New Books: Criminal Justice

This is the untold story of the Border Patrol. It shines a light on this often secretive but powerful police force; how its agents are arrested for committing crimes five times more often than regular police officers, how its culture of racism and violence has proliferated over the last few decades, and how its power, oftentimes, goes unchecked. Reece Jones tells the history of the Border Patrol that has defined its culture and authority: mapping its Wild West beginnings, starting with a small cohort one hundred years ago, to its militarized force today, revealing the shocking true stories and characters behind its most dangerous policies.

In 2003, fresh out of NYU, Daniel Genis was hiding a serious heroin addiction that led him into debt and burglary. He was sentenced to twelve years (ten with good behavior), surviving the decade by reading 1,046 books, weightlifting, having philosophical discussions with various inmates, encountering violence on a daily basis, working at a serious of prison jobs, and in general observing an existence for which nothing in his life had prepared him. Genis describes in unsparing and vivid detail the realities of daily life in the New York penal system, from Rikers Island through a series of upstate institutions, and all he had to learn in order to survive.

Bill Keller argues that the most important role of prisons is preparing incarcerated people to be good neighbors and good citizens when they return to society, as the overwhelming majority will. He takes us inside the walls of our prisons, where we meet men and women who have found purpose while in state custody; American corrections officials who have set out to learn from Europe's state-of-the-art prison campuses; a rehab unit within a Pennsylvania prison where lifers serve as mentors; a college behind bars in San Quentin; a women's prison that helps imprisoned mothers bond with their children; and Keller's own classroom at Sing Sing.

What happens when you jam almost a dozen jails, bulging at the seams with society's cast-offs, onto a spit of landfill, purposefully hidden from public view and named after the family of a judge who sent escaped slaves and free Black men to plantations in the South? Rayman and Blau have spent two years interviewing more than 130 people comprising a broad cross-section of lives Rikers has touched--from detainees and their relatives to officers, lawyers, and commissioners, with stories spanning from the 1970s to the present day. The deeply personal accounts that emerge call into question the very nature of justice in America.

One of the most controversial developments in the American criminal justice system of the last few decades has been the development of the modern private prison industry. While there are many explanations given for the adoption of this policy--including partisanship, economic stress, unionization, and lobbying efforts by private prison firms--none fully explain why states privatize their prisons. Anna Gunderson proposes a novel explanation for why states adopt this policy. She shows that states privatize prisons to limit legal and political accountability for inmate lawsuits, an unintended consequence of the legal rights revolution for prisoners.

No municipality has been under court oversight to reform its police department as long as the city of Oakland, California. The authors trace the history of Oakland since its inception through the lens of the city's police department, through the Palmer Raids, McCarthyism, and the Civil Rights struggle, the Black Panthers and crack eras, to Oakland's present-day revival. Readers will be introduced to a group of sadistic cops known as "The Riders," whose disregard for the oath they took to protect and serve is on full, tragic, infuriating display.

Today, juries have become a symbol of democracy and popular legitimacy. But in English-speaking countries, jury trials are declining. Civil juries have been virtually abolished everywhere except the United States, and plea bargaining is taking the place of criminal jury trials. In this book, Renée Lettow Lerner describes the benefits and challenges of using juries, including jury nullification. Along the way, she charts the history of juries from antiquity through the English-speaking world and beyond.

We rely on the adversarial legal system to hold offenders accountable, ensure everyone is playing by the same rules, and keep our streets safe. Unfortunately, a grave possibility lingers under the surface: the imprisonment of possibly tens of thousands of innocent people. The Plea of Innocence offers a fundamental reform of the adversarial system: plausibly innocent people may now plead innocent and require the government to search for exonerating facts; in return, they will be required to waive their right to remain silent, speak to government agents, and participate in a search for truth.

Justin Brooks has spent his career freeing innocent people from prison. Here he offers up-close accounts of the cases he has fought, embedding them within a larger landscape of innocence claims and robust research on what we know about the causes of wrongful convictions. Putting readers at the defense table, this book forces us to consider how any of us might be swept up in the system, whether we hired a bad lawyer, bear a slight resemblance to someone else in the world, or are not good with awkward silence.

Private white actors today react to deeply ingrained, systemic, and often unconscious racial fear of Black people who appear "out of place" in their public environment. They weaponize this racial fear in a variety of ways, including by abusing 911 to enforce formal social control via armed government agents, by trafficking in racial fear to whitewash their own misdeeds through "racial hoaxes," and by exacting vigilante justice through extrajudicial killing under the guise of self-defense and standing one's ground. This book explores the private weaponization of racial fear that drives modern-day enforcement of these Black and white spaces.