A hilarious, entertaining, and illuminating compendium of the most bizarre ways you might become a federal criminal in America—from mailing a mongoose to selling Swiss cheese without enough holes—written and illustrated by the creator of the wildly popular @CrimeADay Twitter account. Have you ever clogged a toilet in a national forest? That could get you six months in federal prison. Written a letter to a pirate? You might be looking at three years in the slammer. Leaving the country with too many nickels, drinking a beer on a bicycle in a national park, or importing a pregnant polar bear are all very real crimes, and this riotously funny, ridiculously entertaining, and fully illustrated book shows how just about anyone can become—or may already be—a federal criminal. Whether you’re a criminal defense lawyer or just a self-taught expert in outrageous offenses, How to Become a Federal Criminal is your wonderfully weird window into a criminally overlooked sector of American government.

In this book Bryan Reynolds argues that early modern England experienced a sociocultural phenomenon, unprecedented in English history, which has been largely overlooked by historians and critics. Beginning in the 1520s, a distinct "criminal culture" of beggars, vagabonds, confidence tricksters, prostitutes, and gypsies emerged and flourished. This community defined itself through its criminal conduct and dissident thought and was, in turn,officially defined by and against the dominant conceptions of English cultural normality. Examining plays, popular pamphlets, laws, poems, and scholarly work from the period, Reynolds demonstrates that this criminal culture, though diverse, was united by its own ideology, language, and aesthetic. Using his transversal theory, he shows how the enduring presence of this criminal culture markedly influenced the mainstream culture's aesthetic sensibilities, socioeconomic organization, and systems of belief. He maps the effects of the public theater's transformative force of transversality, such as through the criminality represented by Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and Dekker, on both Elizabethan and Jacobean society and the scholarship devoted to it.

This book consists of a fundamental deconstruction and reconstruction of the key concepts of Criminology and The Sociology of Law, providing a coherent expression of the relationships between these newly constructed concepts and thus a radically new statement of the relationship between society, crime and the law.

On Dec. 17, 2004, Warren Lipka, Spencer Reinhard, Eric Borsuk and Charles Allen II visited the Special Collections Library at Transylvania University in disguise, under the guise of viewing some of the library's most valuable items, including a first edition of Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species." Once in the room, the men attacked a librarian with a taser, tied her hands and feet and blindfolded her. The men took the Darwin book, sketches by John James Audubon and other materials they then tried to sell in New York City. The auction house became suspicious, the four men were arrested in February 2005, and each was sentenced to seven years in prison. (Goodreads.com).

Gary Sahlin was a good cop, but a bad criminal. His childhood dream was to become a police officer. He accomplished this dream after serving honorably in the United States Navy. Then, after a series of unfortunate events, and some very poor decisions, he ended up in the federal prison system serving a twenty-year sentence for a bank robbery. Instead of wallowing in depression with the way his life turned out he decided to turn a negative situation into a positive one. Navigating through the justice system as an ex-cop wasn't always easy, but he made it and he came out a much better person. He is now sharing his story about living on both sides of the law in an entertaining, informative and compelling new book titled: Good Cop, Bad Criminal: Becoming a Cop, a Criminal and Life on Both Sides of the Law.

"A hilarious, entertaining, and illuminating compendium of the most bizarre ways you might become a federal criminal in America--from mailing a mongoose to selling Swiss cheese without enough holes..."--

This book consists of a fundamental deconstruction and reconstruction of the key concepts of Criminology and The Sociology of Law, providing a coherent expression of the relationships between these newly constructed concepts and thus a radically new statement of the relationship between society, crime and the law.