New Books in Policing, Incarceration, and Reform

Mar 02 2025 366 ep. 55 mins 77
New Books in Policing, Incarceration, and Reform Podcast artwork

Interviews with scholars of policing, incarceration and reform about their new books

  Arts  Government  Science
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Asim Qureshi and Walaa Quisay, "When Only God Can See: The Faith of Muslim Political Prisoners" (Pluto Press, 2024)

Mar 02 2025 60 mins  
When Only God Can See: The Faith of Muslim Political Prisoners (Pluto Press, 2024), uncovers the unique experiences of Muslim political prisoners held in Egypt and under US custody at Guantanamo Bay and other detention black sites. This groundbreaking book explores the intricate interplay between their religious beliefs, practices of ritual purity, prayer, and modes of resistance i

Timothy P. R. Weaver, "Inequality, Crime, and Resistance in New York City" (Temple UP, 2025)

Mar 01 2025 29 mins  
Looking closely at New York City's political development since the 1970s, three "political orders"--conservativism, neoliberalism, and egalitarianism--emerged. In Inequality, Crime, and Resistance in New York City, Timothy Weaver argues that the intercurrent impact of these orders has created a constant battle for power. Weaver brings these clashes to the fore by showing how New Yo

Joshua Barker, "State of Fear: Policing a Postcolonial City" (Duke UP, 2024)

Feb 16 2025 56 mins  
The relationship between fear people experience in their lives and the government often informs key questions about the rule of law and justice. In nations where the rule of law is unevenly applied, interpreting the people involved in its enforcement allows for contextualized understanding about why that unevenness occurs and is perpetuated. Joshua Barker’s State of Fear: Policin

Michael Rembis, "Writing Mad Lives in the Age of the Asylum" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Feb 09 2025 49 mins  
The asylum--at once a place of refuge, incarceration, and abuse--touched the lives of many Americans living between 1830 and 1950. What began as a few scattered institutions in the mid-eighteenth century grew to 579 public and private asylums by the 1940s. About one out of every 280 Americans was an inmate in an asylum at an annual cost to taxpayers of approximately $200 million. U

Patricia A. Roos, "Surviving Alex: A Mother's Story of Love, Loss, and Addiction" (Rutgers UP, 2024)

Feb 03 2025 76 mins  
In 2015, Patricia Roos’s twenty-five-year-old son Alex died of a heroin overdose. Turning her grief into action, Roos, a professor of sociology at Rutgers University, began to research the social factors and institutional failures that contributed to his death. Surviving Alex: A Mother's Story of Love, Loss, and Addiction (Rutgers UP, 2024) tells her moving story—and argues for

Blessin Adams, "Thou Savage Woman: Female Killers in Early Modern Britain" (HarperCollins, 2025)

Feb 02 2025 32 mins  
Early Modern Britain was awash with pamphlets, ballads, woodcuts broadcasting bloodthirsty tales of traitorous wives, greedy mistresses, cunning female poisoning lacing the supper with deadly substances; of child killers and spiteful witches, stories of women wholly and unnaturally wicked. These were printed or sung, tacked the walls of alehouses, sold in the streets for pennies an

Robin Bernstein, "Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

Jan 27 2025 43 mins  
In Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit (U Chicago Press, 2024), Robin Bernstein tells the story of an Afro-Native teenager named William Freeman who was convicted of a horse theft he insisted he did not commit and sentenced to five years of hard labor in Auburn’s prison. Incensed at being forced to work without pay, Freeman demanded

Valentina N. Glajar, "The Secret Police Dossier of Herta Müller: A "File Story" of Cold War Surveillance" (Camden House, 2023)

Jan 17 2025 100 mins  
"Herta Müller should share her Nobel with the Securitate." This comment by a former officer in the Romanian secret police, or Securitate, was in reaction to hearing that Müller, a German writer originally from Romania, had won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature. Communist Romania's infamous secret police was indeed a protagonist in Müller's work, though an undesired and dreaded

David Lyon, "Surveillance: A Very Short Introduction" (Oxford UP, 2024)

Jan 08 2025 59 mins  
Surveillance is everywhere today, generating data about our purchasing, political, and personal preferences. Surveillance: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2024) shows how surveillance makes people visible and affects their lives, considers the technologies involved and how it grew to its present size and prevalence, and explores the pressing ethical questions su

Adam Elliott-Cooper, "Black Resistance to British Policing" (Manchester UP, 2021)

Jan 07 2025 62 mins  
As police racism unsettles Britain's tolerant self-image, Black Resistance to British Policing (Manchester UP, 2021) details the activism that made movements like Black Lives Matter possible. Adam Elliott-Cooper analyses racism beyond prejudice and the interpersonal - arguing that black resistance confronts a global system of racial classification, exploitation and violence. Imperi