New Books in Policing, Incarceration, and Reform

Was the use of violence on January 6th Capitol attacks legitimate? Is the use of violence morally justified by members of Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil campaigners? Justifying Violent Protest: Law and Morality in Democratic States (Routledge, 2023) addresses these issues head on, to make a radical, but compelling argument in favour of the legitimate use of violence in protest in liberal democracies. Grounded in theories of constitutional morality, the book makes the case that when states make illogical or unjust laws, citizens have morally justifiable reasons to disobey. Violence can act as moral dialogue - both expressively and directly - to denounce unjust laws, particularly in cases where civil disobedience does not go far enough. This book considers recent protest movements, of which the use of violent protest has been central to citizens demands. It examines the activism of the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests, Extinction Rebellion, Black Lives Matter movement, and other contemporary international movements. 

This book could not be more timely. In a world where citizens' rights to protest are being increasingly curtailed, and climate destruction is becoming an increasing matter of urgency, Greenwood-Reeves addresses the legitimacy of violent protest and ultimate importance in upholding liberal democracy. 

Dr James Greenwood-Reeves is a Lecturer in Law at The University of Leeds. One of his current projects @lawsadrag

Jane Richards is a doctoral student at the University of Hong Kong. You can find her on twitter where she follows all things related to human rights and Hong Kong politics @JaneRichardsHK

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Why does Indias police force, created under British rule, still echo the priorities of a bygone empire? And what is it about this institution, tasked with maintaining the law and order, that has led to a normalization of daily violence? These are the key questions that inform the analyses in this volume by lawyers, academics and activists. Divided into four broad sections, it begins by looking at the origins of the modern police force in the 1860s and demonstrates their role in maintaining socio-cultural, economic and political hierarchies even in post-Independence India. The second section explores how the law and legal infrastructure, as well as the bureaucracy in India, work to effectively facilitate police violence and to further marginalize and criminalize certain groups, like lower castes and Muslims. The penultimate section complicates this picture, examining how police violence is shaped by historical ambivalence towards democracy, the personal and systemic dynamics between police personnel and the accused, and the fraught identity of police in conflict zones like Kashmir, where authority is both granted and withheld by the state. The final section contains interviews of and reflections by prominent critics of police violence, including former Haryana DGP V.N. Rai and Abdul Wahid Shaikh, falsely accused of involvement in the 2006 Mumbai blasts. Questioning its foundational purpose and envisioning pathways to accountability and reform, Policing and Violence in India ignites a long-overdue conversation about the nature of policing in India.

Deana Heath is Professor of Indian and Colonial History at the University of Liverpool. She has written widely on issues relating to policing and violence in colonial India, particularly on torture and sexual violence. Her latest book, Colonial Terror: Torture and State Violence in Colonial India, was published by Oxford University Press in 2021.

Jinee Lokaneeta is Professor in Political Science and International Relations at Drew University, New Jersey. She is the author of The Truth Machines: Policing, Violence, and Scientific Interrogations in India, published in 2020 by the University of Michigan Press and Orient Blackswan, and Transnational Torture: Law, Violence, and State Power in the United States and India, published by New York University Press in 2011 and Orient Blackswan in 2012.

Shailza Sharma is an Assistant Professor at Jindal Global Law School, O.P. Jindal Global University.

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A few years ago, Trymaine Lee, though fit and only 38, nearly died of a heart attack. When his then five-year-old daughter, Nola, asked her daddy why, he realized that to answer her honestly, he had to confront what almost killed him—the weight of being a Black man in America; of bearing witness, as a journalist, to relentless Black death; and of a family history scarred by enslavement, lynching, the Great Migration, the also insidious racism of the North, and gun violence that stole the lives of two great-uncles, a grandfather, a stepbrother, and two cousins.
In this powerful narrative, Lee weaves together three strands: the long and bloody history of African Americans and guns; his work as a chronicler of gun violence, tallying the costs and riches generated by both the legal and illegal gun industries; and his own life story. With unflinching honesty he takes readers on a journey, from almost being caught up in gun violence as a young man, to tracing the legacy of the Middle Passage in Ghana through his ancestors’ footsteps, to confronting the challenges of representing his people in an overwhelmingly white and often hostile media world, and most importantly, to celebrating the enduring strength of his family and community.
In A Thousand Ways to Die (St. Martin’s Press, 2025) Lee answers Nola and all who seek a more just America. He shares the hard truths and complexities of the Black experience, but he also celebrates the beauty and resilience that is Nola’s legacy.

In this episode we discuss the work of Dana Tenille Weeks. You can hear her talk about the reimagination of future at Episode 22 of her podcast, The Rest of Us.

Find Trymaine Lee at his website and on Instagram.

Host Sullivan Summer is at her website, Instagram, and on Substack.

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It is impossible to deny the impact of lies and white supremacy on the institutional conditions in US prisons. There is a particular power dynamic of racist intent in the prison system that culminates in what Brittany Friedman terms "carceral apartheid." Prisons are a microcosm of how carceral apartheid operates as a larger governing strategy to decimate political targets and foster deceit, disinformation, and division in society. Among many shocking discoveries, Friedman shows that beginning in the 1950s, California prison officials declared war on imprisoned Black people and sought to identify Black militants as a key problem, creating a strategy for the management, segregation, and elimination of these individuals from the prison population that continues into the present day. Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons (UNC Press, 2025), delves into how the California Department of Corrections deployed various official, clandestine, and at times extralegal control techniques, including officer alliances with imprisoned white supremacists, to suppress Black political movements, revealing the broader themes of deception, empire, corruption, and white supremacy in American mass incarceration. Drawing from original interviews with founders of Black political movements such as the Black Guerilla Family, white supremacists, and a swath of little-known archival data, Friedman uncovers how the US domestic war against imprisoned Black people models and perpetuates genocide, imprisonment, and torture abroad.

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Policing is a source of perennial conflict and philosophical disagreement. Current political developments in the United States have only increased the urgency of this topic. Today we welcome philosopher Jake Monaghan to discuss his book, Just Policing (Oxford UP, 2023), which applies interdisciplinary insights to examine the morality of policing.

Though the injustices of our world seemingly require some kind of policing, the police are often sources of injustice themselves. But this is not always the result of intentionally or negligently bad policing. Sometimes it is an unavoidable result of the injustices that emerge from interactions with other social systems. This raises an important question of just policing: how should police respond to the injustices built into the system? Just Policing attempts an answer, offering a theory of just policing in non-ideal contexts.

Monaghan argues that police discretion is not only unavoidable, but in light of non-ideal circumstances, valuable. This claim conflicts with a widespread but inchoate view of just policing, the legalist view that finds justice in faithful enforcement of the criminal code.

But the criminal code leaves policing seriously underdetermined; full enforcement is neither possible nor desirable. Police need an alternative normative framework for evaluating and guiding their exercise of power.

Just Policing critiques popular approaches to police abolitionism while defending normative limits on police power. The book offers a defense of police discretion against common objections and evaluates controversial issues in order maintenance, such as the policing of "vice" and homelessness, democratic control over policing, community policing initiatives, police collaborations and alternatives like mental health response teams, and possibilities for structural reform.

Jake Monaghan is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Buffalo. His research is primarily in moral and political philosophy.

He is interviewed by Tom McInerney, an international lawyer, scholar, and strategist, who has worked to advance rule of law and development internationally for 25 years. He has taught in the Rule of Law for Development Program at Loyola University Chicago School of Law since 2011. He writes the Rights, Regulation and Rule of Law newsletter on Substack.

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A Clean Hell opens the doors of America’s most secretive prison and lets the reader step into the cell to experience all the horrors the Federal Bureau of Prisons tries to keep hidden underground. 

The federal supermax ADX Florence is the most secure facility in the United States, a dungeon of isolation, sensory deprivation, and psychological disintegration. Here, cruelty isn’t accidental; it’s the design. Built in 1995, the “Alcatraz of the Rockies” was made to cage the so-called worst of the worst: bombers, gang leaders, political enemies, and anyone the government deems too rebellious, too inconvenient, or too visible.

Among them was antifascist prisoner Eric King, targeted for his politics, brutally tortured by the Bureau of Prisons, and ultimately entombed at ADX after beating a politically motivated federal prosecution. A Clean Hell: Anarchy and Abolition in America’s Most Notorious Dungeon (PM Press, 2025) is a searing firsthand account from inside the most repressive prison in the United States, a place built not for rehabilitation but for disappearance. It tells the story of Eric’s decade behind bars: the years of surveillance and retaliation, the years locked in solitary confinement, the reality of being known as a “race traitor,” and the daily acts of resistance that kept him—and others—alive.

More than just a firsthand survival story and exposé, this is a blistering indictment of the carceral state and the sanitized violence it tries to hide. A Clean Hell is a crucial document of solidarity and struggle inside the belly of the beast and required reading for anyone concerned with mass incarceration, political repression, or the inhumane architecture of the US prison system.

Guest: Eric King is an anarchist who was imprisoned in 2014 for acts of solidarity with the Ferguson, Missouri, uprising. During his time in prison, which included almost two years in Federal Supermax, or ADX, Eric coedited the political prisoner anthology, Rattling the Cages: Oral Histories of North American Political Prisoners, published by AK Press, and wrote many other essays about his experiences in prison. In addition to his writing, Eric is also an activist, antifascist, and loving father and husband.

Host: Michael Stauch (he/him) is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025.

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In Life Beside Bars: Confinement and Capital in an American Prison Town (Duke UP, 2024), Heath Pearson showcases dynamic, interdependent community as the best hope for undoing the systems of confinement that reproduce capital in Cumberland County, New Jersey—a place that is home to three state prisons, one federal prison, and the regional jail. Pearson places today’s prisons within the region’s longer history of Lenape genocide, chattel slavery, Japanese American labor camps, and other forms of racialized punishment and carceral control. From this vantage, prisons appear not as the structural fix for the region’s failed political economy but as a continuation of the carceral principle that has always sustained it. This ongoing use of confinement, though, is merely the backdrop. Through ethnographic vignettes written in story form, Pearson offers an alternative history of the unruly and unexpected ways that people resist, get by, make money, find joy, and build radical social life in the small, unseen spaces beside large-scale confinement. As such, Pearson enriches our understanding of daily life in and around prisons—in any American community—while providing a kaleidoscope of possibilities for theorizing and organizing alternative paths.

Heath Pearson is Assistant Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology and Justice and Peace Studies at Georgetown University.

Alize Arıcan is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at CUNY—City College, focusing on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican

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The United States has long been an international outlier, with a powerful business class, a weak social state, and an exceptional gun culture. In Law and Order Leviathan: America’s Extraordinary Regime of Policing and Punishment (Princeton UP, 2025), David Garland shows how, after the 1960s, American-style capitalism disrupted poor communities and depleted social controls, giving rise to violence and social problems at levels altogether unknown in other affluent nations. Aggressive policing and punishment became the default response.
Garland shows that America lags behind comparable nations in protections for working people. He identifies the structural sources of America’s penal state and the community-level processes through which political economy impacts crime and policing. He argues that there is nothing paradoxical in America’s reliance on coercive state controls; the nation’s vaunted liberalism is largely an economic liberalism devoted to free markets and corporate power rather than to individual dignity and flourishing. Fear of violent crime and distrust of others ensure public support for this coercive Leviathan; racism enables indifference to its harms.
Interviewee: David Garland is the Arthur T Vanderbilt Professor of Law and Professor of Sociology at New York University and an Honorary Professor at Edinburgh University.

Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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In Prisoners after War: Veterans in the Age of Mass Incarceration (University of Mass. Press, 2024), Dr. Jason Higgins examines the connections between the military and carceral system through the stories of those most knowledgeable about it: veterans who were incarcerated after their military service. Combining a thorough historical narrative with the oral histories of veterans who had been imprisoned after their return to civilian society, Dr. Higgins shows how the so-called war on drugs and war on crime intersect with the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Through this history he shows how government policies built on racism, ableism, and patriarchy contributed to many young Americans being pushed into the military, punished during their service, and then being kicked out with no access to any type of support which then leads them into the carceral system. Dr. Higgins also tells the story of how incarcerated veterans helped organize amongst themselves leading to Veterans Treatment Courts which have helped reduce the number of veterans going into prison and also show a model for non-punitive responses to crime.

Prisoners after War has been awarded the Oral History Association's book award for 2025. It is available open access: https://uplopen.com/books/m/35...

Jason Higgins is the Digital Scholarship Coordinator for Virginia Tech Publishing and Press and an Assistant Professor affiliated with the Virginia Tech University Library and the Department of History.

You can find a transcript of this interview here.

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Where do cops come from and what do they do? How did “modern policing” as we know it today come to be? What about the capitalist state necessitates policing? In this clear and comprehensive account of why and how the police—the linchpin of capitalism—function and exist, organizer and author brian bean presents a clear case for the abolition of policing and capitalism.

Their End Is Our Beginning traces the roots and development of policing in global capitalism through colonial rule, racist enslavement, and class oppression, along the way arguing how police power can be challenged and, ultimately, abolished. bean draws from extensive interviews with activists from Mexico to Ireland to Egypt, all of whom share compelling and knowledgeable perspectives on what it takes to—even if temporarily—take down the cops and build a thriving community-organized society, free from the police. The lessons they offer bring nuance to the meaning of “solidarity” and clarity to what “abolition” and “revolution” look like in practice.

Featuring illustrations by Chicago-based artist Charlie Aleck, Their End Is Our Beginning is an incendiary book that offers a socialist analysis of policing and the capitalist state, a vital discussion of the contours of abolition at large, and the revolutionary logic needed for liberation.

Guest: brian bean is a Chicago-based socialist organizer, writer, and agitator originally from North Carolina. They are one of the founding editors of Rampant magazine. Their work has been published in Truthout, Jacobin, Tempest, Spectre, Red Flag, New Politics, Socialist Worker, International Viewpoint, and more. In addition to Their End Is Our Beginning, brian coedited and contributed to the book Palestine: A Socialist Introduction, also published by Haymarket Books.

Host: Michael Stauch (he/him) is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025.

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