Hello Grad Students and the Media and other Interested parties. We will post “recommended” sources for papers and research. Items listed here can be cited in academic papers with pride. The criteria? Sometimes books listed here are “seminal”, in that they have been widely read and recognized as important scientific work. Sometimes they present great scholarship and are very readable and informative. We try not to list books that are very technical or focused on an overly-specific topic of interest to few social scientists.
Recommended Books
(last updated 1/6/2024)
Topics listed Alphabetically
(We will add books to this regularly; there are so many to choose from)
Collateral Consequences
Devah Pager. (2007). Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration
Gangs
Malcolm Klein. (1995). The American Street Gang (an oldie but a goodie)
Parole and Reentry
Bruce Western. (2018). Homeward: Life in the Year After Prison
David J. Harding et al. (2019). On the Outside: Prisoner Reentry and Reintegration
Policing and Police
Malcolm Sparrow. (2016). Handcuffed: What Holds Policing Back, and the Keys to Reform
Prison, Life Sentences
Marc Mauer & Ashley Nellis. (2018). The Meaning of Life: The Case for Abolishing Life Sentences
Prosecution, Court Evidence
Emily Bazelon. (2019). Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration.
Daniel S. Medwed. (2014). Prosecution Complex: America’s Race to Convict and Its Impact on the Innocent
Alexandra Natapoff. (2022). Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice, 2nd ed.
Race and Justice
Angela Davis (Ed.). (2017). Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment
Edited Volumes
Edited volumes are an EXCELLENT source for student papers. Some are “readers” (containing reprinted works, often older “seminal” articles), and some are compiled as a new book. In these, each chapter is usually written by a known expert on a specific topic. Chapters are commonly packed with detail about research, as summarized by an expert, and the references can be an excellent resource for delving further into the topic. We list here just a few of these edited volumes. When you cite the chapter, you cite the CHAPTER author, not the editor of the entire volume.
in APA Style for example, the reference listing looks like this:
Anderson, A.A. (2020). My chapter on policing. In B. Burton (Ed.), The big handbook of criminal justice (pp. 1-20). New York: Publisher.
The Oxford Handbook of Criminology
Chapters include those on “Ethnicities, Racism, Crime, and Criminal Justice,” “Green Criminology,” “Feminist Criminology,” “Crime and the City,” “Drugs, Consumption, Addiction, and treatment",” “Youth Justice” in addition to many other chapters.
The Oxford Handbook of Crime and Criminal Justice
Chapters include those on “General Deterrence,” “Immigrants and Crime,” “Juvenile Justice,” “Jails and Pretrial Release” in addition to 25 other chapters.
The Oxford Handbook of Sentencing
The Oxford Handbook of Juvenile Crime and Juvenile Justice
The Oxford Handbook of Prosecution
The Oxford Handbook of Developmental and Life-course Criminology
Other edited volumes of note:
Crime and Justice: A Review of Research annual series edited by Michael Tonry. This comes out annually, so it is sometimes shelved with books, but chapters are also listed in Criminal Justice Abstracts. If your university subscribes to CJ Abstracts, you might be able to get any chapter for free. Chapters are also currently available from JSTOR. In some years, such as 2023, the volume is organized around a theme and has a thematic title such as Prisons and Prisoners. Grad students and young researchers should consider making a point of looking at the new volume each year.
Annual Reviews. We now have an Annual Review of Criminology
The 2023 edition includes topics such as trends in women’s incarceration rates, carjacking, police unions and accountability, criminal defense lawyering, the opioid crisis, etc. Grad students and young researchers should consider making a point of looking at the new volume each year.