WSC 2021: Browse Titles for Your Criminology Courses

Explore our groundbreaking books that facilitate teaching across disciplines. To request an exam copy, click on “Request an Exam or Desk Copy” on the book page, and this will take you to our distributor’s site where you can order your copy.

Criminology Explains Police Violence by Philip Matthew Stinson, Sr.

Criminology Explains Police Violence offers a concise and targeted overview of criminological theory applied to the phenomenon of police violence. In this engaging and accessible book, Philip M. Stinson, Sr. highlights the similarities and differences among criminological theories, and provides linkages across explanatory levels and across time and geography to explain police violence.

This book is appropriate as a resource in criminology, policing, and criminal justice special topic courses, as well as a variety of violence and police courses such as policing, policing administration, police-community relations, police misconduct, and violence in society. Stinson uses examples from his own research to explore police violence, acknowledging the difficulty in studying the topic because violence is often seen as a normal part of policing.

Criminology Explains School Bullying by Robert A. Brooks and Jeffrey W. Cohen

In this book, Robert A. Brooks and Jeffrey W. Cohen provide a concise, targeted overview of the major criminological theories to explain the phenomenon of school bullying, bringing to life what is often dense and confusing material with concrete case examples. Criminology Explains School Bullying is a valuable resource in criminology or juvenile delinquency classes, as well as special-topics classes on school violence, bullying, or the school-to-prison pipeline. Charts, critical thinking questions, and implications for practice and policy illuminate real-world applications, making this is a go-to book for teachers, students, and researchers interested in an empirically driven synthesis of criminological theory as it applies to school bullying.

White-Collar and Financial Crimes: A Casebook of Fraudsters, Scam Artists, and Corporate Thieves by Jennifer C. Noble

Examining a shocking array of fraud, corruption, theft, and embezzlement cases, this vivid collection reveals the practice of detecting, investigating, prosecuting, defending, and resolving white-collar crimes. Each chapter is a case study of an illustrative criminal case and draws on extensive public records around both obscure and high-profile crimes of the powerful, such as money laundering, mortgage fraud, public corruption, securities fraud, environmental crimes, and Ponzi schemes. Organized around a consistent analytic framework, each case tells a unique story and provides an engaging introduction to these complex crimes, while also introducing students to the practical aspects of investigation and prosecution of white-collar offenses. Jennifer C. Noble’s text takes students to the front lines of these vastly understudied crimes, preparing them for future practice and policy work.

Alt-Right Gangs: A Hazy Shade of White by Shannon E. Reid and Matthew Valasik

Alt-Right Gangs provides a timely and necessary discussion of youth-oriented groups within the white power movement. Focusing on how these groups fit into the current research on street gangs, Shannon E. Reid and Matthew Valasik catalog the myths and realities around alt-right gangs and their members; illustrate how they use music, social media, space, and violence; and document the risk factors for joining an alt-right gang, as well as the mechanisms for leaving. By presenting a way to understand the growth, influence, and everyday operations of these groups, Alt-Right Gangs informs students, researchers, law enforcement members, and policy makers on this complex subject. Most significantly, the authors offer an extensively evaluated set of prevention and intervention strategies that can be incorporated into existing anti-gang initiatives. With a clear, coherent point of view, this book offers a contemporary synthesis that will appeal to students and scholars alike.

Law and Justice around the World: A Comparative Approach by Mikaila Mariel Lemonik Arthur

Law and Justice around the World is designed to introduce students to comparative law and justice, including cross-national variations in legal and justice systems as well as global and international justice. The book draws students into critical discussions of justice around the world today by:

taking a broad perspective on law and justice rather than limiting its focus to criminal justice systems
examining topics of global concern, including governance, elections, environmental regulations, migration and refugee status, family law, and others
focusing on a diverse set of global examples, from Europe, North America, East Asia, and especially the global south, and comparing the United States law and justice system to these other nations
continuing to cover core topics such as crime, law enforcement, criminal courts, and punishment
including chapter goals to define learning outcomes
sharing case studies to help students apply concepts to real life issues

Instructor resources include discussion questions; suggested readings, films, and web resources; a test bank; and chapter-by-chapter PowerPoint slides with full-color maps and graphics.

By widening the comparative lens to include nations that are often completely ignored in research and teaching, the book paints a more realistic portrait of the different ways in which countries define and pursue justice in a globalized, interconnected world.

Understanding Criminal Networks: A Research Guide by Gisela Bichler

Understanding Criminal Networks is a short methodological primer for those interested in studying illicit, deviant, covert, or criminal networks using social network analysis (SNA). Accessibly written by Gisela Bichler, a leading expert in SNA for dark networks, the book is chock-full of graphics, checklists, software tips, step-by-step guidance, and straightforward advice. Covering all the essentials, each chapter highlights three themes: the theoretical basis of networked criminology, methodological issues and useful analytic tools, and producing professional analysis. Unlike any other book on the market, the book combines conceptual and empirical work with advice on designing networking studies, collecting data, and analysis. Relevant, practical, theoretical, and methodologically innovative, Understanding Criminal Networks promises to jumpstart readers’ understanding of how to cross over from conventional investigations of crime to the study of criminal networks.

Race and Crime: Geographies of Injustice by Elizabeth Brown and George Barganier

Race and Crime examines how race became a defining feature of the criminal justice 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.

Baby Jails: The Fight to End the Incarceration of Refugee Children in America by Philip G. Schrag

For decades, advocates for refugee children and families have fought to end the U.S. government’s practice of jailing children and families for months, or even years, until overburdened immigration courts could rule on their claims for asylum. Baby Jails is the history of that legal and political struggle. Philip G. Schrag, the director of Georgetown University’s asylum law clinic, takes readers through thirty years of conflict over which refugee advocates resisted the detention of migrant children and provides recommendations for the reform of a system that has brought anguish and trauma to thousands of parents and children. Provocative and timely, Baby Jails exposes the ongoing struggle between the U.S. government and immigrant advocates over the duration and conditions of confinement of children who seek safety in America.

Coerced: Work Under Threat of Punishment by Erin Hatton

What do prisoner laborers, graduate students, welfare workers, and college athletes have in common? According to sociologist Erin Hatton, they are all part of a growing workforce of coerced laborers.

Coerced explores this world of coerced labor through an unexpected and compelling comparison of these four groups of workers, for whom a different definition of “employment” reigns supreme—one where workplace protections do not apply and employers wield expansive punitive power, far beyond the ability to hire and fire. Because such arrangements are common across the economy, Hatton argues that coercion—as well as precarity—is a defining feature of work in America today.

Theoretically forceful yet vivid and gripping to read, Coerced compels the reader to reevaluate contemporary dynamics of work, pushing beyond concepts like “career” and “gig work.” Through this bold analysis, Hatton offers a trenchant window into this world of work from the perspective of those who toil within it—and who are developing the tools needed to push back against it.

Green Criminology: Crime, Justice, and the Environment by Michael J. Lynch, Michael A. Long, Paul B. Stretesky, and Kimberly L. Barrett

This groundbreaking text provides students with an overview and assessment of green criminology as well as a call to action. Green Criminology draws attention to the ways in which the political-economic organization of capitalism causes ecological destruction and disorganization. Focusing on real-world issues of green crime and environmental justice, chapters examine ecological withdrawals, ecological additions, toxic towns, wildlife poaching and trafficking, environmental laws, and nongovernmental environmental organizations. The book also presents an unintimidating introduction to research from the physical sciences on issues such as climate change, pollution levels, and the ecological footprint of humans, providing a truly interdisciplinary foundation for green criminological analysis.

To help students succeed in the course—and to encourage them to see themselves as future green criminology researchers—the end-of-chapter study guides include:

• Questions and Activities for Students that review topics students should be able to conceptualize and address.
• Lessons for Researchers that suggest additional areas of research in the study of green crime.