Critical Perspectives for Law Teaching: Criminal Law

Since the 1980s prison construction and incarceration rates in the U.S. have been rising exponentially, evoking huge public concern about their proliferation, their recent privatisation and their promise of enormous profits. But these prisons house hugely disproportionate numbers of people of colour, betraying the racism embedded in the system, while studies show that increasing prison sentences has had no effect on crime. Here, esteemed civil rights activist Angela Davis lays bare the situation and argues for a radical rethinking of our rehabilitation programmes.

Native Americans are disproportionately represented as offenders in the U.S. criminal justice system, particularly in the southwestern and north-central regions. However, until recently there was little investigation into the reasons for their over-representation. Furthermore, there has been little acknowledgment of the positive contributions of Native Americans to the criminal justice system--in rehabilitating offenders, aiding victims, and supporting service providers. This book offers a valuable and contemporary overview of how the American criminal justice system impacts Native Americans on both sides of the law. Each of the fourteen chapters of Criminal Justice in Native America was commissioned specifically for this volume. Contributors--many of whom are Native Americans--rank among the top scholars in their fields. Some of the chapters treat broad subjects, including crime, police, courts, victimization, corrections, and jurisdiction. Others delve into more specific topics, including hate crimes against Native Americans, state-corporate crimes against Native Americans, tribal peacemaking, and cultural stresses of police officers. Separate chapters are devoted to women and juveniles. The well-known scholar Marianne Nielsen provides a context-setting introduction, in which she addresses the history of the legal treatment of Native Americans in the United States as well as a provocative conclusion that details important issues for current and future research in Native American criminal justice studies. Intended to introduce students to the substantive concerns of a range of disciplines that contribute to Native American Studies--among them, criminal justice and criminology, law, sociology, and anthropology--Criminal Justice in Native America will interest all readers who are concerned about relationships between Native peoples and prevailing criminal justice systems.

See chapters on critical race theory and criminal procedure & critical race theory and criminal law and sentencing

Many feminists grapple with the problem of hyper-incarceration in the United States, and yet commentators on gender crime continue to assert that criminal law is not tough enough. This punitive impulse, prominent legal scholar Aya Gruber argues, is dangerous and counterproductive. In their quest to secure women's protection from domestic violence and rape, American feminists have become soldiers in the war on crime by emphasizing white female victimhood, expanding the power of police and prosecutors, touting the problem-solving power of incarceration, and diverting resources toward law enforcement and away from marginalized communities. Deploying vivid cases and unflinching analysis, The Feminist War on Crime documents the failure of the state to combat sexual and domestic violence through law and punishment. Zero-tolerance anti-violence law and policy tend to make women less safe and more fragile. Mandatory arrests, no-drop prosecutions, forced separation, and incarceration embroil poor women of color in a criminal justice system that is historically hostile to them. This carceral approach exacerbates social inequalities by diverting more power and resources toward a fundamentally flawed criminal justice system, further harming victims, perpetrators, and communities alike. In order to reverse this troubling course, Gruber contends that we must abandon the conventional feminist wisdom, fight violence against women without reinforcing the American prison state, and use criminalization as a technique of last--not first--resort. 

The founder of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama recounts his experiences as a lawyer working to assist those desperately in need, reflecting on his pursuit of the ideal of compassion in American justice.

A tenth-anniversary edition of the iconic bestseller'"one of the most influential books of the 20 years," according to the Chronicle of Higher Education'with a new preface by the author Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Most important of all, it has spawned a whole generation of criminal justice reform activists and organizations motivated by Michelle Alexander's unforgettable argument that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." As the Birmingham News proclaimed, it is "undoubtedly the most important book published in this century about the U.S." Now, ten years after it was first published, The New Press is proud to issue a tenth-anniversary edition with a new preface by Michelle Alexander that discusses the impact the book has had and the state of the criminal justice reform movement today.

A groundbreaking work that turns a "queer eye" on the criminal legal system, and winner of the2011 PASS (Prevention for a Safer Society) Award from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency Drawing on years of research, activism, and legal advocacy, Queer (In)Justice is a searing examination of queer experiences--as "suspects," defendants, prisoners, and survivors of crime. The authors unpack queer criminal archetypes--like "gleeful gay killers," "lethal lesbians," "disease spreaders," and "deceptive gender benders"--to illustrate the punishment of queer expression, regardless of whether a crime was ever committed. Tracing stories from the streets to the bench to behind prison bars, the authors prove that the policing of sex and gender both bolsters and reinforces racial and gender inequalities. A groundbreaking work that turns a "queer eye" on the criminal legal system, Queer (In)Justice illuminates and challenges the many ways in which queer lives are criminalized, policed, and punished.