This book examines a victim-offender dialogue program that offers victims of severe violence an opportunity to meet face-to-face with their incarcerated offenders. Using interview data, it follows the harrowing stories of crime and violence, ultimately moving beyond story-telling to provide both an accessible analysis of restorative justice and evidence that the program has significantly helped the victims. It also looks at how the program has impacted offenders, many of whom have also experienced positive changes in their lives in terms of creating greater accountability and greater victim empathy.

The issue of resettling ex-prisoners and ex-offenders into the community has become an increasingly important one on both sides of the Atlantic. In the USA the former Attorney General Janet Reno identified the issue as 'one of the most pressing problems we face as a nation' in view of the massive prison population and the rapid increase in rates of incarceration, while in the UK it has become an increasingly important issue for similar reasons, and the subject of recent reports by HM Inspectorate of Prisons and HM Inspectorate of Probation, as well as from the Social Exclusion Unit of the Home Office. Yet this issue has not been well served by the criminological literature, and the new policies and programmes that have been set up to address the problem have not been well grounded in criminological thinking. This book seeks to address the important set of issues involved by bringing together the best of recent thinking and research into desistance from crime, drawing upon research in both the UK and the USA, and with a distinct focus on how this might impact upon the design and implementation of ex-offender reintegration policy.

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Analyzing the findings of 20 studies, involving more than 5,000 people, this book explores the decision making process of the crime victim in the immediate aftermath of victimization. Using a broad range of innovative research techniques, the authors assess the effects of rape, robbery, burglary, and theft on individuals from diverse nationalities and ethnic backgrounds. This work will be of value to people who work directly with crime victims, and to researchers who are interested in the process of decision making under stressful circumstances.

International interventions in the aftermath of mass violence tend to focus on justice and reconciliation processes, elections and institution-building. The frame of reference tends to be at the state level with insufficient attention paid to the transformations of belief systems and codes of conduct. This book seeks to bridge this divide by offering a trans-disciplinary analysis of the impact of mass crime on the rebuilding of social and political relations. Drawing on historical and more recent cases (including examples from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Burundi, Cambodia, Indonesia, Peru, and Rwanda) the authors examine the impact of mass crimes on individuals, society at large, and the organizations involved in providing assistance in the post-conflict phase.

Reveals how liberal democracy and free-market economics reproduce the inequalities of apartheid in Cape Town, South Africa.

A compelling case can be made that violent crime, especially after the 1960s, was one of the most significant domestic issues in the United States. Indeed, few issues had as profound an effect on American life in the last third of the twentieth century. After 1965, crime rose to such levels that it frightened virtually all Americans and prompted significant alterations in everyday behaviors and even lifestyles. The risk of being mugged was a concern when Americans chose places to live and schools for their children, selected commuter routes to work, and planned their leisure activities. In some locales, people were afraid to leave their dwellings at any time, day or night, even to go to the market. In the worst of the post-1960s crime wave, Americans spent part of each day literally looking back over their shoulders. The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America is the first book to comprehensively examine this important phenomenon over the entire postwar era. It combines a social history of the United States with the insights of criminology and examines the relationship between rising and falling crime and such historical developments as the postwar economic boom, suburbanization and the rise of the middle class, baby booms and busts, war and antiwar protest, the urbanization of minorities, and more.