Crime Sociology

In 2018, Emily Flitter received a tip that Morgan Stanley had fired a Black employee without cause. Flitter had been searching for a way to investigate the deep-rooted racism in the American financial industry, and that one tip lit the sparkplug for a three-year journey through the shocking yet normalized corruption in our financial institutions. Examining local insurance agencies and corporate titans like JPMorgan Chase, BlackRock, and Wells Fargo and reveals the practices that have kept the racial wealth gap practically as wide as it was during the Jim Crow era.

On October 12, 2005, a massive fire broke out in the Wines Central wine warehouse in Vallejo, California. Within hours, the flames had destroyed 4.5 million bottles of California's finest wine worth more than $250 million, making it the largest destruction of wine in history. The fire had been deliberately set by a passionate oenophile named Mark Anderson, a skilled con man and thief with storage space at the warehouse who needed to cover his tracks.

Something unimaginable occurred from 1764 to 1767 in the remote highlands of south-central France. For three years, a real-life monster, or monsters, ravaged the region, slaughtering by some accounts more than 100 people, mostly women and children, and inflicting severe injuries upon many others.

On a cold night in January 2001, the idyllic community of Dartmouth College was shattered by the discovery that two of its most beloved professors had been hacked to death in their own home. Investigators searched helplessly for clues linking the victims to their murderer or murderers. A few weeks later, across the river, in the town of Chelsea, Vermont, police cars were spotted in front of the house of a high school senior. Soon, the town discovered the incomprehensible reality that two of Chelsea's brightest and most popular sons, were now fugitives, wanted for the murders.

On May 23, 2009, Amanda Stott-Smith drove to the middle of the Sellwood Bridge in Portland, Oregon, and dropped her two children into the Willamette River. Forty minutes later, rescuers found the body of four-year-old Eldon. Miraculously, his seven-year-old sister, Trinity, was saved. As the public cried out for blood, Amanda was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to thirty-five years in prison.

Just as Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations did for the world of food, Dopeworld is an intoxicating journey into the world of drugs. From the cocaine farms in South America to the streets of Manila, Dopeworld traces the emergence of psychoactive substances and our intimate relationship with them. As a former drug dealer turned subversive scholar, with unparalleled access to drug lords, cartel leaders, street dealers, and government officials, journalist Niko Vorobyov attempts to shine a light on the dark underbelly of the drug world.

Guilty Admissions weaves together the story of an unscrupulous college counselor named Rick Singer, and how he preyed on the desperation of some of the country's wealthiest families living in a world defined by fierce competition, who function under constant pressure to get into the "right" schools, starting with preschool; nonstop fundraising and donation demands in the form of multi-million-dollar galas and private parties; and a community of deeply insecure parents who will do anything to get their kids into name-brand colleges in order to maintain their own A-list status.

For two decades, the water in the taps and wells of Mingo County didn’t look, smell, or taste right. Could the water be the root of the health problems - from kidney stones to cancer - in this Appalachian community? Environmental lawyer Kevin Thompson certainly thought so. For seven years, Thompson waged an epic legal battle against Massey Energy, West Virginia’s most powerful coal company, helmed by CEO Don Blankenship. Working with fellow lawyers and a crew of young activists, Thompson would uncover the ruthless shortcuts that put the community’s drinking water at risk.

Crime and gentrification are hot-button issues that easily polarize racially diverse neighborhoods. How do residents, activists, and politicians navigate the thorny politics of race as they fight crime or resist gentrification? And do conflicts over competing visions of neighborhood change necessarily divide activists into racially homogeneous camps, or can they produce more complex alliances and divisions? In Us Versus Them, Jan Doering answers these questions through an in-depth study of two Chicago neighborhoods.

On the 50th anniversary of her murder, Kevin Cook presents the real Kitty Genovese. She was a vibrant young woman - unbeknownst to most, a lesbian - a bartender working (and dancing) her way through the colorful, fast-changing New York of the ’60s, a cultural kaleidoscope marred by the Kennedy assassination, the Cold War, and race riots. Downtown, Greenwich Village teemed with beatniks, folkies, and so-called misfits like Kitty and her lover. Kitty Genovese evokes the Village’s gay and lesbian underground with deep feeling and colorful detail.

How ordinary Americans suffer when the rich and powerful use tax doges or break the law to get richer and more powerful - and how we can stop it. There is an elite crime spree happening in America, and the privileged perps are getting away with it. Selling loose cigarettes on a city sidewalk can lead to a choke-hold arrest, and death, if you are not among the top one percent.

In this new edition, Steve Bruce discusses the continuing arguments for social egalitarianism, considering issues such as gay marriage, women in combat roles, and the 2010 Equality Act to debunk contemporary arguments against parity. As gender divisions are increasingly questioned, he looks ahead to the likely consequences of this for society.

Bobby Gunn has been fighting for his existence since a childhood spent living under the hand of his volatile father, and would do anything to give his seven-year-old daughter a better life—including betting on himself in the underground world of bare-knuckle boxing. In 1984, Gunn was an eleven-year-old boxer in Ontario when his father woke him in the middle of the night to fight grown men in motel parking lots for money, his old man pocketing the cash.

This is the story of an unforgivable con man. Vulnerable families were his prey. His promise was an impossible dream and a lie. Peter Candlewood understood the system. That’s how he could commute prison sentences and reunite hopeless families with incarcerated loved ones. For a price. Except there was no Candlewood. No hope. Just a lowly Texas con artist who bet on the desperate - and won. And he wasn’t working alone. The multimillion-dollar deception cost the betrayed more than their savings.

Since the 1950s, the American war on drugs has positioned white middle-class youth as sympathetic victims of illegal drug markets who need rehabilitation instead of incarceration. The Suburban Crisis traces how politicians, the media, and grassroots political activists crusaded to protect white families from perceived threats while criminalizing and incarcerating urban minorities, and how a troubling legacy of racial injustice continues to inform the war on drugs today.

The True American tells the story of Raisuddin Bhuiyan, a Bangladesh Air Force officer who dreams of immigrating to America and working in technology. But days after 9/11, an avowed "American terrorist" named Mark Stroman, seeking revenge, walks into the Dallas minimart where Bhuiyan has found temporary work and shoots him, maiming and nearly killing him. Two other victims, at other gas stations, aren't so lucky, dying at once. The True American traces the making of these two men, Stroman and Bhuiyan, and of their fateful encounter.

On March 11, 2003, in Brownsville, Texas - one of America's poorest cities - John Allen Rubio and Angela Camacho murdered their three young children. The apartment building in which the brutal crimes took place was already run down, and in their aftermath a consensus developed in the community that it should be destroyed. It was a place, neighbors felt, that was plagued by spiritual cancer.

Chris Bathum was a respected therapist, addiction specialist, and founder of one of the fastest-growing rehabilitation chains in America. But Bathum was a total fraud: he was a homicidal meth-head with a history of sexually abusing his patients, scamming insurance companies, and eliminating whistle-blowers. Like Rose Stahl. But this intended victim would be his last. Stahl would risk her life to bring down the monster she and so many other people in need had once trusted for their salvation.

The U.S. government spends enormous resources each year on the gathering and analysis of intelligence, yet the history of American foreign policy is littered with missteps and misunderstandings that have resulted from intelligence failures. In Why Intelligence Fails, Robert Jervis examines the politics and psychology of two of the more spectacular intelligence failures in recent memory: the belief that the Shah in Iran was secure and stable in 1978, and the claim that Iraq had active WMD programs in 2002.

Beginning in the mid-1990s, American cities experienced an astonishing drop in violent crime. By 2014, the United States was safer than it had been in 60 years. Sociologist Patrick Sharkey gathered data from across the country to understand why this happened. Sharkey puts forth an entirely new approach to confronting violence and urban poverty. At a time when inequality, complacency, and conflict all threaten a new rise in violent crime, and the old methods of policing are unacceptable, the ideas in this book are indispensable.