Showing titles in Criminology

On a summer night in 2009, three lives intersected in one American neighborhood. Two people newly in love - Teresa Butz and Jennifer Hopper, who spent many years trying to find themselves and who eventually found each other - and a young man on a dangerous psychological descent: Isaiah Kalebu, age 23, the son of a distant, authoritarian father and a mother with a family history of mental illness. All three paths forever altered by a violent crime, all three stories a wake-up call to the system that failed to see the signs.

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.

Les solutions à ces problèmes peuvent nous sauter aux yeux, mais si nous n'essayons pas, nous ne les trouverons jamais et nous n'atteindrons pas notre plein potentiel. Pour certains, les relations avec les gens peuvent être très stressantes, mais ce n'est pas une fatalité ! Il faut mettre de côté les blocages et les bagages qui nous pèsent, il faut se libérer.

In 1978, 56-year-old Leoma Patterson left a bar in Clinton, Tennessee, and was never seen again. Six months later, a female skeleton was found on a wooded lakeshore in a neighboring county. The bones were consistent with those of the missing woman, and one of Patterson's daughters recognized a ring found at the death scene as her mother's. The bones were buried, and six years later, a relative of Patterson's - one of the men she was last seen alive with - confessed to killing her. Case closed.

During the early 1970s, more than three dozen teenage boys went missing from the working-class neighborhood of Houston Heights, in the south of Texas. The parents of a number of these boys received strange postcards from their sons, telling them that they were fine and that they had found jobs somewhere else in the state, anywhere from Dallas to Austin. Then, in August 1973, the Houston Police Department made a shocking discovery; something that would later become known as the Houston Mass Murders.

Edmund Emil Kemper III achieved notoriety as a serial killer when he took the lives of 10 people between August 27, 1964, and April 21, 1973. His victims included his adoptive grandparents, six co-eds from the University of Santa Cruz, his mother, and his mother's friend. This book explored the life of Kemper from his abusive childhood to his sentencing in November 1973. The horror of Kemper's actions go beyond the killing of his victims; it was what he did with his victims' bodies after killing them.

Il Dottore is the true story of a "nerdy Jewish kid" from the Bronx who, through a series of circumstances, became physician to top Mafia Dons including John Gotti, Carlos Gambino, and Joe Bonanno. At the same time, his reputation as a medical genius was spreading, and he was fast becoming one of the nation's leading cardiac surgeons. Ron Felber paints a vivid portrait of this doctor's unlikely life in the fast lane as he becomes a top confidante of New York's most notorious criminals.

We live in the Age of the Gun. Around the globe, firearms are ubiquitous and define countless lives; in some places, it's even easier to get a gun than a glass of clean water. In others, it's legal to carry concealed firearms into bars and schools. In The Way of the Gun, Iain Overton embarks on a remarkable journey to understand how these weapons have become an integral part of 21st century life, beyond the economics of supply and demand.

One in three American children will be arrested by the time they are 23, and many will spend time locked inside horrific detention centers that defy everything we know about what motivates young people to change. Nell Bernstein argues that there is no right way to lock up a child. A landmark book, Burning Down the House sparked a national conversation about our inhumane and ineffectual juvenile prisons, and ultimately makes the radical argument that the only path to justice is for state-run detention centers to be abolished completely.

Phil Chalmers has spent more than a decade visiting high security prisons to interview young offenders, his mission is to attempt to answer the questions we all are asking. In Inside the Mind of a Teen Killer, Phil explores the reasons why teens kill; the warning signs we must be looking for; and offers a game plan to keep our homes, schools, and communities safe. This book may help save your life or the life of a child you love!

On the eve of a major treaty conference between Iroquois leaders and European colonists in the distant summer of 1722, two White fur traders attacked an Indigenous hunter and left him for dead near Conestoga, Pennsylvania. This act of brutality set into motion a remarkable series of criminal investigations and cross-cultural negotiations that challenged the definition of justice in early America. Leading historian Nicole Eustace reconstructs the crime and its aftermath, bringing us into the overlapping worlds of white colonists and Indigenous peoples in this formative period.

How can we be proud of a system of justice that often pressures the innocent to plead guilty? How can we claim that justice is equal when we imprison thousands of poor Black men for relatively modest crimes but rarely prosecute rich white executives who commit crimes having far greater impact? Federal Judge Jed S. Rakoff, a leading authority on white-collar crime, explores these and other puzzles in Why the Innocent Plead Guilty and the Guilty Go Free, a startling account of our broken legal system.

Hate crimes are spiralling to an all-time high on both sides of the Atlantic, with minorities experiencing the largest increase in hostility towards their race, nationality, sexuality and religion since records began. Whilst recent political turmoil could be a contributing factor to this spike, professor Matthew Williams shows that there is nothing temporary about the hate that has been stirred up.

Ellen McGarrahan was a young journalist for The Miami Herald in 1990 when she witnessed the botched execution of convicted killer Jesse Tafero: flames and smoke and three jolts of the electric chair. When evidence later emerged casting doubt on Tafero’s guilt, McGarrahan found herself haunted by his fiery death. Had she witnessed the execution of an innocent man? Decades later, McGarrahan, now a successful private investigator, is still gripped by the mystery and infamy of the Tafero case, and decides she must investigate it herself.

This gang of serial killers did unthinkable crimes. It's hard to believe that their story is not a work of fiction. But it's not! Most serial killers work alone. Killing is usually a private crime, something that mass murderers are keen to keep hidden. But this is not always the case. During the 1990s, a small town in Australia witnessed first-hand how devastating, horrendous, and effective a gang of serial killers could be.

From Wilbert Rideau, the award-winning journalist who spent 44 years in Louisiana prisons working against unimaginable odds to redeem himself, the story of a remarkable life: A crime, its punishment, and ultimate triumph. After killing a woman in a moment of panic following a botched bank robbery, Rideau, denied a fair trial, was improperly sentenced to death at the age of 19. After more than a decade on death row, his sentence was amended to life imprisonment, and he joined the inmate population of the infamous Angola penitentiary.

When the ashes had settled after World War II and the Allies convened an international war crimes trial in Nuremberg, a psychiatrist, Douglas Kelley, and a psychologist, Gustave Gilbert, tried to fathom the psychology of the Nazi leaders using extensive psychiatric interviews, IQ tests, and Rorschach inkblot tests. Never before or since has there been such a detailed study of governmental leaders who orchestrated mass killings.

In the lovely town of Pleasant Valley in upstate New York, the maple trees were ablaze with fall's blood-red color. The air was crisp. And a woman named Susan Fassett left her weekly choir practice at a church - when a killer emerged from the shadows and mercilessly gunned her down.

This detailed account of his life, crimes, and death makes extensive use of FBI reports, government records, local newspapers, and contemporary journalistic accounts. Neither highly intelligent nor polished, Floyd relied on his cool demeanor, shrewd cunning, and expert gun-handling ability, but he was also considered by those who knew him to be generous and honest. During the depression, many people saw banks as enemies and Floyd as a hero, and helped screen him from the police.

Leah Carroll's mother, a gifted amateur photographer, was murdered by two drug dealers with Mafia connections when Leah was four years old. Her father, a charming alcoholic who hurtled between depression and mania, was dead by the time she was 18. Why did her mother have to die? Why did the man who killed her receive such a light sentence? What darkness did Leah inherit from her parents? Leah was left to put together her own future, and now in her memoir she explores the mystery of her parents' lives through interviews and police records.