(Part 2) Best criminology books according to redditors

Someone tried to blow the whistle on the abuse at the Kincora boy's home in Belfast among other things. You can see what happened to them here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Wallace

Book on the whistleblower

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Framed-Colin-Wallace-Paul-Foot/dp/0330314467

The rise of mass incarceration in the United States is one of the most critical outcomes of the last half-century... 95% of prisoners are men.

Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became the Most Punitive Democracy in the World

How Many Federal Laws Are There? No One Knows. Add to this state and local laws and regs too.


A recent trend is to write a law so vague that it could mean anything. For example Domestic Violence is anything the woman FEELS afraid of.

My brother yelled at his wife... boom 2-yr long Order of Protection, because she felt afraid. This went on his public record, and he had an impossible time finding a new job, until charge was expunged (removed) - $2,000 and three days off of work to visit court and lawyer

The model proposed by the Chicago school, generally, and Park and Burgess, specifically, was based on ethnographic fieldwork in Chicago in the 1920s. The Concentric Zone Model, while it still has some adherents and adaptations, has generally fallen out of favor, at least in the United States. It is overly ecological and premised on competition over resources, ignores culture, and is fairly reductionist in how it treats physical and social spaces in city. Empirically, the concentric zones do not really match up with how cities grow over time, which becomes especially problematic with the changing nature of American cities in the post-WW2 era, suburbanization, White Flight, and the rise of a globalized economy. The New Urban Sociology goes into much more depth on these critiques, and offers a compelling multidimensional model that accounts for the interactions between space, culture, economy and the usual sociological variables (i.e., race, gender, class, etc.) as well as migration patters.

To return to the OPs question, white flight (the mass migration of white people from city center to surrounding suburbs) is the widely accepted answer for the decrepit state of many American urban areas. This makes sense to an extent; whites left the city for the suburbs, commerce followed, and inner cities were left disproportionately populated by the poor, uneducated, and minorities. With declining tax bases and loss of manufacturing jobs, cities couldn't (and/or wouldn't) support the infrastructure necessary to break the cycle of poverty (e.g., adequately fund schools). The missing pieces to this puzzle, though, are neoliberal globalization and increased "crime control". Loïc Waquant goes over this in great detail in Prisons of Poverty and Punishing the Poor. In short, since the 1970s, the decline of the welfare state and diminishing social programs have been replaced by a neoliberal state that emphasizes commerce and "free markets" while simultaneously relying on police and crime control to fill the vacuum left by the absence of social support (See David Garland's largely Foucauldian The Culture of Control: Crime Control and Social Order in Contemporary Society for much more detail on how this functions).

In sum, suburbanization and globalization have changed the racial and class structure in the cities. The welfare state has retrenched and withdrawn support for already vulnerable populations, and replaced support with a highly punitive model of crime control that perpetuates the cycles of poverty and crime. Of course, this whole post is the tl;dr version, but there are enormous bodies of research on these processes.

Ok, this article is abject garbage, and basically rehashes other NYT pieces which spun the same garbage.

>Perhaps, some speculate, it is because American society is unusually violent. Or its racial divisions have frayed the bonds of society. Or its citizens lack proper mental care under a health care system that draws frequent derision abroad.
>
>These explanations share one thing in common: Though seemingly sensible, all have been debunked by research on shootings elsewhere in the world.

This claim desperately needs a citation. Over 10% of our presidents have been shot, 80% or more of primetime TV shows are about people shooting people, and we sing a song about rockets and bombs while pledging allegiance to a piece of cloth before every sports event. We have troops stationed in 100 countries around the world. We are the most violent society in the world today save perhaps Somalia, so disregarding cultural influences offhand is terribly sloppy, and any studies that attempt to disregard cultural influences need to be very carefully crafted. I'd like to read them.

>The only variable that can explain the high rate of mass shootings in America is its astronomical number of guns.

This sentence makes two claims: astronomical number of guns (absolutely true) and high rate of mass shootings (very questionable and unsupported).

We definitely have an epidemic of news stories about mass shootings, but the idea that we have an epidemic of mass shootings is not supported by the statistics. The NYT article repeatedly cites the Adam Lankford study, which was exposed to be very unrigorous garbage. Lankford built his study off of badly sourced data, and it got traction in the media because it fit a narrative.

Much of the NYT article can be thrown out purely by the fact that it's peddling Lankford's stats, but there's more to consider.

>America’s gun homicide rate was 33 per million people in 2009, far exceeding the average among developed countries. In Canada and Britain, it was 5 per million and 0.7 per million, respectively, which also corresponds with differences in gun ownership.

This is grossly cherry picked. Now that they've shifted to overall gun homicide, and are outright stating a bivariate correlation, we can easily check their claim.

There is no bivariate correlation between gun ownership and gun homicide. Not on a state by state basis within the US, not globally, not within Europe.

There is no bivariate correlation between gun ownership and gun homicide among developed countries. In fact, what tiny correlation there is, is negative. In fact, six of the top 20 countries in the world in Human Development Index have gun/capita rates up around 30/100, which are the highest rates seen in the world outside the US outside of Swaziland, Serbia, and Honduras, which are around 40/100.

>More gun ownership corresponds with more gun murders across virtually every axis: among developed countries, among American states, among American towns and cities and when controlling for crime rates. And gun control legislation tends to reduce gun murders, according to a recent analysis of 130 studies from 10 countries.

This passage is outright lying with links. Follow the links. They're making claims about gun murders, but the links (the non paywalled ones anyway) are to graphs that intentionally conflate gun murders with "gun deaths," which include suicides and accidents. This is an old, tired, trick, peddled by Vox and Mother Jones.

>Skeptics of gun control sometimes point to a 2016 study. From 2000 and 2014, it found, the United States death rate by mass shooting was 1.5 per one million people. The rate was 1.7 in Switzerland and 3.4 in Finland, suggesting American mass shootings were not actually so common.
>
>But the same study found that the United States had 133 mass shootings. Finland had only two, which killed 18 people, and Switzerland had one, which killed 14. In short, isolated incidents. So while mass shootings can happen anywhere, they are only a matter of routine in the United States.

That study was actually rigorous. The rhetorical trick here is obvious. Finland and Switzerland have tiny populations. If you're going to compare based on incident numbers instead of per-capita numbers, you have to compare like populations.

Also, let's mention that any death rate expressed in per million is not routine, by the definition of routine. But they're jumping between denominators all over this piece, and unsavvy readers will only look at the numerators, so the "routine" claim gets lost in the wash.

>In 2013, American gun-related deaths included 21,175 suicides, 11,208 homicides and 505 deaths caused by an accidental discharge. That same year in Japan, a country with one-third America’s population, guns were involved in only 13 deaths.

Here they're including US suicides and not including Japanese suicides. Japanese suicides are a sticky wicket, statistically speaking, because their suicide rates are being fudged by the government. But if we go back to numbers prior the fudging, their suicide rate alone hovers around 20. This is larger than the US homicide rate and suicide rate combined, with all tools, not just guns. Which actually opens up another point, which is that homicide rates in the US today are historically low. We haven't had a five year stretch of homicide rate this low in the USA since the Beatles released "Hard Day's Night," and that's despite our guns/capita numbers being at an all time high.

But nobody in the media seems to want to talk about that. Why? Speculation towards the end, read down.

>After Britain had a mass shooting in 1987, the country instituted strict gun control laws. So did Australia after a 1996 shooting. But the United States has repeatedly faced the same calculus and determined that relatively unregulated gun ownership is worth the cost to society.
>
>That choice, more than any statistic or regulation, is what most sets the United States apart.
>
>“In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate,” Dan Hodges, a British journalist, wrote in a post on Twitter two years ago, referring to the 2012 attack that killed 20 young students at an elementary school in Connecticut. “Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.”

This is a veiled reference to a gun buyback program, and a way to twist it into a culture war attack. "Red tribe is okay with child murder." When the truth about a gun buyback program is that it would cost over half our entire federal non-defense discretionary budget to do so, purely because of the number of guns.

My conclusion is that this statement in the OP:

>I think it does a much better job than most news pieces of both including some actual statistics and explaining what they mean in a way that its readers will actually understand.

...is quite telling. It definitely explains things in a way that the reader can understand, but it's repeatedly lying while doing so. But normal people, even intelligent people (and I do think the OP is a likely very intelligent fellow or lady) buy the lie. And the reason the NYT is pushing this lie is probably partially ideological, but also very likely because this sort of lie easily resonates in the echo chambers that constitute its target demographic, which gets it shared on social media, which gets them more clicks. And the revenue is in the clicks. This business model itself is the root of the expanding culture war.

Ehhh really it'd just more publicized now. There were leaked reports about the NSA tapping underwater data lines and conducting dragnet surveillance a decade ago.

That's not to say it isn't an outrage - it is. It just has been for a while.

Edit: Check out this book from 2003. Don't let the conspiracy-esque name fool you; it's very well researched with thorough citations. Some of the information in it, particularly re: the NSA, is now common knowledge but much is still relevant.

> What current, measurable (aka provide source please) SYSTEMIC racism is faced by black people in Canada.

Busy grad student here, so I don't have the time for that today. Fortunately there is a recently published book that addresses this question (and others): Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present.

A little while back the Walrus published an excerpt so you check that out to see if this book has what you're looking for. Either way, if you are genuinely curious about racism faced by black people in Canada this seems like a great place to start.

> What if the "crying white girl" was poor and the black woman calling her out was super rich? Would you change your mind if that were the case? [...] I personally would rather be a rich black gay trans man than a poor white cishet man.

I think the important thing to keep in mind here is that while race is an important source of privilege/discrimination, it is far from the only source of privilege. Family income is one of many other relevant things that could be brought up in a conversation about an individual's privilege. People who grew up rich are definitely way more privileged than those who grew up poor. The salient question here however: in terms of expected privileges and disadvantages, would you 'rather be' a poor white cishet male, or a poor black cishet male?

there's a book that details the fraternity society and how dangerous it can be -> http://www.amazon.com/Fraternity-Gang-Rape-Brotherhood-Crosscurrents/dp/0814779611

America's prison-industrial complex is very different than what exists in whatever Nordic country you live in. We have more people in prisons than China and China is a one-party dictatorship. This is the material basis for the prison abolition movement and the DSA Praxis' group's resolution.

Police unions in America almost always support police officers that are guilty of murder, assault, and corruption and fight against reform of the system and against #BlackLivesMatter protesters. It's good that police unions in your country are progressive; that's rarely the case here. The only progressive thing I know of that a police union in America ever did was support Bernie Sanders for mayor of Burlington in 1981.

Forget the booth, I miss phones. I don't have stats on what percentage of battery life of a cell phone is dedicated to talk-time, but I bet it is 1% or less for most people. No one uses the phone any more. Everything is so impersonal.

Also, I read in a book (The Road to Hell ...AMAZING book about crime lords in Canada [yes, Canada]) that the biggest downfall in police officers over the last 20 years has been Air Conditioning. It stated that back in the day, pre-AC, officers would have to roll their windows down to cool off. This would allow them to talk to and wave to people on the streets as they pass by. They knew people. They interacted with people. It was a neighborhood. Now it's all business, with little to no connection with citizens, and everyone paints them with the same brush of being abusers of power.

The 90's were the peak of human existence in my opinion.

https://www.amazon.com/If-Had-Son-Railroading-Zimmerman-ebook/dp/B01EYY7W3A/ref=la_B001IQW7IS_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1522971644&sr=1-3

People with responsibility get treatment because that's what works...

We then stick the poor in a warehouse.

Try

https://www.amazon.com/I-Know-You-Are-Lying/dp/0967999820/

And

Spy the Lie: Former CIA Officers Teach You How to Detect Deception https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0071NOJ9W/

Have fun

It is racist when you don't consider why it occurs and, instead, associate it with blackness and black culture when, in fact, it has more to do with poverty, policing, and racialized, if not flat out racist, policy and policy enforcement.

I'd check out some books like The New Jim Crow, The Condemnation of Blackness, As Long as They Don't Move Next Door, Punishment and Inequality in America, Prisons of Poverty, and Punishing the Poor. I know of very few criminologists who would say that crime is a racial thing, instead, it is the enforcement of crime that is racial and it is the income disparity between blacks and whites that causes us to see higher rates of crime amongst blacks in America.

Very much agreed. When I went looking for colleges, I automatically discounted any one that had a 'Greek' system, so I luckily don't have any experience with this shit. However, if you want to be really disturbed: http://www.amazon.com/Fraternity-Gang-Rape-Brotherhood-Crosscurrents/dp/0814779611

That's a fascinating link you provide but I'm left wanting to know what the quotes were for both sample groups. I suspect that rapists don't only talk about women in hostile or vile terms, so some of those quotes could be fairly mild, whereas the quotes from lads magazines are designed to make it seem like the women are always "up for it" and available. Other than the initial shock therefore I'm not sure what the study is trying to prove.

Do you have any more insight into the quotes that were used for the study?

edit: found some more info. Amazon has a "look inside" of the source book, The Rapist File: Interviews with Convicted Rapists by Sally Bordwell and Lesley Sussman. Google has a preview link too. Not sure if I want to read the whole book to be honest, but I'll give it a go...

I don't think that I have still the textbook that mentioned it, but that is an actual academic theory about the origins of modern law enforcement.

Essentially, the police are members of the lower class that are employed by the upper class to enforce rules and laws that prevent upward mobility and maintain the status quo. The rules and laws are, of course, made by the wealthy class.

Unless I can find the textbook, the best citation I can give you is the author of and name of the book I read it in.

Police and Society by Dr. Kenneth Novak.

Novak, K. J., Cordner, G. W., Smith, B. W., & Roberg, R. R. (2017). Police & Society. New York: Oxford University Press.

I personally, don't. And don't have much for you, I'm not deep into it.

But I asked a lawyer friend of mine who teaches a course on this subject and she came back with a couple items. She teaches with these texts:

https://www.amazon.com/American-Corrections-Todd-R-Clear/dp/133755765X
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Jim_Crow

And referred me to this syllabus:
https://www.aaihs.org/prison-abolition-syllabus-2-0/

I'm sure you and I both were hoping for something more succinct.

I was reading the New Jim Crow wikipedia page and among its critics is this guy, Plaff, who while contending TNJC's focus on the drug war makes a point you've brought up before: That non-violent drug offenders are not the majority of prisoners. His book https://www.amazon.com/Locked-Causes-Incarceration-Achieve-Reform/dp/0465096913 focuses on the shift in the 80's towards mandatory minimums and prosecutor behavior. The ever ratcheting prison term lengths since that time have left American prisoners with long sentences compared to other countries and I doubt that acts as a deterrent. I've heard the argument made that violence towards arresting police may be increased in the USA because the arrestee has so much to lose compared to other systems.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/442380.The_God_That_Failed


http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674002357



https://www.amazon.com/My-Awakening-Path-Racial-Understanding/dp/1892796007

http://cis.org/newcase


https://www.amazon.com/Illegals-Unacceptable-Americas-Failure-Control/dp/1595553495


https://www.amazon.com/Race-Reality-Differences-Vincent-Sarich/dp/0813340861

https://mises.org/library/socialism-economic-and-sociological-analysis

If you're interested in learning more about how criminals communicate (including ingenious methods like signaling and screening), check out Diego Gabetta's book

https://www.amazon.com/Codes-Underworld-How-Criminals-Communicate/dp/0691152470

It's a great read. Tiny bit of basic game theory (so you get to learn some game theory too, but in an accessible way), lots of great stories. He's a sociologist, not an economist, but the game theory should be familiar to all economists.

http://www.amazon.com/Crime-Human-Nature-Definitive-Causes/dp/0684852667/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1367641419&sr=1-1&keywords=crime+and+human+nature

On page 473. I have the hard copy.

https://www.amazon.com/Crime-Human-Nature-Definitive-Causes/dp/0684852667

Get woke the fuck up

If you liked No Angel, check out The Road to Hell. It covers a really similar story in Canada, except instead of an ATF agent, it's a Hells prospect who turns informant, and proceeds to get involved in some deep shit.

> lo scopo principale della detenzione debba essere rieducativo e, allo stesso modo, protettivo della comunità verso il reiterarsi del reato per cui una persona viene condannata. Sono fortemente in disaccordo invece con la funzione punitiva e "vendicativa" per rispetto delle vittime di un determnato crimine.

Oltre ad essere completamente d'accordo, è anche lo scopo previsto dalla nostra costituzione. Ed è anche il fondamento di un paese civile, per quanto mi riguarda. Si fa un gran parlare di una superiorità culturale dell'occidente, che riconosco, e poi si rischia di ricadere nella barbarie ogni volta che si parla di punire i criminali.

Detto ciò, dobbiamo partire da alcune cose ricordate dall'articolo. C'è stato bisogno di introdurre il 41-bis (che nello spirito è un regime speciale nato come misura temporanea) per due ragioni principali: - mostrare i muscoli dello Stato contro la mafia che in quegli anni aveva raggiunto punti inammissibili di ferocia; - impedire che i capimafia continuassero a comandare le cosche dal carcere (come ci ricordano anche oggi i giudici antimafia, a volte bastano cenni delle mani o sguardi per comunicare in codice tra mafiosi).

Queste sono due ragioni che personalmente sento di poter capire e sposare (ovviamente più la seconda che la prima), considerando l'eccezionalità tutta italiana delle organizzazioni criminali.

Il problema ("le ombre" di cui parla l'articolo) per me risiede negli aspetti più gratuitamente punitivi, che niente hanno a che vedere con le due ragioni forti di cui sopra. Cosa aggiunge, se non un carattere vendicativo, impedire ai detenuti di avere libri o riviste, o di appendere poster in camera? Cosa guadagniamo come paese dal fatto che a sorvegliare i mafiosi ci siano le squadracce di Bolzaneto invece che normali agenti penitenziari?

Poi riesco ovviamente a capire il lato umano di alcune reazioni di pancia. Gli utenti qui continuano a linkare le stragi e le morti dei mafiosi, come se il problema per me fosse non sapere che Riina merita il carcere duro perché era un criminale spietato e pericolosissimo.

Ma se noi, lo stato italiano, siamo superiori alla mafia, è perché abbiamo dei valori sanciti da una Costituzione, e una cultura giuridica radicata nella storia (e che ha fatto scuola), e quindi una visione non vendicativa delle pene.

Io non ho un'opinione definitiva e solidissima sul 41-bis. E nell'articolo non si parla certo di abolirlo, come qualcuno nei commenti ha lateralmente insinuato. Sono convinto fosse allora (ed è ancora) una misura necessaria, e che la funzione di tagliare i contatti tra boss e criminali ancora in libertà sia da difendere con i denti. Ma su accanimenti gratuiti dettati dalla ferocia ho dei dubbi. Quando leggo le bestialità di questi giorni su Riina sono perplesso. Quando vedo che la questione viene posta ad un livello emotivo ("non ci può essere perdono!" "la dignità non se la meritano" "devono sperare di morire") penso che ci sia stato un fallimento nel capire cos'è uno stato di diritto.

EDIT: per la cronaca, e magari serve per inquadrare meglio come la penso, e magari prendere qualche downvote in più. Io sono per il superamento del carcere come misura punitiva, e ho sposato in pieno da subito le proposte di Luigi Manconi che vanno in questa direzione (qui il libro, qui un articolo riassuntivo).

[This] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Wallace#Imprisonment) police chief was deeply involved in the revelations about the Kincora Boys Home along with blowing the whistle on [Operation Clockwork Orange] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clockwork_Orange_(plot). Months after the Kincora story hit the headlines he was convicted of manslaughter, allegedly having beaten the husband of a work colleague to death and dumping him in a river.

16 years later this conviction was quashed thanks to new forensic evidence. The HOME OFFICE Pathologist that provided most of the evidence in favor of the conviction said some had been given to him by a "American security source".

Paul foot wrote [This] (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Framed-Colin-Wallace-Paul-Foot/dp/0330314467) book, in which he presents a convincing argument that a vengeful security service (Perhaps ordered by certain voices in the British Parliament who had nearly been broken by the Kincora scandal) beat one of Wallace's friends to death, dumped him in a river and framed the police chief for the murder.

This is one of many stories for you.

Cut the sarcasm next time.

Yep. And honestly, my own opinion is that gun laws probably don't even matter enough to be measurable. But it's telling when people have outright lie about who Lott is to try and discredit him, instead of, you know, finding an issue with his methodology or his math or his conclusions.

If you want another book that dives into the phenomenon of mass shootings specifically, I'd suggest this: https://www.amazon.com/Mass-Shootings-Realities-Popular-Culture/dp/1440836523/

I'm looking for this textbook (preferably in epub):

• Police & Society (7th Edition) – IBSN: 9780190639211
  
  Best offer (Paypal)

looking for:
978-1337557658

American Corrections https://www.amazon.com/dp/133755765X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_LjOFDbNPC0YV1

&

978-1-337-09184-8

Criminology: Theories, Patterns and Typologies https://www.amazon.com/dp/1337091847/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_6kOFDbX1JEG7F

I Know You Are Lying

It's written by Mark McClish who is a 26 year veteran of US federal law enforcement and an instructor on interrogation techniques.

One other theme that's going to be important in issues dealing with an organized group of criminals is trust and reliability (amidst a group which self-selects for untrustworthiness and violence). Diego Gambetta's Codes of the Underworld (http://www.amazon.com/Codes-Underworld-How-Criminals-Communicate/dp/0691152470) is really handy for looking at how organized crime winds up establishing methods by which internal trust can be demonstrated.

These guys say it :( http://www.amazon.com/The-Rapist-File-Les-Sussman/dp/0595002439

Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America's Poor

On a related note, if you want to read more about the potential for abuse and general creepiness of America's Continuity of Government program, pick up a copy of this book. The title makes it sound like a conspiracy theorists' brainchild, but it's actually a well researched account of CoG and its inherent flaws. The last third of the book contains the texts of the executive orders that formed the foundation for CoG, so you can slake your desire for verifiable evidence.

Please read these two books: The Johns and The Natashas

Here are some facts for you

https://www.amazon.com/Illegals-Unacceptable-Americas-Failure-Control/dp/1595553495