Review essay: three lenses on race, crime, and justice

Abstract

Mary Louise Frampton, Ian Haney Lopez, and Jonathan Simon (eds.), After the War on Crime: Race, Democracy, and a New Reconstruction, New York: New York University Press, 2008. Lauren J. Krivo and Ruth D. Peterson (eds.), Race, Crime, and Justice: Contexts and Complexities, special editors: The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, volume 623: May 2009. Michael J. Lynch, E. Britt Patterson, and Kristina K. Childs. Monsey (eds.), Racial Divide: Racial and Ethnic Bias in the Criminal Justice System, NY: Criminal Justice Press, 2008. The recent publication of three collections of original work on race/ethnicity, crime, and criminal justice allow criminologists and others the opportunity to assess the degree to which the study of race, crime, justice, and social control has evolved since the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. Each of the anthologies under review is certainly well worth reading alone, but the overlapping analyses as well as the slightly different orientations to the subject matter, makes the reading of all three together a much fuller experience. At the same time, each of these collections on the “theory and practice” of race/ethnicity, crime, and justice in the United States are subject to a similar kind of critique. The sheer number of essays involved here, prohibits this reviewer by and large from doing any more than identifying them by title and author for the purpose of giving the reader some sense of the eclectic and sumptuous offerings found inside of these three volumes. Instead of addressing more than forty contributions, this review essay is divided without formal separation into two substantive unequal parts. The Crime Law Soc Change (2010) 53:299–306 DOI 10.1007/s10611-009-9220-2