Galax, a small Virginia town at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, was one of the first places that Henry H. Brownstein, Timothy M. Mulcahy, and Johannes Huessy visited for their study of the social dynamics of methamphetamine markets--and what they found changed everything. They had begun by thinking of methamphetamine markets as primarily small-scale mom-and-pop businesses operated by individual cooks who served local users--generally stymied by ever more strenuous laws. But what they found was a thriving and complex transnational industry. And this reality was repeated in towns and...

When a woman leaves prison, she enters a world of competing messages and conflicting advice. Staff from prison, friends, family members, workers at halfway houses and treatment programs all have something to say about who she is, who she should be, and what she should do. The Ex-Prisoner's Dilemma offers an in-depth, firsthand look at how the former prisoner manages messages about returning to the community. Over the course of a year, Andrea Leverentz conducted repeated interviews with forty-nine women as they adjusted to life outside of prison and worked to construct new ideas of themselves...

Shining new light on early American prison literature from its origins in last words, dying warnings, and gallows literature to its later works of autobiography, expose, and imaginative literature "Reading Prisoners"weaves together insights about the rise of the early American penitentiary, the history of early American literacy instruction, and the transformation of crime writing in the long eighteenth century.
Looking first at colonial America an era often said to devalue jailhouse literacy Jodi Schorb reveals that in fact this era launched the literate prisoner into public prominence....

The United States imprisons more of its citizens than any other nation in the world. To be sentenced to prison is to face systematic violence, humiliation, and, perhaps worst of all, separation from family and community. It is, to borrow Orlando Patterson's term for the utter isolation of slavery, to suffer "social death." In Prison and Social Death, Joshua Price exposes the unexamined cost that prisoners pay while incarcerated and after release, drawing upon hundreds of often harrowing interviews conducted with people in prison, parolees, and their families.
Price argues that...

Today there are approximately fifty thousand prisoners in American prisons serving life without parole, having been found guilty of crimes ranging from murder and rape to burglary, carjacking, and drug offences. In The Forgotten Men, criminologist Margaret E. Leigey provides an insightful account of a group of aging inmates imprisoned for at least twenty years, with virtually no chance of release. These men make up one of the most marginalized segments of the contemporary U.S. prison population. Considered too dangerous for rehabilitation, ignored by prison administrators, and...

Based on five years of ethnography, archival research, census data analysis, and interviews, Police, Power, and the Production of Racial Boundaries reveals how the LAPD, city prosecutors, and business owners struggled to control who should be considered "dangerous" and how they should be policed in Los Angeles. Sociologist Ana Muniz shows how these influential groups used policies and everyday procedures to criminalize behaviors commonly associated with blacks and Latinos and to promote an exceedingly aggressive form of policing.

Muniz illuminates the degree to which the...

The 1990s witnessed a flurry of legislative initiatives--most notably, "Megan's Law"--designed to control a population of sex offenders (child abusers) widely reviled as sick, evil, and incurable. In Sex Offenders, Stigma, and Social Control, Diana Rickard provides the reader with an in-depth view of six such men, exploring how they manage to cope with their highly stigmatized role as social outcasts. The six men discussed in the book are typical convicted sex offenders--neither serial pedophiles nor individuals convicted of the type of brutal act that looms large in public perceptions...

Galax, a small Virginia town at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, was one of the first places that Henry H. Brownstein, Timothy M. Mulcahy, and Johannes Huessy visited for their study of the social dynamics of methamphetamine markets--and what they found changed everything. They had begun by thinking of methamphetamine markets as primarily small-scale mom-and-pop businesses operated by individual cooks who served local users. But what they found was a thriving and complex transnational industry.

The Methamphetamine Industry in America describes the reality that this...

After decades of the American "war on drugs" and relentless prison expansion, political officials are finally challenging mass incarceration. Many point to an apparently promising solution to reduce the prison population: addiction treatment.

In Addicted to Rehab, Bard College sociologist Allison McKim gives an in-depth and innovative ethnographic account of two such rehab programs for women, one located in the criminal justice system and one located in the private healthcare system--two very different ways of defining and treating addiction. McKim's book shows how...

In Everyday Desistance, Laura Abrams and Diane J. Terry examine the lives of young people who spent considerable time in and out of correctional institutions as adolescents. These formerly incarcerated youth often struggle with the onset of adult responsibilities at a much earlier age than their more privileged counterparts. In the context of urban Los Angeles, with a large-scale gang culture and diminished employment prospects, further involvement in crime appears almost inevitable. Yet, as Abrams and Terry point out, these formerly imprisoned youth are often quite resilient and can...