Book picks similar to
Beat the Heat: How to Handle Encounters With Law Enforcement by Katya Komisaruk
prisons
police-abuse
prison-industrial-complex
prisoners
Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha - 2020
This is How We Survive focuses on concrete alternatives to policing and prisons. From practical tool-kits and personal essays, to supporting people in mental health crises, to community-based murder investigations, this text delves deeply into the “how to” of transformative justice. Along the way, this volume documents the history of this radical movement, creating space for long time organizers to reflect on victories, struggles, mistakes, and transformations.
Generation Oxy: From High School Wrestlers to Pain Pill Kingpins
Douglas Dodd - 2017
This teenage criminal enterprise ultimately shipped hundreds of thousands of OxyContins and other prescription painkillers throughout the country, making millions in the process.This true crime memoir details the three-year-long rise and collapse of the Barabas Criminal Enterprise, an opiod-pill trafficking ring founded by Douglas Dodd and his best friend on the wrestling team, Lance Barabas. Raised by an alcoholic mother and surrounded by drug-abusing relatives, Dodd got involved in narcotics at an early age. Their scheme to sell the drugs he was already consuming coincided with the explosion of prescription addicts who were traveling the “Oxy Express” to Florida for easy access to the pills they dubbed “hillbilly heroin.” Soon they were shipping forty thousand pills a month, with tens of thousands of dollars returning in hollowed-out teddy bears.In Generation Oxy, Dodd recounts his time as a wannabe Scarface: bottle service at clubs, an arsenal of weapons that would make Dillinger blush, narrow escapes from the law, hordes of young women, and as many pills as he could swallow. And this was all before he was legally able to drink a beer, while still living with his grandmother. The good times came to an end when the DEA closed in and the twenty-year-old Dodd faced life in federal prison.
None of the Above
Rick Edwards - 2015
What with broken promises, complicated jargon and a lack of simple and clear information, is it any wonder that voter turnout is plummeting? It's not that you don't care about the way the country is run - it's that you don't think you can change it. Well, you can. And this book aims to show you how, by setting out basic politics and answering questions we've all asked, like: Why do politicians lie? What do UKIP stand for? And what's going to happen to the NHS? You have a decision to make in the countdown to the May 2015 General Election. You have something politicians want. Your vote. An ambassador for #SwingtheVote and the presenter of Free Speech, Rick Edwards has written a pithy and succinct book explaining the power of your vote. A refreshing counterpoint to Russell Brand's sentiments on voting in his latest book, Revolution, it will make you think about politics in a completely new way.
Without Honour: The True Story of the Shafia Family and the Kingston Canal Murders
Rob Tripp - 2012
A father, mother and son convicted of murder. The shocking truth about the “ honourless crime” that stunned a nation.On the morning of June 30, 2009, police in a small eastern Ontario city made a ghastly discovery: four females dead in a car submerged in a shallow canal. Sisters Zainab Shafia, 19, Sahar Shafia, 17, Geeti Shafia, 13, and Rona Mohammad Amir, 50, floated serenely inside the car, seemingly the victims of a terrible accident. That morning, Mohammad Shafia, his wife Tooba and their son, Hamed, arrived at the Kingston police station to report the four missing. In a sweeping covert investigation that spanned three continents, police uncovered layers of lies in the Shafias’ story and they developed a horrifying theory: Zainab, Sahar, Geeti and Rona had been the victims of a meticulously plotted family murder � Canada’ s first mass honour killing.In Without Honour, award-winning journalist Rob Tripp draws on three years of exhaustive research and exclusive interviews to make sense of a senseless crime in a way no other writer could. His unprecedented access tells a story beyond anything the jury heard: a story about a patriarch who fled war and strife in Afghanistan but who did not leave behind his devotion to repressive tradition. Tripp was the first journalist on the scene as the news broke and the only reporter to attend every day of court sessions, through to the convictions of Shafia, Tooba and Hamed on four counts each of first-degree murder, fuelled by what Ontario Superior Court Judge Robert Maranger called a “ twisted notion of honour.” In this gripping and compassionate account, Tripp reveals the heartbreaking and stunning truth about the desperate lives of four women who died in the pursuit of freedom.
Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word
Randall Kennedy - 2002
Paradoxically, among many black people it has become a term of affection and even empowerment. The word, of course, is nigger, and in this candid, lucidly argued book the distinguished legal scholar Randall Kennedy traces its origins, maps its multifarious connotations, and explores the controversies that rage around it.Should blacks be able to use nigger in ways forbidden to others? Should the law treat it as a provocation that reduces the culpability of those who respond to it violently? Should it cost a person his job, or a book like Huckleberry Finn its place on library shelves? With a range of reference that extends from the Jim Crow south to Chris Rock routines and the O. J. Simpson trial, Kennedy takes on not just a word, but our laws, attitudes, and culture with bracing courage and intelligence.
Lawyer X
Patrick Carlyon - 2020
It took the police a decade to curtail the violence and bring down criminal kingpins Carl Williams, Tony Mokbel and their accomplices. When the police finally closed the case file, just how they really won the war, with the help of an unlikely police informer, would become a closely guarded secret and its exposure, the biggest legal scandal of our time.Lawyer X is the scandalous, true story of how a promising defence barrister from a privileged background broke all the rules - becoming both police informer and her client's lover - sharing their secrets and shaping the gangland war that led to sensational arrests and convictions. The story of how Nicola Gobbo became Lawyer X, and why, is a compelling study in desperation and determination.Lawyer X is the definitive story of Melbourne's gangland wars and its most glamorous and compelling central character, based on the ground-breaking work of investigative journalists Anthony Dowsley and Patrick Carlyon, who broke the story for the Herald Sun in 2014, and their five-year struggle to reveal the truth about the identity of Lawyer X.
Race, Incarceration, and American Values
Glenn C. Loury - 2008
Our incarceration rate--at 714 per 100,000 residents and rising--is almost forty percent greater than our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). More pointedly, it is 6.2 times the Canadian rate and 12.3 times the rate in Japan. Economist Glenn Loury argues that this extraordinary mass incarceration is not a response to rising crime rates or a proud success of social policy. Instead, it is the product of a generation-old collective decision to become a more punitive society. He connects this policy to our history of racial oppression, showing that the punitive turn in American politics and culture emerged in the post-civil rights years and has today become the main vehicle for the reproduction of racial hierarchies. Whatever the explanation, Loury argues, the uncontroversial fact is that changes in our criminal justice system since the 1970s have created a nether class of Americans--vastly disproportionately black and brown--with severely restricted rights and life chances. Moreover, conservatives and liberals agree that the growth in our prison population has long passed the point of diminishing returns. Stigmatizing and confining of a large segment of our population should be unacceptable to Americans. Loury's call to action makes all of us now responsible for ensuring that the policy changes.
Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming: The NIPCC Report on Scientific Consensus
Craig D. Idso - 2015
This claim is not only false, but its presence in the debate is an insult to science." With these words, the authors begin a detailed analysis of one of the most controversial topics of the day. The authors make a compelling case against claims of a scientific consensus. The purported proof of such a consensus consists of sloppy research by nonscientists, college students, and a highly partisan Australian blogger. Surveys of climate scientists, even those heavily biased in favor of climate alarmism, find extensive disagreement on the underlying science and doubts about its reliability. The authors point to four reasons why scientists disagree about global warming: a conflict among scientists in different and often competing disciplines; fundamental scientific uncertainties concerning how the global climate responds to the human presence; failure of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to provide objective guidance to the complex science; and bias among researchers. The authors offer a succinct summary of the real science of climate change based on their previously published comprehensive review of climate science in a volume titled Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science. They recommend that policymakers resist pressure from lobby groups to silence scientists who question the authority of the IPCC to claim to speak for climate science. More than 50,000 copies of the first edition were sold or given away in five months to elected officials, civic and business leaders, scientists, and other opinion leaders. The response from the science community and experts on climate change has been overwhelmingly positive. To meet demand for more copies, we have produced this second revised edition. Changes include a foreword by Marita Noon, at the time executive director of Energy Makes America Great, Inc. Some of the discussion in Chapter 1 has been revised and expanded thanks to feedback from readers of the first edition. Graphs in Chapters 4, 5, and 6 are now full color, and new graphs have been added.
Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life
Karen E. Fields - 2012
Sociologist Karen E. Fields and historian Barbara J. Fields argue otherwise: the practice of racism produces the illusion of race, through what they call “racecraft.” And this phenomenon is intimately entwined with other forms of inequality in American life. So pervasive are the devices of racecraft in American history, economic doctrine, politics, and everyday thinking that the presence of racecraft itself goes unnoticed.That the promised post-racial age has not dawned, the authors argue, reflects the failure of Americans to develop a legitimate language for thinking about and discussing inequality. That failure should worry everyone who cares about democratic institutions.
Gimson's Presidents: Brief Lives From Washington to Trump
Andrew Gimson - 2020
Helping to bring these forgotten figures into the light, Andrew Gimson's illuminating accounts are accompanied by sketches from Guardian sartirical cartoonist, Martin Rowson, making this the perfect gift for all lovers of history and politics.
Greetings from Myanmar
David Bockino - 2016
Traversing the country, he encounters a pompous Western businessman swindling his way to millions, a local vendor with a flair for painting nudes, and long ago legends of a western circus. Sensitively written and expertly researched, Greetings from Myanmar: Exploring the Price of Progress in One of the Last Countries on Earth to Open for Business is the story of a flourishing nation still very much in limbo and an answer to the hard questions that arise when tourism not only charts, but shapes a place as well.
You Have the Right to Remain Innocent
James Duane - 2016
Duane became a viral sensation thanks to a 2008 lecture outlining the reasons why you should never agree to answer questions from the police—especially if you are innocent and wish to stay out of trouble with the law. In this timely, relevant, and pragmatic new book, he expands on that presentation, offering a vigorous defense of every citizen’s constitutionally protected right to avoid self-incrimination. Getting a lawyer is not only the best policy, Professor Duane argues, it’s also the advice law-enforcement professionals give their own kids.Using actual case histories of innocent men and women exonerated after decades in prison because of information they voluntarily gave to police, Professor Duane demonstrates the critical importance of a constitutional right not well or widely understood by the average American. Reflecting the most recent attitudes of the Supreme Court, Professor Duane argues that it is now even easier for police to use your own words against you. This lively and informative guide explains what everyone needs to know to protect themselves and those they love.
Exit Ramp: A Short Case Study of the Profitability of Panhandling
David P. Spears II - 2013
During the summer of his senior year at college, while earning a B.A. in Economics and Political Science, David P. Spears spent eighty hours undercover as a panhandler. Systematically recording every transaction at the exit ramp, Spears captured a rarely seen picture of how modern urban charity works.This book is the record of his adventures, part economic research, part investigative journalism. Both the numbers and the stories behind the numbers provide answers to the questions we’ve all been wondering: Who gives more to panhandlers—men or women? What percentage of drivers roll down their windows to donate? And most important of all, how much can a panhandler earn per hour?Get out your bi-weekly pay stub—by the end of this book you’ll know if you make more or less than the guy with the cardboard sign.
Baptized in Tear Gas: From White Moderate to Abolitionist
Elle Dowd - 2021
called the tension-free, ordered negative peace of white moderates. Then Michael Brown, a Black man, was murdered by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, and the subsequent Uprising changed everything.In Baptized in Tear Gas, minister and activist Elle Dowd tells the gripping story of her transformation into an Assata Shakur-reading, courthouse-occupying abolitionist with an arrest record, hungry for the revolution. Thanks to deep relationships with people in Ferguson and St. Louis, and to experiencing a fraction of the system for herself--including the fear of rubber bullets, the shock of sound cannons, and running from tear gas--Dowd fully committed to the work of anti-racism and abolition. Now she wants to help other white allies do the same.Like in baptism, this transformation requires parts of us to die: our lack of power analysis, our commitment to white niceness, our tone policing, our respectability politics--all of those impulses we have been socialized by since birth must die so that something new can be resurrected in our lives and in the world. The uprising in Ferguson changed Dowd, and through it, God made her into something new.Now it's our turn.
The Bohemian Grove: Facts & Fiction
Mark Dice - 2015
Is this mysterious meeting “just a vacation spot” for the wealthy and well-connected, or is it something more? Does it operate as an off the record consensus building organization for the elite establishment? What major plans or political policies were given birth by the club? Do they really kickoff their gathering each year with a human sacrifice ritual? Is this the infamous Illuminati? After getting his hands on some rare copies of the club’s yearbooks; obtaining an actual official membership list smuggled out by an employee; and having personally been blocked from entering the club by police—secret society expert Mark Dice uncovers The Bohemian Grove: Facts & Fiction. By the Author of The Illuminati: Facts & Fiction-Their History-Symbols, Saint, and Motto-Infiltrations and Leaks-Cremation of Care-Different Subcamps-Allegations of Murder-Hookers & Homosexuality-Depictions in TV and Film-And More!