Don’t Shoot
by David M. Kennedy
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The Collapse of American Criminal Justice
by William J. Stuntz
(Harvard, $35)
William Stuntz’s new book rails against an American criminal-justice system that has become “one of the most punitive in the world without providing a corresponding level of public safety,” said Paul G. Cassell in The Wall Street Journal. After a period of low incarceration rates, the U.S. now leads the world in that category. Stuntz’s arguments for reform don’t all add up, but they “deserve wide discussion.” Whether the system has “collapsed” is debatable, “but few would argue that it can’t be improved.”
The City That Became Safe
by Franklin E. Zimring
(Oxford, $30)
Beginning in 1991, “something completely unexpected happened with New York City crime,” said Steve Chapman in the Chicago Tribune. Eighty percent of it vanished, marking the largest urban crime decline ever recorded. Berkeley criminologist Franklin Zimring argues that the biggest factors were “focusing cops on high-crime areas and closing down outdoor drug markets.” But he acknowledges that just how New York went from urban dystopia to metropolitan Mayberry remains partially a mystery.
The Justice Cascade
by Kathryn Sikkink
(Norton, $28)
The 1998 arrest of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet marked “a turning point” in the history of human rights, said G. John Ikenberry in Foreign Affairs. Rarely in past centuries were former or sitting heads of state prosecuted in court for human-rights crimes committed while in power. In Kathryn Sikkink’s telling, activists in Europe and the U.S. turned the tide. Her book is “an inspiring story of the rise and spread of a set of ideas and norms”—what the author calls a “justice cascade.”