Justice Studies 101 - Hill: Books

The Constitution contains numerous safeguards that check the state's power to lock people away. Yet since the 1960s the Supreme Court has repeatedly disregarded these limits, bowing instead to unfounded claims that adherence to the Constitution is incompatible with public safety.

Providing a complete view of U.S. legal principles, this book addresses distinct issues as well as the overlays and connections between them. It presents as a cohesive whole the interrelationships between constitutional principles, statutory criminal laws, procedural law, and common-law evidentiary doctrines.

A leading authority on sheriffs investigates the impunity with which they police their communities, alongside the troubling role they play in American life, law enforcement, and, increasingly, national politics.

This powerful book on racism in the United States argues that a threatening narrative originating in slavery continues to link Black people to inferiority, dangerousness, and crime, causing them to be presumed guilty by society and U.S. legal systems.

Like Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy, The Sing Sing Files is a deeply personal account of wrongful imprisonment and the flaws in our justice system, and a powerful argument for reckoning and accountability. Slepian's extraordinary book, at once painful and full of hope, shines a light on an injustice whose impact the nation has only begun to confront.

Innocence Project attorney M. Chris Fabricant presents an insider's journey into the heart of a broken, racist system of justice and the role junk science plays in maintaining the status quo.

New technology has offered the public the opportunity to witness police use of force far more frequently than in the past. What sort of guidelines have police departments given their officers, and are they appropriate guidelines? Do the officers follow them?

Police body cameras, or even the exhortation for civil rights mean nothing in the absence of equality and dignity. To upset dominant practices of abuse, oppression and disregard, we must reach instead for radical sensibility. Radical sensibility requires that we become cognizant of the history of black thought and activism.

Policing the Black Man explores and critiques the many ways the criminal justice system impacts the lives of African American boys and men at every stage of the criminal process, from arrest through sentencing.

This title addresses controversies related to police brutality including are police using excessive force? Is police brutality a widespread problem in the United States? How can police brutality be stopped? What is the US government's response to police brutality?