The twentieth century was among the bloodiest in the history of humanity. Untold millions were slaughtered. How people are enrolled in the service of evil is a question that continues to bedevil. In this trenchant book, Abram de Swaan offers a taxono...

There is no more seemingly incorrigible criminal type than the child sex offender. Said to suffer from a deeply rooted paraphilia, he is often considered as outside the moral limits of the human, profoundly resistant to change. Despite these assessme...

Violent and property crime rates in all Western countries have been falling since the early and mid-1990s, after rising in the 1970s and 1980s. Few people have noticed the common patterns and fewer have attempted to understand or explain them. Yet th...

For the American criminal justice system, 1975 was a watershed year. Offender rehabilitation and individualized sentencing fell from favor. The partisan politics of "law and order" took over. Among the results four decades later are the world's harsh...

The United States imprisons far more people, total and per capita, and at a higher rate than any other country in the world. Among the more than 1. 5 million Americans currently incarcerated, minorities and the poor are disproportionately represented...

Within weeks of the September 11 attacks in 2001, the United States had captured hundreds of suspected al Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan, and by the following January the first of these prisoners arrived at the U.S. Navy's detention camp in Guantana...

The numbers are staggering: One-third of America's adult population has passed through the criminal justice system and now has a criminal record. Many more were never convicted, but are nonetheless subject to surveillance by the state. Never before h...

For sale in CIS only! Stalin's American Spy tells the remarkable story of Noel Field, a Soviet agent in the US State Department in the mid-1930s. Lured to Prague in May 1949, he was kidnapped and handed over to the Hungarian secret police. Tortured...

In sheer numbers, no form of government control comes close to the police stop. Each year, twelve percent of drivers in the United States are stopped by the police, and the figure is almost double among racial minorities. Police stops are among the m...

The number of women murdered and mutilated by Jack the Ripper is impossible to know, although most researchers now agree on five individuals. These five canonical cases have been examined at length, but other contemporary murders and attacks bearing...