In her exciting new book, Marisol LeBrón traces the rise of punitive governance in Puerto Rico over the course of the twentieth century and up to the present. Punitive governance emerged as a way for the Puerto Rican state to manage the deep and ongoing crises stemming from the archipelago’s incorporation into the United States as a colonial territory. A structuring component of everyday life for many Puerto Ricans, police power has reinforced social inequality and worsened conditions of vulnerability in marginalized communities. This book provides powerful examples of how Puerto Ricans negotiate and resist their subjection to increased levels of segregation, criminalization, discrimination, and harm. Policing Life and Death shows how Puerto Ricans are actively rejecting punitive solutions and working toward alternative understandings of safety and a more just future.
This comprehensive, detailed account explores crime and punishment throughout the world through the eyes of leading experts, local authors and scholars, and government officials. It is a subject as old as civil society, yet one that still fuels debate. Now the many and varied aspects of that subject are brought together in the four-volume Crime and Punishment around the World. This unprecedented work provides descriptions of crimes—and the justice systems that define and punish them—in more than 200 nations, principalities, and dependencies. Each chapter examines the historical, political, and cultural background, as well as the basic organization of the subject state's legal and criminal justice system. It also reports on the types and levels of crime, the processes leading to the finding of guilt, the rights of the accused, alternatives to going to trial, how suspects are prosecuted for their crimes, and the techniques and conditions of typical punishments employed. Comprising a study that is at once extraordinarily comprehensive and minutely detailed, the essays collected here showcase the variety and the universality of crime and punishment the world over.
"An extensive overview of the drug trade in the Americas and its impact on politics, economics, and society throughout the region. . . . Highly recommended."--Choice "A first-rate update on the state of the long-fought hemispheric 'war on drugs.' It is particularly timely, as the perception that the war is lost and needs to be changed has never been stronger in Latin and North America."--Paul Gootenberg, author of Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug "A must-read volume for policy makers, concerned citizens, and students alike in the current search for new approaches to forty-year-old policies largely considered to have failed."--David Scott Palmer, coauthor of Power, Institutions, and Leadership in War and Peace "A very useful primer for anyone trying to keep up with the ever-evolving relationship between drug enforcement and drug trafficking."--Peter Andreas, author of Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America In 1971, Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs. Despite foreign policy efforts and attempts to combat supply lines, the United States has been for decades, and remains today, the largest single consumer market for illicit drugs on the planet. This volume argues that the war on drugs has been ineffective at best and, at worst, has been highly detrimental to many countries. Leading experts in the fields of public health, political science, and national security analyze how U.S. policies have affected the internal dynamics of Mexico, Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Central America, and the Caribbean islands. Together, they present a comprehensive overview of the major trends in drug trafficking and organized crime in the early twenty-first century. In addition, the editors and contributors identify emerging issues and propose several policy options to address them. This accessible and expansive volume provides a framework for understanding the limits and liabilities in the U.S.-championed war on drugs throughout the Americas.
As therapists are increasingly held legally responsible for failing to predict their client's violent behaviour, the pressure to know and forecast behaviour - never the chosen domain of clinicians - has risen. Worries about potential law suits invade the therapeutic setting. The volume enables therapists to master the proven signs of potentially harmful acts, so that they can get back to the work they were trained for: helping people.
This book describes various types and sources of crime and explanatory data available to study variation in crime across nations. Problems with the data and appropriate methods for adjusting and analyzing the data are described. A thorough review of theories and past cross-national crime research is included. This book intends to facilitate and stimulate quality cross-national crime research. The book notes past misuse of data, such as using homicide rates unadjusted for attempts, as well as inconsistencies and contradictions in past research. The major theories and concepts which have been used to explain crime across nations are described in detail and critiqued. Inconsistencies and contradictions in results are noted, and avenues for future research are offered. Methodological techniques, issues, and problems involved in analysis are also presented and new approaches to dealing with the resulting data are projected. Extensive appendixes give information and contacts to researchers, providing a network for research in cross-national crime heretofore lacking.
This compilation of works highlights the historical, economic, and human dynamics behind youth offending in the nations of the West Indies. Youth Crime and Violence in the Caribbean offers insights into the slow rate of system change yet leaves readers with an optimistic picture of possibilities. Recent events in Haiti and neighboring Venezuela demonstrate how quickly dynamics in the Caribbean area can shift if crime is not addressed and people increasingly disengage from systems in a manner that allows despots to rise to power. When this happens, the impacts are not localized.
"Raising the Living Dead is a new history of Puerto Rico's carceral rehabilitation system in the middle decades of the twentieth century that brings to life the interactions of incarcerated people, their wider social networks, and health care professionals. The book addresses key issues in the history of prisons and the histories of medicine and belief, including how prisoners' different racial, class, and cultural identities shaped their incarceration and how professionals living in a colonial society dealt with the challenge of rehabilitating prisoners for citizenship. The main idea of the book is that, in the region, multiple communities of care came together both inside and outside of prisons to imagine and imperfectly enact solution-oriented cultures of rehabilitation. Specifically, Alberto Ortiz Díaz argues that scientific and humanistic approaches to well-being were deliberately fused to raise the "living dead" (an expression that reemerged in the modern Caribbean to refer to prisoners). These reform groups sought to raise incarcerated people physically, mentally, socially, spiritually, and civically. The book is based on deep, original archival research into the Oso Blanco (White Bear) penitentiary in Puerto Rico, yet it situates its study within Puerto Rico's broader carceral archipelago and other Caribbean prisons. The agents of this history include not only physical health professionals, but also their mental health counterparts (psychologists and psychiatrists), social workers, spiritual and religious practitioners, and, of course, the prisoners and their families. By following all these groups and emphasizing the interpersonal exercise of power, Ortiz Díaz is able to tell a story that goes beyond structural and social control debates. Raising the Living Dead is not just about convicts, their immediate interlocutors, and their contexts, however, but about how together these open a window into the history of social uplift projects within the (neo)colonial societies of the Caribbean. There is no book like this in Caribbean historiography and few examine these themes in the larger literature on the history of prisons"--
