A comprehensive history of crime and corruption in Cuba, ###The Cuban Connection# challenges the common view that widespread poverty and geographic proximity to the United States were the prime reasons for soaring rates of drug trafficking, smuggling, gambling, and prostitution in the tumultuous decades preceding the Cuban revolution. Eduardo S?enz Rovner argues that Cuba's historically well-established integration into international migration, commerce, and transportation networks combined with political instability and rampant official corruption to help lay the foundation for the development of organized crime structures powerful enough to affect Cuba's domestic and foreign politics and its very identity as a nation.

America is the most punitive nation in the world, incarcerating more than 2.3 million people—or one in 136 of its residents. Against the backdrop of this unprecedented mass imprisonment, punishment permeates everyday life, carrying with it complex cultural meanings. In The Culture of Punishment, Michelle Brown goes beyond prison gates and into the routine and popular engagements of everyday life, showing that those of us most distanced from the practice of punishment tend to be particularly harsh in our judgments.

The Culture of Punishment takes readers on a tour of the sites where culture and punishment meet—television shows, movies, prison tourism, and post 9/11 new war prisons—demonstrating that because incarceration affects people along distinct race and class lines, it is only a privileged group of citizens who are removed from the experience of incarceration. These penal spectators, who often sanction the infliction of pain from a distance, risk overlooking the reasons for democratic oversight of the project of punishment and, more broadly, justifications for the prohibition of pain.

The first full-scale overview of cybercrime, law, and policy The exponential increase in cybercrimes in the past decade has raised new issues and challenges for law and law enforcement. Based on case studies drawn from her work as a lawyer, Susan W. Brenner identifies a diverse range of cybercrimes, including crimes that target computers (viruses, worms, Trojan horse programs, malware and DDoS attacks) and crimes in which the computer itself is used as a tool (cyberstalking, cyberextortion, cybertheft, and embezzlement). Illuminating legal issues unique to investigations in a digital environment, Brenner examines both national law enforcement agencies and transnational crime, and shows how cyberspace erodes the functional and empirical differences that have long distinguished crime from terrorism and both from warfare.

Strikingly, scant attention has focused on the victimization of women who want to leave their hostile partners. Dangerous Exits, a groundbreaking work challenges the perception that rural communities are safe havens from the brutality of urban living. Identifying hidden crimes of economic blackmail and psychological mistreatment, and the complex relationship between patriarchy and abuse, Walter S. DeKeseredy and Martin D. Schwartz propose concrete and effective solutions, giving voice to women who have often suffered in silence.

Reflecties op het leven achter tralies. De gevangenis is een totaalinstituut en heeft een fundamentele impact op alle aspecten van het leven. De gekooide mens is niet alleen beroofd van zijn vrijheid, hij wordt ook geconfronteerd met de grenzen van het bestaan. Vanuit zijn ervaring als aalmoezenier in de Centrale Gevangenis van Leuven, schreef criminoloog Achiel Neys (1943-2013) veelvuldig over de belevings- en zingevingsdimensies van de vrijheidsberovende straf. Zijn teksten hebben vandaag nog niets aan actualiteitswaarde ingeboet. Ze nodigen uit tot debat en reflectie, en illustreren de unieke positie die Neys innam in het debat over de strafuitvoering. De gekooide mens situeert zich op het kruispunt van criminologie, filosofie, theologie en literatuur. Het bundelt de belangrijkste publicaties van Achiel Neys en plaatst deze in dialoog met de hedendaagse gevangenisrealiteit. Die wordt vertolkt door verschillende deskundigen uit Vlaanderen en Nederland die, ieder vanuit een andere achtergrond, reflecteren op het werk van Neys en de relevantie daarvan voor het leven achter tralies vandaag de dag.

After Tom Ketchum had been sentenced to death for attempting to hold up a railway train, his attorneys argued that the penalty was “cruel and unusual” for the offense charged. The appeal failed and he became the first individual—and the last—ever to be executed for a crime of this sort. He was hanged in 1901; in a macabre ending to his life of crime, his head was torn away by the rope as he fell from the gallows. Tom Ketchum was born in 1863 on a farm near the fringe of the Texas frontier. At the age of nine, he found himself an orphan and was raised by his older brothers. In his mid-twenties he left home for the life of an itinerant trail driver and ranch hand. He returned to Texas, murdered a man, and fled. Soon afterwards, he and his brother Sam killed two men in New Mexico. A year later, he and two other former cowboys robbed a train in Texas. The career of the Ketchum Gang was under way. In their day, these men were the most daring of their kind, and the most feared. They were accused of crimes that were not theirs, but their proven record is long and lurid. Their downfall was brought about by what one editor called “the magic of the telephone and telegraph,” by quarrels between themselves, and by their reckless defiance of ever-mounting odds. Jeffrey Burton has been researching the story of the Ketchum Gang and related outlaws for more than forty years. He has mined unpublished sources, family records, personal reminiscences, trial transcripts and other court papers, official correspondence and reports, census returns, and contemporary newspapers to sort fact from fiction and provide the definitive truth about Ketchum and numerous other outlaws, including Will Carver, Ben Kilpatrick, and Butch Cassidy.

From the day he was born, Patrick McCullough faced hardships and reacted with untempered anger. His mother, a soon-to-be-divorced military wife, was late to realize that he was deaf and never learned how to handle his outbursts. Eventually, she abandoned him by petitioning for him to be a ward of the state. Stints in mental institutions and dismissals from several schools punctuated the rest of McCullough=s early years. Despite this severe childhood, no one could have predicted the outcome of his life described in Deadly Charm: The Story of a Deaf Serial Killer. Authors McCay and Marie Vernon present a compelling story about McCullough, a strikingly handsome man with a winning personality. His charm was endearing, but his incendiary temper resulted in increasing aggression and abuse. Eventually, he was convicted for the murder of two men. Yet, McCullough ingratiated himself with the court and served only seven years in prison. Once free again, he resumed his pattern of sweetness and mayhem. He beguiled sympathetic women whom he then abused and stalked. Finally, his rage culminated in a crescendo of destruction. Deadly Charm depicts a deaf serial killer driven by frustration and violence and leaves much to consider. Did McCullough=s deafness exacerbate his lethally violent nature? Perhaps his vicious impulses could have been constrained if his time in mental institutions had been more productive than his time in prison.