ETHNICITY AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE IN THE ERA OF MASS INCARCERATION: A Critical Reader on the Latino Experience is designed as a Latino reader in criminal justice, covering a much broader spectrum of the Latino experience in criminal justice and society, while giving readers a broad overview of the Latino experience in a single book. Considering the shifting trends in demographics and the current state of the criminal justice system, along with the current political “climate,” this book is timely and of critical significance for the academic, political, and social arena. The authors report sound evidence that testifies to a historical legacy of violence, brutality, manipulation, oppression, marginalization, prejudice, discrimination, power, and control, and to white America’s continued fear about ethnic and racial minorities, a movement that continues in the twenty-first century—as we have been witnessing during the 2015-2016 presidential race, highly charged with anti-immigrant and anti-Mexican political rhetoric. A central objective of this book is to demystify and expose the ways in which ideas of ethnicity, race, gender, and class uphold the functioning and “legitimacy” of the criminal justice system. In this mission, rather than attempting to develop a single explanation for the Latino experience in policing, the courts, and the penal system, this book presents a variety of studies and perspectives that illustrate alternative ways of interpreting crime, punishment, safety, equality, and justice. The findings reveal that race, ethnicity, gender, class, and several other variables continue to play a significant role in the legal decision-making process. With the social control (from police brutality to immigration) discourse reaching unprecedented levels, the book will have broad appeal for students, police officers, advocates/activists, attorneys, the media, and the general public.

Criminal justice practices such as policing and imprisonment are integral to the creation of racialized experiences in U.S. society. Race as an important category of difference, however, did not arise here with the criminal justice system but rather with the advent of European colonial conquest and the birth of the U.S. racial state. Race and Crime examines how race became a defining feature of the system and why mass incarceration emerged as a new racial management strategy. This book reviews the history of race and criminology and explores the impact of racist colonial legacies on the organization of criminal justice institutions. Using a macrostructural perspective, students will learn to contextualize issues of race, crime, and criminal justice. Topics include: How “coloniality” explains the practices that reproduce racial hierarchies The birth of social science and social programs from the legacies of racial science The defining role of geography and geographical conquest in the continuation of mass incarceration The emergence of the logics of crime control, the War on Drugs, the redefinition of federal law enforcement, and the reallocation of state resources toward prison building, policing, and incarceration How policing, courts, and punishment perpetuate the colonial order through their institutional structures and policies Race and Crime will help students understand how everyday practices of punishment and surveillance are employed in and through the police, courts, and community to create and shape the geographies of injustice in the United States today.

The author reports on an innovative field experiment on the difficulties facing ex-offenders in the job market. Pairs of young men were matched up, randomly assigned criminal records, and then sent on hundreds of real job searches throughout the city of Milwaukee. Applicants were attractive, articulate, and capable - yet ex-offenders received less than half the call-backs of the equally qualified applicants without criminal backgrounds. Young black men, meanwhile, paid a particularly high price for the widespread assumptions about black criminality: black applicants with clean records fared no better in their job searches than white men just out of prison. Such barriers to legitimate work, the author contends, are an important reason that many ex-prisoners soon find themselves back in the realm of poverty, underground employment, and crime that led them to prison in the first place.

Argues that the War on Drugs and policies that deny convicted felons equal access to employment, housing, education and public benefits create a permanent under-caste based largely on race. Reprint. 12,500 first printing.

In this revised edition of his seminal book on race, class, and the criminal justice system, Marc Mauer, executive director of one of the United States leading criminal justice reform organizations, offers the most up-to-date look available at three decades of prison expansion in America. Including newly written material on recent developments under the Bush administration and updated statistics, graphs, and charts throughout, the book tells the tragic story of runaway growth in the number of prisons and jails and the overreliance on imprisonment to stem problems of economic and social development. Called ''sober and nuanced by Publishers Weekly, Race to Incarcerate documents the enormous financial and human toll of the ''get tough movement, and argues for more humane - and productive - alternatives.

A spatial view of punishment -- The urban model -- Small cities and mass incarceration -- Social services beyond the city : isolation and regional inequity -- Race and communities of pervasive incarceration -- Punishing places -- Beyond punishing places : a research and reform agenda -- Appendix : data and methodology.

This timely, readable text offers an authoritative and balanced analysis of how racially driven policies in America impact post release education as a leading pathway to social reintegration. Compelling research findings from an assemblage of college faculty, seasoned administrators, and criminal justice professionals are interwoven with first-person narratives from formerly incarcerated individuals. This book takes full advantage of its interdisciplinary mixture of voices and positionality to build its argument upon a three-part framework from Critical Race Theory (CRT). It convincingly utilizes the tools of academic research, counterstories, and counterspaces to make a persuasive case that the intersection of race, the criminal justice system, and education represent one of the greatest civil rights issues of our time. Part 1, “Context, Critical Race Theory and College Re-Entry,” explores the historical and current dynamics of these uniquely American intersections while linking Critical Race Theory with the field of re-entry and offering serious analysis of post incarceration and education initiatives. Interest convergence, white privilege, and writing from returning citizens as a way of “coming to voice” are also explored in this section. Part 2, “Counterstories,” offers case, comparative case, and phenomenological studies that include embedded quotations with first-person narratives contributed from formerly incarcerated students and graduates. This section also includes an honest and gripping analytic auto-ethnography from the book’s co-editor who readily reveals his experiences as both a faculty member and formerly incarcerated individual. Other highlighted topics include the issues of stigma, overcoming obstacles in the classroom, and the unique problems for returning citizens when acclimating to college culture. Combining qualitative research and descriptions of successful programs Part 3,“Counterspaces,” explores the dynamics of creating places within programs and classrooms that support physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual engagement for and with the formerly incarcerated through learner-centered, culturally sensitive, and racially explicit pedagogy. This book is designed to be a most welcome addition to any serious academic discussion focusing upon institutionalized racism and education’s use as a tool in reversing the mass incarceration of people of color in America.