Conviction

Conviction PDF Author: Oliver Rollins
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 150362790X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
Exposing ethical dilemmas of neuroscientific research on violence, this book warns against a dystopian future in which behavior is narrowly defined in relation to our biological makeup. Biological explanations for violence have existed for centuries, as has criticism of this kind of deterministic science, haunted by a long history of horrific abuse. Yet, this program has endured because of, and not despite, its notorious legacy. Today's scientists are well beyond the nature versus nurture debate. Instead, they contend that scientific progress has led to a nature and nurture, biological and social, stance that allows it to avoid the pitfalls of the past. In Conviction Oliver Rollins cautions against this optimism, arguing that the way these categories are imagined belies a dangerous continuity between past and present. The late 1980s ushered in a wave of techno-scientific advancements in the genetic and brain sciences. Rollins focuses on an often-ignored strand of research, the neuroscience of violence, which he argues became a key player in the larger conversation about the biological origins of criminal, violent behavior. Using powerful technologies, neuroscientists have rationalized an idea of the violent brain—or a brain that bears the marks of predisposition toward "dangerousness." Drawing on extensive analysis of neurobiological research, interviews with neuroscientists, and participant observation, Rollins finds that this construct of the brain is ill-equipped to deal with the complexities and contradictions of the social world, much less the ethical implications of informing treatment based on such simplified definitions. Rollins warns of the potentially devastating effects of a science that promises to "predict" criminals before the crime is committed, in a world that already understands violence largely through a politic of inequality.

Conviction

Conviction PDF Author: Oliver Rollins
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 150362790X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 287

Get Book Here

Book Description
Exposing ethical dilemmas of neuroscientific research on violence, this book warns against a dystopian future in which behavior is narrowly defined in relation to our biological makeup. Biological explanations for violence have existed for centuries, as has criticism of this kind of deterministic science, haunted by a long history of horrific abuse. Yet, this program has endured because of, and not despite, its notorious legacy. Today's scientists are well beyond the nature versus nurture debate. Instead, they contend that scientific progress has led to a nature and nurture, biological and social, stance that allows it to avoid the pitfalls of the past. In Conviction Oliver Rollins cautions against this optimism, arguing that the way these categories are imagined belies a dangerous continuity between past and present. The late 1980s ushered in a wave of techno-scientific advancements in the genetic and brain sciences. Rollins focuses on an often-ignored strand of research, the neuroscience of violence, which he argues became a key player in the larger conversation about the biological origins of criminal, violent behavior. Using powerful technologies, neuroscientists have rationalized an idea of the violent brain—or a brain that bears the marks of predisposition toward "dangerousness." Drawing on extensive analysis of neurobiological research, interviews with neuroscientists, and participant observation, Rollins finds that this construct of the brain is ill-equipped to deal with the complexities and contradictions of the social world, much less the ethical implications of informing treatment based on such simplified definitions. Rollins warns of the potentially devastating effects of a science that promises to "predict" criminals before the crime is committed, in a world that already understands violence largely through a politic of inequality.

Harlem

Harlem PDF Author: Camilo José Vergara
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022603447X
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
For more than a century, Harlem has been the epicenter of black America, the celebrated heart of African American life and culture—but it has also been a byword for the problems that have long plagued inner-city neighborhoods: poverty, crime, violence, disinvestment, and decay. Photographer Camilo José Vergara has been chronicling the neighborhood for forty-three years, and Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto is an unprecedented record of urban change. Vergara began his documentation of Harlem in the tradition of such masters as Helen Levitt and Aaron Siskind, and he later turned his focus on the neighborhood’s urban fabric, both the buildings that compose it and the life and culture embedded in them. By repeatedly returning to the same locations over the course of decades, Vergara is able to show us a community that is constantly changing—some areas declining, as longtime businesses give way to empty storefronts, graffiti, and garbage, while other areas gentrify, with corporate chain stores coming in to compete with the mom-and-pops. He also captures the ever-present street life of this densely populated neighborhood, from stoop gatherings to graffiti murals memorializing dead rappers to impersonators honoring Michael Jackson in front of the Apollo, as well as the growth of tourism and racial integration. Woven throughout the images is Vergara’s own account of his project and his experience of living and working in Harlem. Taken together, his unforgettable words and images tell the story of how Harlem and its residents navigated the segregation, dereliction and slow recovery of the closing years of the twentieth century and the boom and racial integration of the twenty-first century. A deeply personal investigation, Harlem will take its place with the best portrayals of urban life.

Organized Crime and American Power

Organized Crime and American Power PDF Author: Michael Woodiwiss
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802082787
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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Book Description
Historisch overzicht van de samenhang en wederzijdse beïnvloeding van de georganiseerde misdaad en de politiek in de Verenigde Staten.

Why We Harm

Why We Harm PDF Author: Lois Presser
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813562600
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
Criminologists are primarily concerned with the analysis of actions that violate existing laws. But a growing number have begun analyzing crimes as actions that inflict harm, regardless of the applicability of legal sanctions. Even as they question standard definitions of crime as law-breaking, scholars of crime have few theoretical frameworks with which to understand the etiology of harmful action. In Why We Harm, Lois Presser scrutinizes accounts of acts as diverse as genocide, environmental degradation, war, torture, terrorism, homicide, rape, and meat-eating in order to develop an original theoretical framework with which to consider harmful actions and their causes. In doing so, this timely book presents a general theory of harm, revealing the commonalities between actions that impose suffering and cause destruction. Harm is built on stories in which the targets of harm are reduced to one-dimensional characters—sometimes a dangerous foe, sometimes much more benign, but still a projection of our own concerns and interests. In our stories of harm, we are licensed to do the harmful deed and, at the same time, are powerless to act differently. Chapter by chapter, Presser examines statements made by perpetrators of a wide variety of harmful actions. Appearing vastly different from one another at first glance, Presser identifies the logics they share that motivate, legitimize, and sustain them. From that point, she maps out strategies for reducing harm.

Cultural Histories of Crime in Denmark, 1500 to 2000

Cultural Histories of Crime in Denmark, 1500 to 2000 PDF Author: Tyge Krogh
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351691082
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Taking the kingdom of Denmark as its frame of reference, this volume presents a range of close analyses that shed light on the construction and deconstruction of crime and criminals, on criminal cultures and on crime control from 1500 to 2000. Historically, there have been major changes in the legal definition of those acts that are legally defined as being criminal offences – and of those that are not. This volume explores the criteria and perceptions underlying definitions of crime in a powerful and absolutist Lutheran state and subsequently in a Denmark characterised by social welfare and sexual liberation. It places special focus on moral issues rooted in considerations of religion and sexuality.

Making and Unmaking Intellectual Property

Making and Unmaking Intellectual Property PDF Author: Mario Biagioli
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022617249X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 476

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Book Description
Rules regulating access to knowledge are no longer the exclusive province of lawyers and policymakers and instead command the attention of anthropologists, economists, literary theorists, political scientists, artists, historians, and cultural critics. This burgeoning interdisciplinary interest in “intellectual property” has also expanded beyond the conventional categories of patent, copyright, and trademark to encompass a diverse array of topics ranging from traditional knowledge to international trade. Though recognition of the central role played by “knowledge economies” has increased, there is a special urgency associated with present-day inquiries into where rights to information come from, how they are justified, and the ways in which they are deployed. Making and Unmaking Intellectual Property, edited by Mario Biagioli, Peter Jaszi, and Martha Woodmansee, presents a range of diverse—and even conflicting—contemporary perspectives on intellectual property rights and the contested sources of authority associated with them. Examining fundamental concepts and challenging conventional narratives—including those centered around authorship, invention, and the public domain—this book provides a rich introduction to an important intersection of law, culture, and material production.

Unmaking Migrants

Unmaking Migrants PDF Author: Stacey Vanderhurst
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501763547
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
Unmaking Migrants engages critical questions about preventing trafficking by preventing migration through a study of a shelter for trafficking victims in Lagos, Nigeria. Over the past fifteen years, antitrafficking personnel have stopped thousands of women from traveling out of Nigeria and instead sent them to the federal counter-trafficking agency for investigation, protection, and rehabilitation. Government officials defend this form of intervention as preemptive, having intercepted the women before any abuses take place. Yet many of the women protest their detention, insist they were not being trafficked, and demand to be released. As Stacey Vanderhurst argues, migration can be a freely made choice. Unmaking Migrants shows the moments leading up to the migration choice, and it shows how well-intentioned efforts to help women considering these paths often don't address their real needs at all.

Unmaking a Murder

Unmaking a Murder PDF Author: Graham Archer
Publisher: Random House Australia
ISBN: 0143784064
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
An investigation into an intriguing murder case and an unprecedented account of how the decisions made by organs of government can be defended and mistakes covered up. Anna-Jane Cheney worked at the epicentre of the conservative Adelaide legal community. She was vivacious, popular and talented, with an impeccable middle-class upbringing. The man she loved, Henry Vincent Keogh, was a divorced 39-year-old Irish migrant with three children. She died just six weeks before their wedding date. According to the prosecution, Keogh had planned the drowning murder of Anna-Jane 18 months in advance. He had taken out five insurance policies amounting to $1.2 million over his fiancée’s life and forged her signature on them. Journalist Graham Archer became fascinated by the case. It wasn’t a matter of Henry Keogh’s guilt or innocence, but that a man could be sentenced to life in prison without him having received a fair trial. The story became an odyssey for Graham. Deliberately, he had no contact with Henry Keogh in the 13 years it took to have the case reviewed by the Supreme Court and have his conviction quashed. In the end dogged determination prevailed, and after 20 years behind bars Henry Keogh was released.

Making and Unmaking Nations

Making and Unmaking Nations PDF Author: Scott Straus
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801455677
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
Winner of the Grawmeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order, 2018 Winner of the Joseph Lepgold Prize Winner of the Best Books in Conflict Studies (APSA) Winner of the Best Book in Human Rights (ISA) In Making and Unmaking Nations, Scott Straus seeks to explain why and how genocide takes place—and, perhaps more important, how it has been avoided in places where it may have seemed likely or even inevitable. To solve that puzzle, he examines postcolonial Africa, analyzing countries in which genocide occurred and where it could have but did not. Why have there not been other Rwandas? Straus finds that deep-rooted ideologies—how leaders make their nations—shape strategies of violence and are central to what leads to or away from genocide. Other critical factors include the dynamics of war, the role of restraint, and the interaction between national and local actors in the staging of campaigns of large-scale violence. Grounded in Straus's extensive fieldwork in contemporary Africa, the study of major twentieth-century cases of genocide, and the literature on genocide and political violence, Making and Unmaking Nations centers on cogent analyses of three nongenocide cases (Côte d'Ivoire, Mali, and Senegal) and two in which genocide took place (Rwanda and Sudan). Straus's empirical analysis is based in part on an original database of presidential speeches from 1960 to 2005. The book also includes a broad-gauge analysis of all major cases of large-scale violence in Africa since decolonization. Straus's insights into the causes of genocide will inform the study of political violence as well as giving policymakers and nongovernmental organizations valuable tools for the future.

Corporate Bodies and Guilty Minds

Corporate Bodies and Guilty Minds PDF Author: William S. Laufer
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226470423
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
We live in an era defined by corporate greed and malfeasance—one in which unprecedented accounting frauds and failures of compliance run rampant. In order to calm investor fears, revive perceptions of legitimacy in markets, and demonstrate the resolve of state and federal regulators, a host of reforms, high-profile investigations, and symbolic prosecutions have been conducted in response. But are they enough? In this timely work, William S. Laufer argues that even with recent legal reforms, corporate criminal law continues to be ineffective. As evidence, Laufer considers the failure of courts and legislatures to fashion liability rules that fairly attribute blame for organizations. He analyzes the games that corporations play to deflect criminal responsibility. And he also demonstrates how the exchange of cooperation for prosecutorial leniency and amnesty belies true law enforcement. But none of these factors, according to Laufer, trumps the fact that there is no single constituency or interest group that strongly and consistently advocates the importance and priority of corporate criminal liability. In the absence of a new standard of corporate liability, the power of regulators to keep corporate abuses in check will remain insufficient. A necessary corrective to our current climate of graft and greed, Corporate Bodies and Guilty Minds will be essential to policymakers and legal minds alike. “[This] timely work offers a dispassionate analysis of problems relating to corporate crime.”—Harvard Law Review