Paul Leighton: 4 books

Punishment for Sale is the definitive modern history of private prisons, told through social, economic and political frames. The authors explore the origin of the ideas of modern privatization, the establishment of private prisons, and the efforts to keep expanding in the face of problems and bad...

For nearly 40 years, this classic text has taken the issue of economic inequality seriously and asked: Why are our prisons filled with the poor? Why aren’t the tools of the criminal justice system being used to protect Americans from predatory business practices and to punish well-off people who...

This book shows students that much that goes on in the criminal justice system violates their own sense of basic fairness, presents evidence that the system malfunctions, and sketches a whole theoretical perspective from which they might understand the failures and evaluate them morally.

Class, Race, Gender, and Crime is a popular, and provocative, introduction to crime and the criminal justice system through the lens of class, race, gender, and their intersections. The book systematically explores how the main sites of power and privilege in the United States consciously or unconsciously...