Police Brutality & Racism

This history of Chicago from 1919's Red Summer to the rise and fall of Black Power in the 1960s and 1970s narrates the evolution of racially repressive policing in black neighborhoods as well as how black citizen-activists challenged that repression. By exploring the deeper origins of this toxic system, Balto reveals how modern mass incarceration, built upon racialized police practices, emerged as a fully formed machine of profoundly antiblack subjugation.

Between 1972 and 1991, at least 125 black suspects were tortured by Chicago police officers working under former Police Commander Jon Burge. 400 cases are currently pending investigation and 3-5 new claims are submitted to the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission of Illinois each week. For more than fifty years, police officers who took an oath to protect and serve have instead beaten, electrocuted, suffocated, and raped hundreds--perhaps thousands--of Chicago residents. This book chronicles the history of torture in Chicago, the burgeoning activist movement against police violence, and the American public's complicity in perpetuating torture at home and abroad.

Demonstrates the role of the urban North in shaping views of race and crime in American society. 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 in criminal justice and the social sciences, Khalil Gibran Muhammad reveals the influence such ideas have had on urban development and social policies.

Classic pieces and original essays that provide the reader with a comprehensive, even-handed sense of the theoretical underpinnings, methodological challenges, and existing research necessary to understand the problems associated with racial and ethnic profiling and police bias. 22 essays clearly illustrate that equitable treatment of citizens across racial and ethnic groups by police is one of the most critical components of a successful democracy, and that it is only when agents of social control are viewed as efficient, effective, and legitimate that citizens will comply with the laws that govern their society.

Although Jim Crow laws have been wiped off the books, an astounding percentage of the African American community remains trapped in a subordinate status; much like their grandparents before them. Argues that we have not ended racial caste in America: we have simply redesigned it. By targeting black men and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control, even as it formally adheres to the principle of color blindness.

Understanding Mass Incarceration offers the first comprehensive overview of the incarceration apparatus put in place by the world's largest jailer: the United States. Describes in plain English the many competing theories of criminal justice--from rehabilitation to retribution, from restorative justice to justice reinvestment and illuminates the difference between prisons and jails, probation and parole, laying out key concepts and policies such as the War on Drugs, broken windows policing, three-strikes sentencing, the school-to-prison pipeline, recidivism, and prison privatization.

In the United States, immigration is generally seen as a law and order issue. Amidst increasing anti-immigrant sentiment, unauthorized migrants have been cast as lawbreakers. Governing Immigration Through Crime offers a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the use of crime and punishment to manage undocumented immigrants.Of equal importance, the readings highlight how migrants have managed to actively resist these punitive practices.

Crime and Racial Constructions: Cultural Misinformation about African Americans in Media and Academia focuses on how film images of dangerous, hedonistic blacks have assumed greater significance since blacks protested racial injustice during the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Because these on-screen images of a violent, apolitical, and immoral black underclass find their way into the criminological literature, the book also takes a look at how criminologists use these images to link crime to underclass culture.

Argues that public policy and private prejudice work together to create a possessive investment in whiteness that is responsible for the racialized hierarchies of our society. Whiteness has a cash value: profits from housing secured in discriminatory markets, unequal educational opportunities, insider networks that channel employment opportunities to those who have profited most from past and present discrimination, and intergenerational transfers of inherited wealth that pass on the spoils of discrimination to succeeding generations. 20th anniversary edition provides updated statistics and analyzes anti-immigrant mobilizations, police assaults on Black women, the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Freddie Gray, the legacy of Obama and the emergence of Trump, and the ways in which white fear, fragility, and failure have become drivers of a new ethno-nationalism.

Combines ethics, history, law, and science with a personal narrative to describe how to move beyond the awareness of racism and contribute to making society just and equitable.

Offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation's history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of "race," a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men--bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.

Bryan Stevenson was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending the poor, the wrongly condemned, and women and children trapped in the farthest reaches of our criminal justice system. One of his first cases was that of Walter McMillian, a young man who was sentenced to die for a notorious murder he insisted he didn't commit. The case drew Bryan into a tangle of conspiracy, political machination, and legal brinksmanship--and transformed his understanding of mercy and justice forever. Just Mercy is at once an unforgettable account of an idealistic, gifted young lawyer's coming of age, a moving window into the lives of those he has defended, and an inspiring argument for compassion in the pursuit of true justice.

This book attempts to spark public discussion by revealing the tainted origins of modern policing as a tool of social control. It shows how the expansion of police authority is inconsistent with community empowerment, social justice even public safety. Drawing on groundbreaking research from across the world, and covering virtually every area in the increasingly broad range of police work, Alex Vitale demonstrates how law enforcement has come to exacerbate the very problems it is supposed to solve. E-BOOK FREE from
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