Justice System

Based on exclusive new information, Submerged, a compelling true crime drama, exposes hidden angles of a case that captivated and divided an ordinary American community, tore apart two families, and tested the criminal justice system. Compelled by conscience and curiosity, former Cincinnati Enquirer reporter Janice (Morse) Hisle - who covered the saga of Ryan and Sarah Widmer from the start - returns 10 years later to dig deep to tell the untold story

Since 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has maintained unrivalled control over the country, persisting even in the face of economic calamity, widespread social upheaval, and violence against its own people. Yet the party does not sustain dominance through repressive tactics alone - it pairs this with surprising responsiveness to the public. The Party and the People explores how this paradox has helped the CCP endure for decades, and how this balance has shifted increasingly toward repression under the rule of President Xi Jinping.

More people than ever are getting arrested - usually for petty offenses against laws that rarely used to be enforced. This eye-opening book tells you everything you need to know about how cops operate, the little things that can get you in trouble, and how to stay free from the hungry jaws of the criminal justice system. It is now updated with new and important information on the right of the police to search your car; on guns, knives, and self-defense; and on changes in surveillance methods.

Victor Rios grew up in the ghetto of Oakland, California, in the 1980s and '90s. A former gang member and juvenile delinquent, Rios managed to escape the bleak outcome of many of his friends and earned a PhD at Berkeley and returned to his hometown to study how inner-city young Latino and African American boys develop their sense of self in the midst of crime and intense policing. Punished examines the difficult lives of these young men.

Powell and Silverglate shine a light on the defects of the federal criminal-justice system: overzealous prosecutors, perjury traps, negligent judges, perverse limits on self-defense, vague and overabundant criminal statutes, insufficient requirements for criminal intent, and no accountability for prosecutors. Most important, they provide a much-needed blueprint for reforming the Department of Justice and the criminal-justice system, including actions an average citizen can take to help restore justice.

In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson insisted that "the policeman is the frontline soldier in our war against crime", and police forces, arms makers, policy makers, and crime experts heeded this call to arms, bringing weapons and practices from the arena of war back home. The Punitive Turn in American Life offers a political and cultural history of the ways in which punishment and surveillance have moved to the center of American life and become imbued with militarized language and policies.

Only 30 years ago, rape within marriage was not a crime, Judges saw rape victims as complicit for wearing short skirts; teenage runaways were groomed, pimped and then arrested as ‘common prostitutes’, and harassment, stalking, forced marriage and honour-based violence were not defined or recognised as separate offences in law. Since then there have been important legislative reforms but the law is only as good as those who enforce it. Telling the stories of a series of ground-breaking cases, Harriet Wistrich illustrates how far misogyny is baked into our justice system.

Crimes and violations of the law require punishment, and our legal system is set up to punish, but what if the system was recalibrated to also weigh grounds for forgiveness? What if something like bankruptcy - a fresh start for debtors - were available to people convicted of crimes? Martha Minow explores the complicated intersection of the law, justice, and forgiveness, asking whether the law should encourage people to forgive, and when courts, public officials, and specific laws should forgive.

The US has the largest criminal justice system in the world. Because they spend enough time in prison to disrupt their connections to their families and their communities, they are not prepared for the difficult and often life-threatening process of reentry. As a result, the percentage of these people who return to a life of crime and additional prison time escalates each year. Beyond Bars is the most current, practical, and comprehensive guide for ex-convicts and their families about managing a successful reentry into the community.

A significant element of the justice system is dedicated to finding those on the run, and the most-wanted posters and true-crime television shows have made fugitives seemingly ubiquitous figures of fear and fascination for the public. In On the Lam, Jerry Clark and Ed Palattella trace the history of fugitives in the United States by looking at the characters - real and fictional - who have played the roles of the hunter and the hunted. They also examine the origins of the bail system and other legal tools, such as most-wanted programs, that are designed to guard against flight.

The revolving door for convicted, violent felons has to stop. Each year, more and more and more violent felons are constantly chewed up and spit back out into our society again and again, in no way rehabilitated, and carrying a grudge on their shoulders for being locked up to begin with. They are like a human time bomb, just waiting to explode, and won't hesitate to take as many innocent victims as they can down with them. Why? Because our current judicial system is a joke. But it can change - if we speak out.

Jeffrey loved fire. Since he was a little boy, he would see fire trucks racing down the street with their lights flashing and sirens blaring and he'd hop on his bike and chase them down and watch the fire burn. He would sit there on his bike and smile as he took it all in, and wished he, himself, could have been involved in their misery. To this day, nobody really knows where Jeffrey went wrong, but wrong he went, and unfortunately, innocent people went down with him. One of those innocents was a beautiful young girl named Jill Slater.

Vernell LaQuan Banks and Justyce McAllister grew up a block apart in the Southwest Atlanta neighborhood of Wynwood Heights. Years later, though, Justyce walks the illustrious halls of Yale University...and Quan sits behind bars at the Fulton Regional Youth Detention Center. Through a series of flashbacks, vignettes, and letters to Justyce - the protagonist of Dear Martin - Quan's story takes form.

If someone had told me in 2008 that the single most time-consuming issue facing me as one of the newest of America’s three thousand-and-eighty-one sheriffs would be mental health, I would have laughed. I was the SWAT team leader. I was a drug education officer on patrol and a street-level narcotics interdiction officer for a larger (by Iowa standards) sheriff’s office. I would do the occasional court-ordered, emergency mental health committal and the random transport from one health care facility to another mental health facility on a judge’s order from time to time.

Indigenous Justice is Book 10 in the Durvile True Cases series. In the spirit of truth and reconciliation and respectful of Indigenous cultural integrity, judges, lawyers, and law enforcement officers write about working with First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Peoples through their trials and tribulations with the criminal justice system. The stories are a mix of previously published essays from the True Cases anthologies with an equal number of new chapters by legal and law enforcement professionals.

Missoula by Jon Krakauer is a close examination of the cause and effect of a series of alleged sexual assaults in a Montana college town. Missoula is the second-largest city in Montana, and the Missoula-based University of Montana (UM) Grizzlies football team is a source of significant local pride. In December 2010 a scandal began in which four members of the football team were accused of gang rape but were not charged with a crime.

From the bestselling and critically acclaimed author of The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace comes “an eye-opening, fully humanizing, deeply affecting look at the often-misunderstood juvenile justice system and its inhabitants—young people of earnestness, disappointment, hope, and resilience” (Booklist, starred review).

The United States incarcerates more of its residents than any other nation. Though home to five percent of the global population, the United States has nearly 25 percent of the world’s prisoners - a total of over two million people. This number continues to steadily rise. Over the past 40 years, the number of people behind bars in the United States has increased by 500 percent.

The American legal system changed dramatically when the OJ Simpson trial became a television-ratings bonanza. Now it's all crime, all the time, from tabloid news to police procedurals. Americans now know more about the criminal justice system than ever before. Or do they?

The sad truth is that the US criminal justice system doesn’t work for many different reasons - from our overflowing prisons, to the destructive war on drugs and disproportionate effect on minority communities, to conflicts between police and citizens and problems with prosecutors and the courts. In Fixing the US Criminal Justice System, author Paul Brakke provides an in-depth look from a conservative perspective at the many flaws in the system and how to fix them.