John Jay College - Department of Sociology

This book examines a unique judicial experiment called the Manhattan Youth Part, a specialized criminal court set aside for youth prosecuted as adults in New York City. Focusing on the lives of those coming through and working in the courtroom, Barrett’s ethnography is a study of a microcosm that reflects the costs, challenges, and consequences the “tough on crime” age has had, especially for male youth of color.

ETHNOGRAPHY AND THE CITY: READINGS ON DOING URBAN FIELDWORK (THE METROPOLIS AND MODERN LIFE)

This book is the only collection of its kind on the market, gathering the work of some of the most esteemed urban ethnographers in sociology and anthropology. Broken down into sections that cover key aspects of ethnographic research, Ethnography and the City will expose readers to important works in the field, while also guiding students to the study of method as they embark on their own work.

The book is a collection of lively autobiographical stories about growing up in a Russian-American Jewish household in the stifling political atmosphere of the Red Scare.

At the center of these memories is Lyduce’s father, whose complex personality mixes a passion for social justice, the desire to protect his family, and intellectual snobbery. In this revelatory memoir, international politics shadow a child’s gradual awakening to the world around her. As she tells her family’s story, Rosner shows how complicated autobiography can be, more a matter of pursuing the truth than of asserting it.

Dr. Lydia S. Rosner, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, has been on the faculty at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York since 1985. Mentioned in Two Thousand Notable American Women, Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who in the East, Dr. Rosner has traveled the world with a keen interest in cultures and social structures.

“How They Got Away with It: White Collar Criminals and the Financial Meltdown” is the first book that examines the criminology of the 2008 world financial crisis in a compilation of essays written by a cross-section of national and international experts. The book is edited by Assistant Professor Susan Will of the Sociology Department, Director of the Center on Media, Crime and Justice Stephen Handelman, and Professor David C. Brotherton, co-chair of the Department of Sociology.

Will, Handelman and Brotherton gathered contributions from sociologists, economists, criminologists, and lawyers after a conference called: Financial Meltdown: How Did They Get Away With It? that was organized by the Center on Media, Crime and Justice with support from the McCormick Foundation for national financial journalists, academics and practitioners.

“The media and expert commentators were focused on the economic reasons for the breakdown, and individual cases of malfeasance, especially after the accusations of Occupy Wall Street,” said Handelman. “We wanted to gather the best minds in criminology, sociology and finance from around the world and ask the hard questions about whether there were larger systemic issues of white collar criminality involved, why no one caught them, and how we can prevent similar crises from happening again.”

Handelman and Will said that in the last 20 to 30 years no other book or textbook has examined financial crime as a systemic international challenge.

“It’s unique because we took a global approach and a highly interdisciplinary perspective,” said Brotherton. “We’re trying to educate people around the global significance, and not allow this crisis to become just another event from the past. We are teaching people about real analysis; it’s happening in real time. We hope it teaches our students to think globally and comparatively, to put themselves in other positions, and to see links between crime and sociology.”

The distinguished contributors looked at financial crime from a multitude of perspectives. Authors include Gilbert Geis who is Professor Emeritus of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine; Jock Young who is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at John Jay and the CUNY Graduate Center and Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent in the UK; Laureen Snider who is Professor of Sociology (Emerita) at Queen’s University; David O. Friedrichs who writes text books on white collar crime; and William K. Black, a former federal regulator who is considered the leading expert on the nation’s financial regulatory structure, and who helped bring down the so-called “Keating Five---five U.S. Senators accused of corruption for their part in the 1989 Savings and Loan scandal.

“The approach has been that there are a couple of bad apples,” said Will. “(It’s considered) soft criminality: we will get away with as much as we can. There are a lot of reasons for this that the authors give, the structure of the financial systems, obviously the weakness of regulators, lobbying efforts. But we don’t seem to learn our lessons. This book is a first step.”

HOW ISLAM IS BECOMING AN AMERICAN RELIGION

The events of 9/11 had a profound impact on American society, but they had an even more lasting effect on Muslims living in the United States. Once practically invisible, they suddenly found themselves overexposed. By describing how Islam in America began as a strange cultural object and is gradually sinking into familiarity, Finding Mecca in America illuminates the growing relationship between Islam and American culture as Muslims find a homeland in America. Rich in ethnographic detail, the book is an up-close account of how Islam takes its American shape. In this book, Mucahit Bilici traces American Muslims’ progress from outsiders to natives and from immigrants to citizens. Drawing on the philosophies of Simmel and Heidegger, Bilici develops a novel sociological approach and offers insights into the civil rights activities of Muslim Americans, their increasing efforts at interfaith dialogue, and the recent phenomenon of Muslim ethnic comedy. Theoretically sophisticated, Finding Mecca in America is both a portrait of American Islam and a groundbreaking study of what it means to feel at home.

WHO YOU CLAIM: PERFORMING GANG IDENTITY IN SCHOOL AND ON THE STREETS

Professor Robert Garot

The color of clothing, the width of shoe laces, a pierced ear, certain brands of sneakers, the braiding of hair and many other features have long been seen as indicators of gang involvement. But it’s not just what is worn, it’s how: a hat tilted to the left or right, creases in pants, an ironed shirt not tucked in, baggy pants. For those who live in inner cities with a heavy gang presence, such highly stylized rules are not simply about fashion, but markers of "who you claim," that is, who one affiliates with, and how one wishes to be seen.

In this carefully researched ethnographic account, Robert Garot provides rich descriptions and compelling stories to demonstrate that gang identity is a carefully coordinated performance with many nuanced rules of style and presentation, and that gangs, like any other group or institution, must be constantly performed into being. Garot spent four years in and around one inner city alternative school in Southern California, conducting interviews and hanging out with students, teachers, and administrators. He shows that these young people are not simply scary thugs who always have been and always will be violent criminals, but that they constantly modulate ways of talking, walking, dressing, writing graffiti, wearing make-up, and hiding or revealing tattoos as ways to play with markers of identity.

They obscure, reveal, and provide contradictory signals on a continuum, moving into, through, and out of gang affiliations as they mature, drop out, or graduate. Who You Claim provides a rare look into young people’s understandings of the meanings and contexts in which the magic of such identity work is made manifest.

‘This is an exciting and innovative book which provides a thorough introduction to contemporary social theory by examining the way in which the widespread existence of violence against women is explored. A wide range of theories from liberalism to evolutionary psychology are considered culminating in the development of a distinctive feminist realist position. The theories discussed are tested against a large-scale survey, the findings of which challenge many conventional wisdoms as to the patterning of violence in contemporary society’

'...will make a fundamental and longlasting impact on the direction of research and policy making.' - Professor Sandra Walklate, Manchester Metropolitan University

A first in the field when initially published and now a true classic, Crime Victims: An Introduction to Victimology, offers the most comprehensive and balanced exploration of victimology available today. The author examines the victims' plight, carefully placing statistics from the FBI's Uniform Crime Report and Bureau of Justice Statistics National Crime Victimization Survey in context. The text systematically investigates how victims are currently handled by the criminal justice system, analyzes the goals of the victims' rights movement, and discusses what the future is likely to hold.

The Routledge Handbook of International Criminology brings together the latest thinking and findings from a diverse group of both senior and promising young scholars from around the globe. This collaborative project articulates a new way of thinking about criminology that extends existing perspectives in understanding crime and social control across borders, jurisdictions, and cultures, and facilitates the development of an overarching framework that is truly international.

The book is divided into three parts, in which three distinct yet overlapping types of crime are analyzed: international crime, transnational crime, and national crime. Each of these perspectives is then articulated through a number of chapters which cover theory and methods, international and transnational crime analyses, and case studies of criminology and criminal justice in relevant nations. In addition, questions placed at the end of each chapter encourage greater reflection on the issues raised, and will encourage young scholars to move the field of inquiry forward.

This handbook is an excellent reference tool for undergraduate and graduate students with particular interests in research methods, international criminology, and making comparisons across countries.

The book explores the reasons underlying the vastly differing responses of the English and Norwegian criminal justice systems to the cases of James Bulger and Silje Redergard respectively. James Bulger's killers were subject to extreme press and public hostility, held in secure detention for nine months and tried in an adversarial court. Redergard's killers were shielded from public antagonism and carefully reintegrated into the local community. This book argues that English adversarial political culture creates far more incentives to politicize high-profile crimes than Norwegian consensus political culture. Drawing on a wealth of empirical research, Green suggests that the tendency for politicians to justify punitive responses to crime by invoking harsh political attitudes is based upon a flawed understanding of public opinion. The book proposes a more deliberative response to crime that accommodates the informed public in news ways - ways that might help build social capital and remove incentives for cynical penal populism.

"Many people talk of the need for comparative method in criminology, few have attempted it and even fewer contribute so imaginatively to the forefront of scholarship as does David Green in this study. Here we have comparison placed in the contrasting contexts of English and Norwegian politics and media with clear and innovative policy implications; incisive theory informing future practice." -Jock Young, Distinguished Professor, Graduate Center, City University of New York. Author of The Criminological Imagination

"A master class in comparative criminology, this study proves there is an alternative to demonization in response to child-on-child homicide." -David Downes, Mannheim Centre for Criminology, London School of Economics

"David Green uses comparative analysis of two high-profile child-on-child homicides to explore the complex interconnections between media processes, public opinion and political culture. It would be impressive enough to achieve Green’s analytical sophistication in just one of these areas. The extraordinary achievement of When Children Kill Children is to demonstrate theoretical and empirical sophistication, resulting in compelling and cogent analysis, across all three. A remarkable feat of critical scholarship. A genuinely enlightening book." -Chris Greer, City University London

"this important, stimulating book has the potential to become a landmark contribution to the development of comparative penology." -John Pratt, Punishment and Society

"a most valuable and informative work which provides new insights and ways forward in the face of the destructive potentialities of penal populism." -Dennis Eady, Criminology and Criminal Justice