New Books: Criminal Justice

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.

In 2017, a routine network television investigation led Ronan Farrow to a story only whispered about: one of Hollywood's most powerful producers was a predator, protected by fear, wealth, and a conspiracy of silence. As Farrow drew closer to the truth, shadowy operatives, from high-priced lawyers to elite war-hardened spies, mounted a secret campaign of intimidation, threatening his career and following his every move. This is the untold story of the exotic tactics of surveillance and intimidation deployed by wealthy and connected men to threaten journalists, evade accountability, and silence victims of abuse.

Sonali Chakravarti offers a defense of juries as a democratic institution. She argues that juries provide an important site for democratic action by citizens and that their use should be revived. The jury, Chakravarti argues, could be a forward-looking institution that nurtures the best democratic instincts of citizens, but this requires a change in civic education regarding the skills that should be cultivated in jurors before and through the process of a trial.

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.

Utilizing a mix of clinical case studies, autotheory, and ethnographic research, Jessi Lee Jackson examines the emotional and psychological forces that shape U.S. police power. She begins with her work as a psychotherapist working across the spectrum of relationships to policing, and then turns to interrogate carceral psychology--the involvement of her profession in ongoing state violence. The book then shifts toward trainings, museums, and memorials that illuminate the psychic life of policing, and the possibility for its transformation. Within her investigation of clinical practice, Jackson offers a critique of contemporary police psychology.

When family physician Dr. Benjamin Gilmer began working at a clinic in rural North Carolina, he was following in the footsteps of a man with the same last name. His predecessor, Dr. Vince Gilmer, was beloved by his patients and community--right up until the shocking moment when he strangled his ailing father and then returned to the clinic for a regular day of work after the murder. The more Benjamin looked into Vince's case, the more he knew that something was wrong. In The Other Dr. Gilmer, Dr. Benjamin Gilmer tells of how a caring man was overcome by a perfect storm of rare health conditions, leading to an unimaginable crime.

Sean M. Lane and Kate A. Houston delve into the science of eyewitness memory. They examine a number of important topics, from basic research on perception and memory to the implications of this research on the quality and accuracy of eyewitness evidence. The volume answers questions such as: How do we remember and describe people we've encountered? What is the nature of false and genuine memories? How do emotional arousal and stress affect what we remember? This book offers an overview of how memory and psychology affect eyewitness testimony.