The numbers are staggering: One-third of America’s adult population has passed through the criminal justice system and now has a criminal record. Many more were never convicted, but are nonetheless subject to surveillance by the state. Never before has the American government maintained so vast a network of institutions dedicated solely to the control and confinement of its citizens. A provocative assessment of the contemporary carceral state for American democracy, Arresting Citizenship argues that the broad reach of the criminal justice system has fundamentally recast the relation between citizen and state, resulting in a sizable—and growing—group of second-class citizens. From police stops to court cases and incarceration, at each stage of the criminal justice system individuals belonging to this disempowered group come to experience a state-within-a-state that reflects few of the country’s core democratic values. Through scores of interviews, along with analyses of survey data, Amy E. Lerman and Vesla M. Weaver show how this contact with police, courts, and prisons decreases faith in the capacity of American political institutions to respond to citizens’ concerns and diminishes the sense of full and equal citizenship—even for those who have not been found guilty of any crime. The effects of this increasingly frequent contact with the criminal justice system are wide-ranging—and pernicious—and Lerman and Weaver go on to offer concrete proposals for reforms to reincorporate this large group of citizens as active participants in American civic and political life.

A brand new RoboCop series set in the original continuity, featuring the return of Alex Murphy as an aged and depowered cyborg who is enlisted back into the fight against oppression once more. Thirty years have passed since Alex Murphy first took to the streets of Detroit as RoboCop. Following the destruction of its original entity, OCP has risen again, appropriated by a new tech startup and fashioned into a mobile app called OCPolice, allowing citizens to report any crime they see fit...and profit from it. Though the elite of Detroit have created what seems like a utopia, the poor and downtrodden pay the price, and they’ve had enough. They just need their champion, but the only question is: What happened to Alex Murphy? Written by visionary author Brian Wood (DMZ, Star Wars) and illustrated by Jorge Coelho (Venom, Loki), RoboCop: Citizens Arrest is the next chapter in the epic cult-favorite saga--a gripping modern dissection of government overreach and the slippery slope of privacy in the digital age.

The criminal justice system aims to maintain a balance between the individual interest of private citizens to carry on their lives free from state interference, and the communal interest in maintaining a safe society. These two goals come into conflict with each other most visibly when agents of the state physically take control of private citizens -- that is, when they exercise their powers to detain or to arrest. The book focuses on "street-level" encounters: detentions and arrests that occur in the course of investigating crime and laying charges. The authors explore the initial interaction between agents of the state or others authorized to detain and arrest, and the private citizens whose liberty is interfered with. It is at that point that the balance between societal safety and individual liberty is most keenly in play. This second edition has been updated to incorporate significant changes which have taken place with regard to statutory powers (the new citizen's arrest power and others), to common law powers (powers of detention, safety searches, search incident to arrest, etc.) and to Charter rights (freedom from arbitrary detention, right to counsel, and so on).

In the netherlands, the right of citizens to arrest the suspects of crime is the subject of debate. At stake is whether citizens engaging in law enforcement should be punished for taking the law into their own hands. In the political sphere, it is argued that by enforcing the law, citizens are making a contribution to public safety in cases in which the state cannot guarantee adequate protection. In the legal sphere, however, it is argued that this could open the gates for ‘eigenrichting’. In this context, Astrid Bosch raises the following questions: Have the legal norms constraining citizens' right to enforce the law become outdated? Is there, thus, a gap between the current legal and social opinions regarding citizen’s arrest? Would bridging this gap, by broadening the legal space for citizen’s arrest, endanger the rule of law?

The costs of racially disparate patterns of police behavior are high, but the crime fighting benefits are low.

“A well-supported critique of therapeutic policing and, by extension, of similar paternalistic efforts to help the poor by hassling them into good behavior.” —Los Angeles Times In his first year working in Los Angeles’s Skid Row, Forrest Stuart was stopped on the street by police fourteen times. Usually for doing little more than standing there. Juliette, a woman he met during that time, has been stopped by police well over one hundred times, arrested upward of sixty times, and has given up more than a year of her life serving week-long jail sentences. Her most common crime? Simply sitting on the sidewalk—an arrestable offense in LA. Why? What purpose did those arrests serve, for society or for Juliette? How did we reach a point where we’ve cut support for our poorest citizens, yet are spending ever more on policing and prisons? That’s the complicated, maddening story that Stuart tells in Down, Out & Under Arrest, a close-up look at the hows and whys of policing poverty in the contemporary United States. What emerges from Stuart’s years of fieldwork—not only with Skid Row residents, but with the police charged with managing them—is a tragedy built on mistakes and misplaced priorities more than on heroes and villains. At a time when distrust between police and the residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods has never been higher, Stuart’s book helps us see where we’ve gone wrong, and what steps we could take to begin to change the lives of our poorest citizens—and ultimately our society itself—for the better.