This concise and engaging book presents a critical perspective on the correctional system and the process of incarceration in the United States. Fleury-Steiner and Longazel emphasize the magnitude of mass imprisonment in the United States, especially of people of color, not by objective statistics and trends, but by the voices and lived experiences of individuals who live their harsh conditions on a daily basis. This is an ideal book for courses in corrections, social problems, criminology, and prisoner re-entry.

Torture is indisputably abhorrent. Why, you might ask, would you even want to think or read about torture? That is a very good question, and one this book addresses in a compelling and enlightening way. Torture is a very important issue, not least because millions of people around the world have been subjected to this odious practice and many are enduring torture right now as you read these words.

Higher education is more important than ever, for individual success and for national economic growth. And yet higher education in the United States is in crisis: public funding has been in free fall; tuition has skyrocketed making colleges and universities less accessible; basic structures such as tenure are under assault. The Future of Higher Education analyzes the crisis in higher education, describing how a dominant neo-liberal political ideology has significantly changed the U.S. system of higher education. The book examines the contemporary landscape of higher education institutions...

This short text, ideal for Social Problems and Criminal Justice courses, examines the American prison system, its conditions, and its impact on society. Wehr and Aseltine define the prison industrial complex and explain how the current prison system is a contemporary social problem. They conclude by using California as a case study, and propose alternatives and alterations to the prison system.

Due process protections are among the most important Constitutional protections in the United States, yet they do not apply to non-citizens facing detention and deportation. Due Process Denied describes the consequences of this lack of due process through the stories of deportees and detainees. People who have lived nearly all of their lives in the United States have been detained and deported for minor crimes, without regard for constitutional limits on disproportionate punishment. The court's insistence that deportation is not punishment does not align with the experiences of...

The United States has been involved in many wars, sometimes for noble causes like defeating Nazism, and, at other times, it has compromised its own ideals, leading to a lot of soul searching and regrets. Some wars are celebrated as glorious achievements (World War II), some are 'forgotten' (Korea), and some are 'ignored' (Afghanistan). The current wars in the Middle East represent a complex interplay of motivations, challenges, and threats to America's role as the world's democratic leadership. In the case of Afghanistan, we find that during the Cold War the US defense and intelligence...

The book reviews the science of climate change and explains why it is one of the most difficult problems humanity has ever tackled. Climate change is a "wicked" problem bound up with problems of population growth, environmental degradation, and world problems of growing social and economic inequality. The book explores the politicization of the topic, the polarization of opinion, and the reasons why, for some, science has become just another ideology to be contested. How do humans assess risk? Why are they are so bad at focusing on the future? How can we solve the problem of climate...

Like any other valued resource, emotions are distributed unequally. Moreover, emotions are a generalized resource because they give people the confidence, or lack of confidence, to secure additional types of resources. Thus, this distribution of emotions roughly corresponds to the shares of others kinds of resources that members of various social classes possess. The level of positive and negative emotional energy evident among members of different social classes has large consequences for the viability of human societies. When a large majority of members in diverse social classes have...

How have new social media altered how individuals present themselves? What dilemmas have they introduced? In the age of Facebook, Twitter and other forms of instant communication, individuals are losing (or relinquishing) control over their personal information Trottier provides a trenchant analysis of the paradoxes of privacy and the presentation of self in the early 21st century. This book is ideal for courses in Sociology, Media Studies and Communication.

This short, accessible text takes on the global and pervasive phenomenon of hate crimes and hypothesizes potential fixes. Iganski and Levin detail evidence of hate violence in the 21^st century, particularly religious hatred, ethnic, racial and xenophobic hatred, violence on the basis of sexual orientation and sexual identity, disablist violence, and violence against women, using the most recently published data from cross-national surveys produced by international organizations. This is an ideal addition to any course on social problems, violence, or hate crimes.