A critical assessment of the research related to batterer programs with recommendations for heightened engagement of men, ongoing risk management, and better coordination of courts and services Batterer programs are at a critical juncture, with a handful of experimental program evaluations showing little or no effect from the prevailing program approach. This finding has prompted calls to overhaul or replace such programs. Edward W. Gondolf examines batterer research in light of the push for “evidence-based practice” and advocates a progressive evolution of batterer intervention as it currently stands. Cautioning against the call for programs based on a “new psychology,” he argues that current cognitive-behavioral approaches are appropriate for most cases, with the addition of ongoing risk management for severely violent men. Overall, he promotes a broader picture of batterer intervention and advocates better implementation of the basic principles established in the criminal justice field.

Hate crime laws, on both the federal and state levels, increasingly include gender, yet the category continues to be controversial and rarely implemented. Law enforcement officials themselves view the gender category differently from other forms of bias crimes, such as those based on race, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation. Why are these types of bias crimes reported more extensively than those gender-biased crimes?

Jessica P. Hodge uses extensive empirical research, including newspaper accounts, legislative histories, and interviews with criminal justice professionals and advocacy groups to investigate the creation and implementation of the gender category in New Jersey. She finds several reasons why the gender category is (or is not) included and/or implemented in particular cases. Extrapolating her findings beyond the Garden State, Hodge illuminates the challenges of developing definitive and effective gender-inclusive bias crime statutes.

When DNA profiling was first introduced into the American legal system in 1987, it was heralded as a technology that would revolutionize law enforcement.Yet, this promise took ten turbulent years to be fulfilled. In Genetic Witness, Jay D. Aronson uncovers the dramatic early history of DNA profiling that has been obscured by the technique's recent success.

Governments, Citizens, and Genocide
A Comparative and Interdisciplinary Approach

Alex Alvarez

A comprehensive analysis demonstrating how whole societies come to support the practice of genocide.

"Alex Alvarez has produced an exceptionally comprehensive and useful analysis of modern genocide... [It] is perhaps the most important interdisciplinary account to appear since Zygmunt Bauman's classic work, Modernity and the Holocaust."
-- Stephen Feinstein, Director, Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies

"Alex Alvarez has written a first-rate propaedeutic on the running sore of genocide. The singular merit of the work is its capacity to integrate a diverse literature in a fair-minded way and to take account of genocides in the post-Holocaust environment ranging from Cambodia to Serbia. The work reveals patterns of authoritarian continuities of repression and rule across cultures that merit serious and widespread public concern." -- Irving Louis Horowitz, Rutgers University

More people have been killed in 20th-century genocides than in all wars and revolutions in the same period. Recent events in countries such as Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia have drawn attention to the fact that genocide is a pressing contemporary problem, one that has involved the United States in varying negotiating and peace-keeping roles. Genocide is increasingly recognized as a threat to national and international security, as well as a source of tremendous human suffering and social devastation.

Governments, Citizens, and Genocide views the crime of genocide through the lens of social science. It discusses the problem of defining genocide and then examines it from the levels of the state, the organization, and the individual. Alex Alvarez offers both a skillful synthesis of the existing literature on genocide and important new insights developed from the study of criminal behavior. He shows that governmental policies and institutions in genocidal states are designed to suppress the moral inhibitions of ordinary individuals.

By linking different levels of analysis, and comparing a variety of cases, the study provides a much more complex understanding of genocide than have prior studies. Based on lessons drawn from his analysis, Alvarez offers an important discussion of the ways in which genocide might be anticipated and prevented.

Alex Alvarez is Associate Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Northern Arizona University. His primary research interests are minorities, crime, and criminal justice, as well as collective and interpersonal violence. He is author of articles in Journal of Criminal Justice, Social Science History, and Sociological Imagination and is currently writing a book on patterns of American murder.

April 2001
240 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, bibl., index
cloth 0-253-33849-2 $29.95 s /

This reference work is a resource for those needing assistance in locating Texas criminal justice statistics. R. Scott Harnsberger has compiled more than 600 entries describing statistical sources for Texas crime; criminals; law enforcement; courts and sentencing; adult and juvenile corrections; capital punishment and death row; victims of crime; driving/boating under the influence; traffic fatalities; substance abuse and treatment; polls and rankings; and fiscal topics such as appropriations, revenues, expenditures, and federal aid. The sources for these statistics originate primarily, but not exclusively, from federal and State of Texas agencies, boards, bureaus, commissions, and departments. The following types of publications are included: annual, biennial, and biannual reports; reports issued in series; analytic and research reports; statistical compilations; budgets and other fiscal documents; audits, inspections, and investigations; census publications; polls; projections; rankings; surveys; continuously updated online resources; and datasets. Harnsberger has annotated the entries to provide sufficient detail to enable users to decide whether the listed resources merit further investigation. Additional notes contain URLs and information regarding the scope of the published data; title changes; related publications; and the availability of earlier data, previous editions, online tables, and datasets. This book will prove to be a valuable resource for students, faculty, researchers, government officials, and individuals in the law enforcement, correctional, and judicial professions.

Although homelessness is a serious social problem in the United States, there is little direct information about the actual experiences of violence, past and current, among homeless people. This volume, based on the Florida Four-City Study, brings together interview material from 737 women, including structured quantitative interviews as well as in-depth qualitative interviews. The authors investigate how many homeless women have experienced violence in their lives, either as children or as adults, and then examine factors associated with experiences of violence, the consequences of violence, and types of interactions of homeless people with the justice system. The volume concludes with pragmatic and compassionate policy recommendations.

Pinned down by a posse, the wounded outlaw’s companions urged him to escape through the gulch. “Don’t wait for me,” he replied, “I’m all in and might as well end it right here.” Placing his revolver to his right temple, he pulled the trigger for the last time, thus ending the life of the notorious “Kid Curry” of the Wild Bunch. It is long past time for the publication of a well-researched, definitive biography of the infamous western outlaw Harvey Alexander Logan, better known by his alias Kid Curry. In Wyoming he became involved in rustling and eventually graduated to bank and train robbing as a member—and soon leader—of the Wild Bunch. The core members of the gang came to be Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, George “Flatnose” Currie, Elzy Lay, Ben “the Tall Texan” Kilpatrick, Will Carver, and Kid Curry. Kid Curry has been portrayed as a cold-blooded killer, without any compassion or conscience and possessed of limited intelligence. Curry indeed was a dangerous man with a violent temperament, which was aggravated by alcoholic drink. However, Smokov shows that Curry’s record of kills is highly exaggerated, and that he was not the blood-thirsty killer as many have claimed. Mark Smokov has researched extensively in areas significant to Curry’s story and corrects the many false statements that have been written about him in the past. Curry was a cunning outlaw who planned and executed robberies on par with anything Butch Cassidy is reported to have pulled off. Smokov contends that Curry was the actual train robbing leader of the Wild Bunch—there is no concrete evidence that Cassidy ever robbed a train. He also presents new evidence that is virtually conclusive in resolving whether or not Curry was the “unknown bandit” who was killed after robbing a train near Parachute, Colorado, in 1904.

America is fascinated with murder, as evidenced by the media's elaborate and often sensational coverage of homicides, the plethora of recreated television crime programs-such as America's Most Wanted and Unsolved Mysteries-and the number of high-grossing films and best-selling novels that revolve around murder plots. We love to be afraid and we love to hate offenders. Murderers, particularly those sentenced to death, we consider to be unusually heinous, often sub-human, and entirely different from the rest of us. In Hidden Victims , sociologist Susan F. Sharp challenges this culturally ingrained perspective by reminding us that those individuals facing a death sentence, in addition to being murderers, are brothers or sisters, mothers or fathers, daughters or sons, relatives or friends. Through a series of vivid and in-depth interviews with families of the accused, she demonstrates how the exceptionally severe way in which we view those on death row.