State Crime and Civil Activism explores the work of non-government organisations (NGOs) challenging state violence and corruption in six countries – Colombia, Tunisia, Kenya, Turkey, Myanmar and Papua New Guinea. It discusses the motives and methods of activists, and how they document and criticise wrongdoing by governments. It documents the dialectical process by which repression stimulates and shapes the forces of resistance against it. Drawing on over 350 interviews with activists, this book discusses their motives; the tactics they use to withstand and challenge repression; and the legal and other norms they draw upon to challenge the state, including various forms of law and religious teaching. It analyses the relation between political activism and charitable work, and the often ambivalent views of civil society organisations towards violence. It highlights struggles over land as one of the key areas of state and corporate crime and civil resistance. The interviews illustrate and enrich the theoretical premise that civil society plays a vital part in defining, documenting and denouncing state crime. They show the diverse and vibrant forms that civil society takes in a widely varied group of countries. This book will be of much interest to undergraduate and postgraduate social science students studying criminology, international relations, political science, anthropology and development studies. It will also be of interest to human rights defenders, NGOs and civil society.

Drawing on sources in a dozen states and focusing on seven case studies, documents how the prison reform movement that began in 1876 quickly reverted to the previous standards of punishment, psychological and physical abuse, escapes, riots, suicide, drugs, arson, and rape. Argues that today's prisons, directly descended from those, still lay claim to the ideology of education and rehabilitation that was a myth from the beginning. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

In When Riot Cops Are Not Enough, sociologist and activist Mike King examines the policing, and broader political repression, of the Occupy Oakland movement during the fall of 2011 through the spring of 2012. King’s active and daily participation in that movement, from its inception through its demise, provides a unique insider perspective to illustrate how the Oakland police and city administrators lost the ability to effectively control the movement. Drawn from King’s intensive field work, the book focuses on the physical, legal, political, and ideological dimensions of repression—in the streets, in courtrooms, in the media, in city hall, and within the movement itself—When Riot Cops Are Not Enough highlights the central role of political legitimacy, both for mass movements seeking to create social change, as well as for governmental forces seeking to control such movements. Although Occupy Oakland was different from other Occupy sites in many respects, King shows how the contradictions it illuminated within both social movement and police strategies provide deep insights into the nature of protest policing generally, and a clear map to understanding the full range of social control techniques used in North America in the twenty-first century.

In her exciting new book, Marisol LeBrón traces the rise of punitive governance in Puerto Rico over the course of the twentieth century and up to the present. Punitive governance emerged as a way for the Puerto Rican state to manage the deep and ongoing crises stemming from the archipelago’s incorporation into the United States as a colonial territory. A structuring component of everyday life for many Puerto Ricans, police power has reinforced social inequality and worsened conditions of vulnerability in marginalized communities. This book provides powerful examples of how Puerto Ricans negotiate and resist their subjection to increased levels of segregation, criminalization, discrimination, and harm. Policing Life and Death shows how Puerto Ricans are actively rejecting punitive solutions and working toward alternative understandings of safety and a more just future.

Less than 2 percent of some 4000 adults prosecuted for participating in the bloodiest ghetto revolt of this generation served any time in jail as a result of their conviction and sentencing. Why? Why, in contrast, did the majority of those arrested following a brief and minor confrontation with police in a different city receive far harsher treatment than ordinarily meted out for comparable offenses in "normal" times? What do these incidents tell us about the nature of legal repression in the American state? No coherent theory of political repression in the liberal state exists today. Neither the liberal view of repression as "anomaly" nor the radical view of repression as "fascist core" appears to come to grips with the distinctive characteristics of legal repression in the liberal state. This book attempts to arrive at a more adequate understanding of these "distinctive characteristics" by means of a detailed analysis of the legal response to the most serious violent challenge to the existing political order since the Great Depression—the black ghetto revolts between 1964 and 1968. Using police and court records, and extensive interviews with judges, defense attorneys, prosecutors, and detention officials, Professor Balbus provides a complete reconstruction of the response of the criminal courts of Los Angeles, Detroit, and Chicago to the "civil disorders" that occurred in these cities. What emerges is a disturbing picture of the relationship between court systems and participants and the local political environments in which they operate.