Drawing on revealing, in-depth interviews, Cecilia Menjívar investigates the role that violence plays in the lives of Ladina women in eastern Guatemala, a little-visited and little-studied region. While much has been written on the subject of political violence in Guatemala, Menjívar turns to a different form of suffering—the violence embedded in institutions and in everyday life so familiar and routine that it is often not recognized as such. Rather than painting Guatemala (or even Latin...
Combining extensive interviews with his own experience as an inmate, John Irwin constructs a powerful and graphic description of the big-city jail. Unlike prisons, which incarcerate convicted felons, jails primarily confine arrested persons not yet charged or convicted of any serious crime. Irwin argues that rather than controlling the disreputable, jail disorients and degrades these people, indoctrinating new recruits to the rabble class. In a forceful conclusion, Irwin addresses the issue of...
The United States has poured over a billion dollars into a network of interagency intelligence centers called “fusion centers.” These centers were ostensibly set up to prevent terrorism, but politicians, the press, and policy advocates have criticized them for failing on this account. So why do these security systems persist? <I>Pacifying the Homeland </I>travels inside the secret world of intelligence fusion, looks beyond the apparent failure of fusion centers,...
In <I>Stick Together and Come Back Home</I>, Patrick Lopez-Aguado examines how what happens inside a prison affects what happens outside of it. Following the experiences of seventy youth and adults as they navigate juvenile justice and penal facilities before finally going back home, he outlines how institutional authorities structure a “carceral social order” that racially and geographically divides criminalized populations into gang-associated...
While many researchers study offenders and offending, few actually journey into the correctional world to meet offenders face to face. This book offers researchers, practitioners, and students a step-by-step guide to effectively research correctional populations, providing field-tested advice for those studying youth and adults on probation, on parole, and in jails and prisons.<BR />  <BR /> The book addresses topics such as how to build rapport with offenders and those who...
In <I>Taking Baby Steps</I>, Jody Lyneé Madeira takes readers inside the infertility experience, from dealing with infertility-related emotions to forming treatment relationships with medical professionals and confronting difficult medical decisions. Based on hundreds of interviews, this book investigates how women, men, and medical professionals negotiate infertility’s rocky terrain to create life and build families—a journey across personal, medical,...
The fear of violent crime dominates Guatemala City. In the midst of unprecedented levels of postwar violence, Guatemalans struggle to fathom the myriad forces that have made life in this city so deeply insecure. Born out of histories of state terror, migration, and US deportation, <I>maras </I>(transnational gangs) have become the face of this new era of violence. They are brutal organizations engaged in extortion, contract killings, and the drug trade, and yet they...
Early in the morning of September 5, 2002, camouflaged and heavily armed Drug Enforcement Administration agents descended on a terraced marijuana garden. The DEA raid on the Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana, a sanctuary for severely ill patients who were using marijuana as medicine, is the riveting opening scene in <I>Weed Land,</I> an up-close journalistic narrative that chronicles a transformative epoch for marijuana in America.<BR /><BR /> From the 1996 passage...
Decriminalizing Domestic Violence asks the crucial, yet often overlooked, question of why and how the criminal legal system became the primary response to intimate partner violence in the United States. It introduces readers, both new and well versed in the subject, to the ways in which the criminal legal system harms rather than helps those who are subjected to abuse and violence in their homes and communities, and shares how it...
The sensational story of a girl's tragic death and the whirlwind of racial prejudices that came in its wake. On Boxing Day 2005, fifteen-year-old Jane Creba was fatally shot on one of the busiest streets in Toronto. Police and journalists reported her death as that of an innocent bystander caught in the crossfire of rival gangs. In the months that followed Creba’s death, fifty-six men of colour were arrested in connection with the shooting. Twelve men went to preliminary hearings. One...
Thousands are homeless, tens of thousands are languishing on social housing waiting lists, even more are unable to afford to rent or buy. Why is our housing system so dysfunctional? Why can it not meet social and affordable housing needs? Home: Why Public Housing is the Answer examines the structural causes of our housing emergency, provides a detailed critique of government housing policy from the 1980s to the present and outlines a comprehensive, practical and radical alternative that would...