relating to diversity is necessary in order for officers to perform their duties effectively and efficiently in America’s diverse population.

This book is useful not only for criminal justice students, but law enforcement organizations’ basic law enforcement training sessions as well. In an effort to achieve the main objective of helping the reader understand and build a better relationship between officers and citizens, the historical perspective of each population segment discussed is included.

This second edition includes firsthand knowledge from officers who are currently employed in law enforcement. They share their knowledge in order to stimulate and motivate thinking that can assist with building trust between officers, individuals, and the community. These officers describe real-life experiences that they are confronted with daily as they struggle to not only protect and serve but to also build trust. This edition also utilizes current events and situations to formulate progressive thinking on twenty-first century issues such as immigration and the use of deadly force. The overall aim is to provide information that will encourage dialogue and positive actions.

Race, Ethnicity, Crime, and Justice
By Matthew B. Robinson
The second edition of Race, Ethnicity, Crime, and Justice presents the latest research on studies of race, ethnicity, and justice practices at the juvenile and adult levels. With a focus on intersectionality, the text shows how these extralegal factors interact with others to help understand outcomes such as disparities in excessive use of force by the police and court sentencing, as well as disproportionate minority confinement in corrections. Designed to be brief yet thorough, the text covers the most important issues related to race and ethnicity as they pertain to the law, crime and delinquency, policing, courts, and corrections. Race, Ethnicity, Crime, and Justice is highly readable and classroom friendly while also making a meaningful contribution to the literature on the topic.

Race and Ethnicity in the Juvenile Justice System
By Tina L. Freiburger and Kareem L. Jordan

Race and Ethnicity in the Juvenile Justice System provides a comprehensive empirical examination of the role of race and ethnicity in the juvenile court. Using empirical research as a foundation, the authors examine how race and ethnicity influence multiple decision points for youth entering the juvenile system, including arrest, referral, petition, pre-adjudication release, adjudication, and disposition. The authors ground the decision-making in a separate chapter that exclusively focuses on theories that can be used to explain the role of race and ethnicity in juvenile justice processing.

Additionally, there is an examination of how community factors differentially impact decision-making based on the race/ethnicity of youth, the role of race/ethnicity in the practice of transferring youth to adult court, and how race influences juveniles’ perceptions of police and the juvenile system. Also, the authors empirically examine the role of race/ethnicity on the processing of status offenders and how it influences female involvement in delinquency.

In framing all of these salient issues in the proper context, the authors provide a historical analysis of the role of race in development of the juvenile court system and how different races were treated both before and after the juvenile court’s implementation. The underlying theme of the text is that all races/ethnicities of youth were not initially served by or meant to benefit from the juvenile court. Therefore, the continuing racial and ethnic disparities currently observed in the system can be traced to the pre-juvenile court era.