The development of crime policy in the United States for many generations has been hampered by a drastic shortage of knowledge and data, an excess of partisanship and instinctual responses, and a one-way tendency to expand the criminal justice system. Even if a three-decade pattern of prison growth came to a full stop in the early 2000s, the current decade will be by far the most punitive in U.S. history, hitting some minority communities particularly hard.

The book examines the history, scope, and effects of the revolution in America's response to crime since 1970. Henry Ruth and Kevin Reitz offer a comprehensive, long-term, pragmatic approach to increase public understanding of and find improvements in the nation's response to crime. Concentrating on meaningful areas for change in policing, sentencing, guns, drugs, and juvenile crime, they discuss such topics as new priorities for the use of incarceration; aggressive policing; the war on drugs; the need to switch the gun control debate to a focus on crime gun regulation; a new focus on offenders' transition from confinement to freedom; and the role of private enterprise.

A book that rejects traditional liberal and conservative outlooks, The Challenge of Crime takes a major step in offering new approaches for the nation's responses to crime.

The drug trade. Crime. Terrorism. Cyber threats. In the Caribbean, these cross-border Problems Without Passports (PWPs) have shaken the very foundation of nation states. Blending case studies with regional analysis, Ivelaw Lloyd Griffith examines the regionwide impact of PWPs and the complex security and sovereignty issues in play. The interaction of local and global forces within PWPs undermines the governments’ basic goal of protecting their people against military threats, subversion, and the erosion of political, economic, and social values. Seeking solutions to these multidimensional threats requires addressing both traditional and non-traditional security and sovereignty issues. Griffith focuses on clashes between PWPs and the state from warring drug gangs in Jamaica, to Trinidad and Tobago’s one-time status as a center for terrorism-related activities, to the political resurgence of drug trafficker Desi Bouterse in Suriname, and the growing cyber threats across the region.

Informed and up to date, Challenged Sovereignty explains the effects of today’s globalized problems on the contemporary Caribbean.

An analysis of the hit television series Columbo and the investigative methods of its eponymous main character.

In the iconic detective show, which aired from 1968 to 2003, Lieutenant Columbo was known for his Socratic method of rhetorical inquiry. Feigning ignorance and employing a barrage of questions about minute details, the detective enacts a persona of “antipotency,” or counter authoritativeness, to affect the villains' underestimation of his attention to inconsistencies, abductive reasoning, and rhetorical efficacy. In his predominantly dialogue-based investigations, Columbo exhausts his suspects by asking a battery of questions concerning all minor details of the case—an aggravating, tedious provocation for the killer trying to maintain innocence.

In this engaging interdisciplinary study, Christyne Berzsenyi explores the character and his influences, dissects his methods of investigation, and assesses the show’s enduring legacy in academia and popular culture. While critical and theoretical, the text is also accessible to interdisciplinary readers, practical in application, and amusing for Columbo buffs.

This reference work examines the ways in which some medieval behaviours and identities were categorized as criminal or deviant. It also explores the implications of modern demonization of the Middle Ages. As well as discussing constructions of deviance, this book also explores the behaviours and identities which provoked these labels and processes. The model is one of reciprocity between behaviours and processes of demonisation and criminalisation. Each authoritative essay engages carefully with this approach, examining behaviours, the ways they were demonized, and the relationship between the two processes. The three parts of the volume are centred around forms of discursive and normative power—religious ideologies, political ideologies, and legalism. The authors also explore issues of political discourse, spiritual censure, justice and punishment, and the construction of taboos. This reference work examines the ways in which some medieval behaviours and identities were categorized as criminal or deviant. It also explores the implications of modern demonization of the Middle Ages. As well as discussing constructions of deviance, this book also explores the behaviours and identities which provoked these labels and processes. The model is one of reciprocity between behaviours and processes of demonisation and criminalisation. Each authoritative essay engages carefully with this approach, examining behaviours, the ways they were demonized, and the relationship between the two processes. The three parts of the volume are centred around forms of discursive and normative power—religious ideologies, political ideologies, and legalism. The authors also explore issues of political discourse, spiritual censure, justice and punishment, and the construction of taboos.

Winner of the John Hope Franklin Prize
A Moyers & Company Best Book of the Year

“[A] brilliant work that tells us how directly the past has formed us.”
—Darryl Pinckney, New York Review of Books

Lynch mobs, chain gangs, and popular views of black southern criminals that defined the Jim Crow South are well known. We know less about the role of the urban North in shaping views of race and crime in American society.

Following the 1890 census, the first to measure the generation of African Americans born after slavery, crime statistics, new migration and immigration trends, and symbolic references to America as the promised land of opportunity were woven into a cautionary tale about the exceptional threat black people posed to modern urban society. Excessive arrest rates and overrepresentation in northern prisons were seen by many whites—liberals and conservatives, northerners and southerners—as indisputable proof of blacks’ inferiority. In the heyday of “separate but equal,” what else but pathology could explain black failure in the “land of opportunity”?

The idea of black criminality was crucial to the making of modern urban America, as were African Americans’ own ideas about race and crime. Chronicling the emergence of deeply embedded notions of black people as a dangerous race of criminals by explicit contrast to working-class whites and European immigrants, Khalil Gibran Muhammad reveals the influence such ideas have had on urban development and social policies.

Winner of the John Hope Franklin Prize
A Moyers & Company Best Book of the Year

“A brilliant work that tells us how directly the past has formed us.”
—Darryl Pinckney, New York Review of Books

How did we come to think of race as synonymous with crime? A brilliant and deeply disturbing biography of the idea of black criminality in the making of modern urban America, The Condemnation of Blackness reveals the influence this pernicious myth, rooted in crime statistics, has had on our society and our sense of self. Black crime statistics have shaped debates about everything from public education to policing to presidential elections, fueling racism and justifying inequality. How was this statistical link between blackness and criminality initially forged? Why was the same link not made for whites? In the age of Black Lives Matter and Donald Trump, under the shadow of Ferguson and Baltimore, no questions could be more urgent.

“The role of social-science research in creating the myth of black criminality is the focus of this seminal work…[It] shows how progressive reformers, academics, and policy-makers subscribed to a ‘statistical discourse’ about black crime…one that shifted blame onto black people for their disproportionate incarceration and continues to sustain gross racial disparities in American law enforcement and criminal justice.”
—Elizabeth Hinton, The Nation

“Muhammad identifies two different responses to crime among African-Americans in the post–Civil War years, both of which are still with us: in the South, there was vigilantism; in the North, there was an increased police presence. This was not the case when it came to white European-immigrant groups that were also being demonized for supposedly containing large criminal elements.”
—New Yorker

When five-year-old Joshua Christopher disappears off the street as he walks to a friend’s birthday party, his family is forced to confront the unimaginable. What happened? Why? Who took him? The convicted sex offender caught lurking near the search? Why won’t police leave his family, his parents, alone?

In his second novel, his first in twenty years, Robert H. Van Wagoner explores a family in extremis tottering at the edge of faith: in God and church, in family, and in marriage, in the institutions that promise safety and meaning. Both lyrical and explosive, The Contortionists unfolds as a page-turning mystery. Van Wagoner’s wrenching narrative propels the reader forward, toward the novel’s harrowing climax, while deftly unpacking its major themes—mental illness, sexuality, and substance abuse in a culture that would rather not confront them. Does the truth ever set anyone ultimately free? The stakes for Joshua and his family could not be greater.

An intimate portrait, based on newly discovered archival sources, of one of the most famous Jewish artists of the Italian Renaissance who, charged with a scandalous crime, renounced his faith and converted to Catholicism.

In 1491 the renowned goldsmith Salomone da Sesso converted to Catholicism. Born in the mid-fifteenth century to a Jewish family in Florence, Salomone later settled in Ferrara, where he was regarded as a virtuoso artist whose exquisite jewelry and lavishly engraved swords were prized by Italy’s ruling elite. But rumors circulated about Salomone’s behavior, scandalizing the Jewish community, who turned him over to the civil authorities. Charged with sodomy, Salomone was sentenced to die but agreed to renounce Judaism to save his life. He was baptized, taking the name Ercole “de’ Fedeli” (“One of the Faithful”). With the help of powerful patrons like Duchess Eleonora of Aragon and Duke Ercole d’Este, his namesake, Ercole lived as a practicing Catholic for three more decades. Drawing on newly discovered archival sources, Tamar Herzig traces the dramatic story of his life, half a century before ecclesiastical authorities made Jewish conversion a priority of the Catholic Church.

A Convert’s Tale explores the Jewish world in which Salomone was born and raised; the glittering objects he crafted, and their status as courtly hallmarks; and Ercole’s relations with his wealthy patrons. Herzig also examines homosexuality in Renaissance Italy, the response of Jewish communities and Christian authorities to allegations of sexual crimes, and attitudes toward homosexual acts among Christians and Jews. In Salomone/Ercole’s story we see how precarious life was for converts from Judaism, and how contested was the meaning of conversion for both the apostates’ former coreligionists and those tasked with welcoming them to their new faith.

"This book is superb in every way.... [It] is the only book that attempts to put into perspective just what the possible relationship between praxis and Marxist criminology might (should) be." --Eleanor Miller, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee In this expanded and updated second edition of a revered reader in Marxist criminology, editor David F. Greenberg brings together writings about crime that range from classic articles by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to a variety of contemporary essays. Taking an explicitly Marxist point of view, the articles deal with various aspects of criminology, including organized crime, delinquency, urban crime, criminal law, and criminal justice. To the original text, Greenberg has added pieces on race and crime, gender and crime, rape, arson for profit, and auto theft. With extensive prefatory material prepared by Greenberg, as well as editorial notes, and a glossary of Marxist terminology, Crime and Capitalism is an indispensable text for students and professionals in the fields of criminology, criminal justice, social history, and sociology.

In the late Roman Republic, acts of wrongdoing against individuals were prosecuted in private courts, while the iudicia publica (literally "public courts") tried cases that involved harm to the community as a whole. In this book, Andrew M. Riggsby thoroughly investigates the types of cases heard by the public courts to offer a provocative new understanding of what has been described as "crime" in the Roman Republic and to illuminate the inherently political nature of the Roman public courts.

Through the lens of Cicero's forensic oratory, Riggsby examines the four major public offenses: ambitus (bribery of the electorate), de sicariis et veneficiis (murder), vis (riot), and repetundae (extortion by provincial administrators). He persuasively argues that each of these offenses involves a violation of the proper relations between the state and the people, as interpreted by orators and juries. He concludes that in the late Roman Republic the only crimes were political crimes.

As this account of crime patterns in medieval England shows, crime can perhaps tell us more about a society's dynamics, tensions, and values than any other single social phenomenon. And Barbara Hanawalt's approach is particularly enlightening because it looks at the subject not from the heights of the era's learned opinion, but from the viewpoint of the people participating in the criminal dramas and manipulating the law for their own benefit.

Hanawalt's sources are those of the new social historian—village and judicial records supplemented by the literature of the time. She examined approximately 20,000 criminal court cases as well as coroners' and manorial court rolls. Her analysis of these data produces striking results. Medieval England, the author reveals, was a society in which all classes readily sought violent solutions to conflicts. The tensions of village life were severe. The struggle for food and for profits caused numerous homicides and property crimes. These felonies were committed in seasonal patterns, with homicides occurring most frequently during the difficult times of planting and harvesting, and burglaries reaching a peak in winter when goods were stored in houses and barns.

Moreover, organized crime was widespread and varied. It ranged from simple associations of local people to professional bands led by members of the nobility. One of Hanawalt's most interesting findings explodes the Robin Hood myth of robbers who stole from the rich and gave to the poor. Almost always, she shows, the robbers stole from the poor and kept for themselves. Throughout, Hanawalt carefully places the crimes and their participants within the context of village life in the later middle ages. Along with a description of the social and legal setting of criminal acts, she includes a discussion of the influence of war, politics, and economic, social, and demographic changes on the patterns of crime.

A provocative analysis of how Christianity helped legitimize the death penalty in early modern Europe, then throughout the Christian world, by turning execution into a great cathartic public ritual and the condemned into a Christ-like figure who accepts death to save humanity.

The public execution of criminals has been a common practice ever since ancient times. In this wide-ranging investigation of the death penalty in Europe from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century, noted Italian historian Adriano Prosperi identifies a crucial period when legal concepts of vengeance and justice merged with Christian beliefs in repentance and forgiveness.

Crime and Forgiveness begins with late antiquity but comes into sharp focus in fourteenth-century Italy, with the work of the Confraternities of Mercy, which offered Christian comfort to the condemned and were for centuries responsible for burying the dead. Under the brotherhoods’ influence, the ritual of public execution became Christianized, and the doomed person became a symbol of the fallen human condition. Because the time of death was known, this “ideal” sinner could be comforted and prepared for the next life through confession and repentance. In return, the community bearing witness to the execution offered forgiveness and a Christian burial. No longer facing eternal condemnation, the criminal in turn publicly forgave the executioner, and the death provided a moral lesson to the community.

Over time, as the practice of Christian comfort spread across Europe, it offered political authorities an opportunity to legitimize the death penalty and encode into law the right to kill and exact vengeance. But the contradictions created by Christianity’s central role in executions did not dissipate, and squaring the emotions and values surrounding state-sanctioned executions was not simple, then or now.

Since 1979 the Crime and Justice series has presented a review of the latest international research, providing expertise to enhance the work of sociologists, psychologists, criminal lawyers, justice scholars, and political scientists. The series explores a full range of issues concerning crime, its causes, and its cure. Volume 39 covers a range of criminal justice issues, including how drug enforcement affects drug prices, the source of racial disparity in imprisonment, rape and attrition in the legal process, and sex offender recidivism. Contributors to this volume include: Brigitte Bouhours, Jonathan P. Caulkins , Aaron Chalfin, Philip J. Cook, , Kathleen Daly, Denise C. Gottfredson, David S. Kirk, John H. Laub, Stephen D. Mastrofski , Chongmin Na, Steven Raphael, Michael D. Reisig, Peter Reuter, Dirk van Zyl Smit, Keith Soothill, Michael Tonry, and James J. Willis.

Prosecutors are powerful figures in any criminal justice system. They decide what crimes to prosecute, whom to pursue, what charges to file, whether to plea bargain, how aggressively to seek a conviction, and what sentence to demand. In the United States, citizens can challenge decisions by police, judges, and corrections officials, but courts keep their hands off the prosecutor. Curiously, in the United States and elsewhere, very little research is available that examines this powerful public role. And there is almost no work that critically compares how prosecutors function in different legal systems, from state to state or across countries. Prosecutors and Politics begins to fill that void.

Police, courts, and prisons are much the same in all developed countries, but prosecutors differ radically. The consequences of these differences are enormous: the United States suffers from low levels of public confidence in the criminal justice system and high levels of incarceration; in much of Western Europe, people report high confidence and support moderate crime control policies; in much of Eastern Europe, people’s perceptions of the law are marked by cynicism and despair. Prosecutors and Politics unpacks these national differences and provides insight into this key area of social control.

Since 1979 the Crime and Justice series has presented a review of the latest international research, providing expertise to enhance the work of sociologists, psychologists, criminal lawyers, justice scholars, and political scientists. The series explores a full range of issues concerning crime, its causes, and its cure.

For most Americans, The Godfather, The Sopranos, and the Cosa Nostra exemplify organized crime. In Asia the term conjures up images of Japanese yakuza and Chinese triads, in Italy the Cosa Nostra and ‘Ndrangheta, in Latin America Mexican narco-gangs and Colombian drug cartels, in the Netherlands transnational drug and human trafficking, and in Scandinavia outlaw motorcycle gangs. Some but not all those organizations are “mafias” with centuries-long histories, distinctive cultures, and complicated relationships with local communities and governments. Others are new, large but transitory and with no purpose other than maximizing profits from illegal markets.

Organized crime organizations have existed for centuries. Serious scholarly, as opposed to journalistic or law enforcement, efforts to understand them, however, date back only a few decades. Authoritative overviews were, until very recently, impossible. Rigorous, analytically acute, and methodologically sophisticated literatures did not exist. They have begun to emerge. They have developed in many countries, involve work in different languages and disciplines, and deploy a wide range of methods. 

Organizing Crime: Mafias, Markets, and Networks provides the most exhaustive overview ever published of knowledge about organized crime. It provides intensive accounts of American, Italian, and Dutch developments, covers both national mafias and transnational criminality, and delves in depth into gender, human capital, and money laundering issues. The writers are based in seven countries. To a person they are, or are among, the world’s most distinguished specialists in their subjects. At last, credible explanations and testable hypotheses are available concerning when, why, and under what circumstances mafias and other organized crime organizations come into being, what makes them distinctive, what they do and with what effects, and how to contain them.
 

Since 1979 the Crime and Justice series has presented a review of the latest international research, providing expertise to enhance the work of sociologists, psychologists, criminal lawyers, justice scholars, and political scientists. The series explores a full range of issues concerning crime, its causes, and its cures. In both the review and the thematic volumes, Crime and Justice offers an interdisciplinary approach to address core issues in criminology.

Volume 51 is a thematic volume on Prisons and Prisoners.

Since 1979, the Crime and Justice series has presented a review of the latest international research, providing expertise to enhance the work of sociologists, psychologists, criminal lawyers, justice scholars, and political scientists. The series explores a full range of issues concerning crime, its causes, and its cures. In both the review and the occasional thematic volumes, Crime and Justice offers an interdisciplinary approach to address core issues in criminology.

Volume 51 of Crime and Justice is the first to reprise a predecessor, Prisons (Volume 26, 1999), edited by series editor Michael Tonry and the late Joan Petersilia. In Prisons and Prisoners, editors Michael Tonry and Sandra Bucerius revisit the subject for several reasons.
In 1999, most scholarly research concerned developments in Britain and the United States and was published in English. Much of that was sociological, focused on inmate subcultures, or psychological, focused on how prisoners coped with and adapted to prison life. Some, principally by economists and statisticians, sought to measure the crime-preventive effects of imprisonment generally and the deterrent effects of punishments of greater and lesser severity. In 2022, serious scholarly research on prisoners, prisons, and the effects of imprisonment has been published and is underway in many countries. That greater cosmopolitanism is reflected in the pages of this volume. Several essays concern developments in places other than Britain and the United States. Several are primarily comparative and cover developments in many countries. Those primarily concerned with American research draw on work done elsewhere.
The subjects of prison research have also changed. Work on inmate subcultures and coping and adaptation has largely fallen by the wayside. Little is being done on imprisonment’s crime-preventive effects, largely because they are at best modest and often perverse. An essay in Volume 50 of Crime and Justice, examining the 116 studies then published on the effects of imprisonment on subsequent offending, concluded that serving a prison term makes ex-prisoners on average more, not less, likely to reoffend.
In 1999, little research had been done on the effects of imprisonment on prisoners’ families, children, or communities, or even—except for recidivism— on ex-prisoners’ later lives: family life, employment, housing, physical and mental health, or achievement of a conventional, law-abiding life. The first comprehensive survey of what was then known was published in the earlier Crime and Justice: Prisons volume. An enormous literature has since emerged, as essays in this volume demonstrate. Comparatively little work had been done by 1999 on the distinctive prison experiences of women and members of non-White minority groups. That too has changed, as several of the essays make clear.
What is not clear is the future of imprisonment. Through more contemporary and global lenses, the essays featured in this volume not only reframe where we are in 2022 but offer informed insights into where we might be heading.

 

Volume 52 is an annual survey of cutting-edge issues by preeminent criminology scholars.
 
Since 1979, Crime and Justice has presented a review of the latest international research, providing expertise to enhance the work of sociologists, psychologists, criminal lawyers, justice scholars, and political scientists. The series explores a full range of issues concerning crime, its causes, and its cures. In both the review and the thematic volumes, Crime and Justice offers an interdisciplinary approach to address core issues in criminology.
 

The Chinese were writing detective stories at least three hundred years before Edgar Allan Poe and courtroom drama about two hundred years before that. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, courtroom drama was a popular sub-genre—with the judge-hero Pao Cheng of the Sung dynasty as a principal character—and crime and punishment as its most important themes.

In Crime and Punishment in Medieval Chinese Drama George A. Hayden translates three Judge Pao plays: "Selling Rice at Ch'ien-chu," "The Ghost of the Pot," and "The Flower in the Back Courtyard." In his introduction Professor Hayden explains the structure of the dramas, which were sung as well as spoken, and their moral significance in the light of traditional Chinese ethics. He also traces the legend of the wise and incorruptible but very human Judge Pao through the years to its high point in Yuan and early Ming drama. The book is annotated for the general reader as well as for the specialist and contains a list of twenty-seven courtroom plays and a list of late Ming anthologies in which these plays appear.

Policing, incarceration, capital punishment: these forms of crime control were crucial elements of Jim Crow regimes. White southerners relied on them to assert and maintain racial power, which led to the growth of modern state bureaucracies that eclipsed traditions of local sovereignty. Friction between the demands of white supremacy and white southern suspicions of state power created a distinctive criminal justice system in the South, elements of which are still apparent today across the United States.

In this collection, Amy Louise Wood and Natalie J. Ring present nine groundbreaking essays about the carceral system and its development over time. Topics range from activism against police brutality to the peculiar path of southern prison reform to the fraught introduction of the electric chair. The essays tell nuanced stories of rapidly changing state institutions, political leaders who sought to manage them, and African Americans who appealed to the regulatory state to protect their rights.

Contributors: Pippa Holloway, Tammy Ingram, Brandon T. Jett, Seth Kotch, Talitha L. LeFlouria, Vivien Miller, Silvan Niedermeier, K. Stephen Prince, and Amy Louise Wood

Russians from all walks of life poured into the streets of the imperial capital after the February Revolution of 1917, joyously celebrating the end of Tsar Nicholas II’s monarchy. One year later, with Lenin’s Bolsheviks now in power, Petrograd’s deserted streets presented a very different scene. No celebrations marked the Revolution’s anniversary. Amid widespread civil strife and lawlessness, a fearful citizenry stayed out of sight.

In Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa offers a new perspective on Russia’s revolutionary year through the lens of violent crime and its devastating effect on ordinary people. When the Provisional Government assumed power after Nicholas II’s abdication, it set about instituting liberal reforms, including eliminating the tsar’s regular police. But dissolving this much-hated yet efficient police force and replacing it with a new municipal police led rapidly to the breakdown of order and services. Amid the chaos, crime flourished. Gangs of criminals, deserters, and hooligans brazenly roamed the streets. Mass prison escapes became common. And vigilantism spread widely as ordinary citizens felt compelled to take the law into their own hands, often meting out mob justice on suspected wrongdoers.

The Bolsheviks swept into power in the October Revolution but had no practical plans to reestablish order. As crime continued to escalate and violent alcohol riots almost drowned the revolutionary regime, they redefined it as “counterrevolutionary activity,” to be dealt with by the secret police, whose harshly repressive, extralegal means of enforcement helped pave the way for a Communist dictatorship.

This book brings together key debates within cultural studies, media studies, criminology and sociology on the relationship between the media and crime in a postmodern society – highlighted by recent controversies on the effects of media portrayals of violence and crime on the community at large.

Real-life crime, crime reconstruction and crime as entertainment are categories that are now so interdependent that the media itself is in danger of confusing the genres as it seeks to profit from their undoubted appeal. This intertextuality is a key theme in this collection. The contributors highlight and theorise the symbiosis that exists between real crime and its representations, from media moral panics, policing the crisis and representing order to the postmodern confusion of crime and spectacle, trial by media and trials on media. As recent debates have shown all too starkly, the media's neutrality in this critical area is ever more problematic.

This is an invaluable introduction to new thinking in a pressing contemporary debate.

This new explanation of crime over the life course provides an important foundation for rethinking contemporary theory and criminal justice policy. It is based on the reanalysis of a classic set of data: Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency, Sheldon and Eleanor Gluecks’ mid-twentieth-century study of 500 delinquents and 500 nondelinquents from childhood to adulthood. Several years ago, Robert Sampson and John Laub dusted off sixty cartons of the Gleucks’ data that had been stored in the basement of the Harvard Law School. After a lengthy process of recoding and reanalyzing these data, they developed and tested a theory of informal social control that acknowledges the importance of childhood behavior but rejects the implication that adult social factors have little relevance.

Crime in the U.S. and the institutions for its control are deeply embedded in and shaped by history. The historical origins have often become invisible, and their recovery difficult, but any understanding of the contemporary situation requires historical context. For over twenty-five years Eric H. Monkkonen has worked on some of the puzzles and problems in recovering the history of crime and police.

Much of his work has appeared in articles, often in specialized journals or not in English, which this book collects for the first time. In addition to Monkkonen’s major published articles, this volume includes several new ones. The topics embrace violence, public disorder, policing, popular culture, and contrasts between the U.S. and Europe. Some articles illuminate special methodological and source issues that challenge historians of criminal justice. As well as dealing with serious crime, this book includes several articles on specifically urban problems and solutions associated with disorder, crime, and poverty.

In contrast to the more technical articles, several chapters, which originally appeared as op-ed pieces, show how historical understanding can help address current policy issues in crime and crime control. All too often, current policy debates occur without proper historical background. As a result, old ideas that have been tried and rejected are re-introduced, or new and sometimes simple ideas are ignored.

The release of No Time To Die in 2020 heralds the arrival of the twenty-fifth installment in the James Bond film series. Since the release of Dr. No in 1962, the cinematic James Bond has expedited the transformation of Ian Fleming's literary creation into an icon of western popular culture that has captivated audiences across the globe by transcending barriers of ideology, nation, empire, gender, race, ethnicity, and generation. The Cultural Life of James Bond: Specters of 007 untangles the seemingly perpetual allure of the Bond phenomenon by looking at the non-canonical texts and contexts that encompass the cultural life of James Bond. Chronicling the evolution of the British secret agent over half a century of political, social, and cultural permutations, the fifteen chapters examine the Bond-brand beyond the film series and across media platforms while understanding these ancillary texts and contexts as sites of negotiation with the Eon franchise.