The most recommended criminology books

We are brought up to think of racism as a matter of individual attitudes and biases. If only it were that simple. Stuart Hall and his colleagues taught me that understanding how racism worked required much deeper thinking. First published in 1978, Policing the Crisis argued that race is a key constituent of Britain’s social and economic structures. It presented a picture of Britain in the 1970s as caught in a crisis of authority. Society was fracturing, giving rise to new authoritarianism in response. A moral panic about black crime was the surface justification for new “law and order” policies. But in a strange way, the country was using black people to work through its own anxieties. This was Thatcherism in embryo. The same processes continue to shape our lives today. There is no better book on how politics in Britain has functioned in the last fifty years.

In Daniel Karpowitz’s book, he takes readers behind the scenes in college-in-prison classrooms to explore what a liberal arts education can offer people who are incarcerated, and the educators who facilitate them. Karpowitz was a mentor and a guide as I was building my own college-in-prison program. His steadfast belief in the human capacity for transformative learning shines through in these accessible, riveting pages of what it means to read the canon from a position of marginalization.

My list would not be complete without a work of scholarship. Of the texts I encountered during my research, this one stayed with me. It helped me develop a deeper, more philosophical insight into solitary experience. This book begins in the early days of the penitentiary system in the US, analyzing the inmates' experiences through a phenomenological approach. It discusses sensory deprivation, the way the disorienting experience of time in solitary interferes with basic sensory perception, and what this type of confinement does to the human mind. The author shows that all the justifications about the redemptive, corrective or reformative potential of this form of punishment are weak attempts at concealing what it is: an effective tool for the annihilation of human subjectivity.

This book opens our eyes to the sordid history of drug use in the US and elsewhere and why it’s become such a problem. I was appalled at the things our country did and continue to do that has created this problem, and deeply dismayed at the barbaric way we continue to deal with this, especially since and there are three countries in the world that have resolved the drug problem in their country that should be role models for us. 

This is another book that cuts through the hype, helping to define the often sensationalized connections between mafiosi in Italy and the United States.

Historian Salvatore Lupo, a Sicilian, brings a perspective often missing in American books on the Mafia. His meticulous research knocks down the idea that the American Mafia was ever some giant “alien conspiracy” with Sicilian overlords, but it does examine whatever interconnections and parallels exist in real life between the two Mafias.

Much like the Critchley book, this is for those who want the facts, facts, facts. And Italian experts have a lot to contribute to the story of the American Mafia.

This book introduced me to some women who had an impact on criminology, as Frances Glessner Lee did later.

They moved between Hull House and the University of Chicago and worked hard to change laws and improve the justice system. They worked in prisons and courthouses.

I got ideas for my Emily Cabot Mysteries from this book, as one woman was amazed to find when she got to do graduate work at the university that she could work with actual police officials to do the sociological studies.

These women found that when they pushed they could make an impression and actually activate some change in society. Again, I’m grateful to those women who came before me and knocked down closed doors.

The 1892 ax murder of Andrew and Abby Borden has become a staple of American popular culture. Everyone familiar with the case has a firmly held opinion on the guilt or innocence of their daughter Lizzie. There are many theories on what may have happened that day, but we have no way of knowing the whole truth. Then, as today, the best we can do is a trial by jury. The Trial of Lizzie Borden is a detailed and well-researched book presenting evidence, testimony, and events surrounding that momentous trial, leaving the reader with the same question that faced the jury—did Lizzie do it? Though unlikely to change many opinions, it gives the reader a greater understanding of why that jury found Lizzie Borden not guilty.

This 1890 novel, also called The Beast in Man, may be the most intense among the twenty novels that comprise Zola’s cycle about the fortunes and vicissitudes of the Rougon-Macquart, a fictional clan. Its complex plot is set in the railroad milieu and involves homicidal mania, seduction, adultery, murder, social hypocrisy, and a harrowing train wreck.

Zola’s novels were controversial at his time, not least because of his indictments of social, political, economic, and class issues, but now stand as magnificent achievements in literary realism. Equally powerful is Zola’s "You Are There!" manner of storytelling, which is unsurpassed in its immediacy. A case in point is this novel’s unforgettable ending. 

The baseball writer and analyst Bill James sets out to trace the path of a serial ax murderer who left a bloody trail across the US in the early 20th century. Starting with the well-chronicled deaths of eight people in Villisca, Iowa, in 1912, he reveals the signature connections between this crime and dozens of others committed over a period of 15 years from Washington State to Florida, crimes for which innocent people were put to death. A mind-boggling feat of research.

Hull House was the famous settlement house on the West Side of Chicago where a group of mostly women attempted to change the lives of their immigrant neighbors by living among them.

Although the work brought cultural and artistic opportunities to the poor, the women also began to work on political and legal issues. Changes to juvenile justice and occupational health laws as well as labor laws came out of the work of women who couldn’t even vote at the time.

That they were able to have such influence is intriguing.