CRSC Books

Economists and Societies: Discipline and Profession in the United States, Britain, and France, 1890s to 1990s

Marion Fourcade
2009

Marion Fourcade - Economists and Societies is the first book to systematically compare the profession of economics in the United States, Britain, and France, and to explain why economics, far from being a uniform science, differs in important ways among these three countries. Drawing on in-depth interviews with economists, institutional analysis, and a wealth of scholarly evidence, Marion Fourcade traces the history of economics in each country from the late nineteenth century to the present, demonstrating how each political, cultural, and institutional...

The New Scarlet Letter?: Negotiating the U.S. Labor Market with a Criminal Record

Steven Raphael
2014

Steven Raphael - The numbers are eye-opening. In 2007, on any given day, 2.2 percent of all males in the United States were incarcerated, including 7.9 percent of all black males. Some 2.6 percent of white males , 7.7 percent of Hispanic males, and 16.6 percent of black males have spent time in state or federal prison at some point in their lives. And for a male child born in 2001, the likelihood of going to prison is 5.9 percent for whites, 17.2 percent for Hispanics, and a whopping 32.2 percent for blacks. Of those who spend time in prison, the overwhelming...

After the War on Crime: Race, Democracy, and a New Reconstruction

Ian Haney López
Mary Louise Frampton
Jonathan Simon
2008

Ian Haney López - Since the 1970s, Americans have witnessed a pyrrhic war on crime, with sobering numbers at once chilling and cautionary. Our imprisoned population has increased five-fold, with a commensurate spike in fiscal costs that many now see as unsupportable into the future. As American society confronts a multitude of new challenges ranging from terrorism to the disappearance of middle-class jobs to global warming, the war on crime may be up for reconsideration for the first time in a generation or more. Relatively low crime rates indicate that the public...

Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats, and Media Constructed a New American

G. Cristina Mora
2014

G. Cristina Mora - How did Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and Cubans become known as “Hispanics” and “Latinos” in the United States? How did several distinct cultures and nationalities become portrayed as one? Cristina Mora answers both these questions and details the scope of this phenomenon in Making Hispanics. She uses an organizational lens and traces how activists, bureaucrats, and media executives in the 1970s and ’80s created a new identity category—and by doing so, permanently changed the racial and political landscape of the nation.

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Punishing the Poor The Neoliberal Government of the Social Insecurity

Loic Wacquant
2009

Loic Wacquant - The punitive turn of penal policy in the United States after the acme of the Civil Rights movement responds not to rising criminal insecurity but to the social insecurity spawned by the fragmentation of wage labor and the shakeup of the ethnoracial hierarchy. It partakes of a broader reconstruction of the state wedding restrictive “workfare” and expansive “prisonfare” under a philosophy of moral behaviorism. This paternalist program of penalization of poverty aims to curb the urban disorders wrought by economic deregulation...

Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?

Steven Raphael
2013

Steven Raphael - Raphael and Stoll carefully evaluate changes in crime patterns, enforcement practices and sentencing laws to reach a sobering conclusion: So many Americans are in prison today because we have chosen, through our public policies, to put them there. They dispel the notion that a rise in crime rates fueled the incarceration surge; in fact, crime rates have steadily declined to all-time lows. There is also little evidence for other factors commonly offered to explain the prison boom, such as the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill since the 1950s...

When Police Kill

Franklin E. Zimring
2017

Franklin E. Zimring - Deaths of civilians at the hands of on-duty police are in the national spotlight as never before. How many killings by police occur annually? What circumstances provoke police to shoot to kill? Who dies? The lack of answers to these basic questions points to a crisis in American government that urgently requires the attention of policy experts. When Police Killis a groundbreaking analysis of the use of lethal force by police in the United States and how its death toll can be reduced.

Franklin Zimring compiles...

Sancho's Journal: Exploring the Political Edge with the Brown Berets

David Montejano
2012

David Montejano - Completing the story of the Mexican American struggle for inclusion and equal rights that he began in Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 and Quixote’s Soldiers, Montejano presents a rich ethnography of the street-level Chicano movement.

Globalization's Muse: Universities and Higher Education Systems in a Changing World

John Aubrey Douglass
C. Judson King
Irwin Feller
2009

John Aubrey Douglass - Universities have become a widely recognized route to full participation in the knowledge society. They serve as an unparalleled source of knowledge production, a foundation for modern science, an unequaled generator of talent, and a nearly required path for socioeconomic mobility. But how do we build, nurture, and sustain these crucial institutions? Globalization's Muse helps to answer those questions, informing both policymakers and educators of the profound efforts by governments and institutions, and reminding both groups that in this...

The City That Became Safe

Franklin Zimring
2011

Franklin Zimring - In The City That Became Safe, Franklin E. Zimring seeks out the New York difference through a comprehensive investigation into the city's falling crime rates. The usual understanding is that aggressive police created a zero-tolerance law enforcement regime that drove crime rates down. Is this political sound bite true-are the official statistics generated by the police accurate? Though zero-tolerance policing and quality-of-life were never a consistent part of the NYPD's strategy, Zimring shows the numbers are correct and...