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Disposable Heroes illuminates challenges facing many African American veterans. Rather than finding military service to be a path to upward mobility, these veterans fight just to survive. Drawing on in-depth interviews with veterans of Vietnam and recent wars, as well as national survey data, the book shows the ways America fails black veterans today

In this paper, I analyze elite discourse in the context of the increasing role played by large-scale corporate platforms in federal immigration enforcement in the US Specifically, I focus on Amazon Web Services' (AWS) alliance with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Incorporating Marx's (2016) "fallacy of explicit agendas" as a heuristic for contextualizing recent employee challenges to company CEO Jeff Bezos, I show how the fallacy serves to conceal far more about the AWS alliance with ICE, an organization with a long track record of deeply troubling practices. The secrecy that is fostered by such discourse also obscures the growing dependency of government entities on large-scale technologies of marginalizing surveillance that threaten civil liberties and rights of refugees and immigrants.

By highlighting the real world experiences of cause lawyers who work on behalf of HIV-infected prisoners (e.g., 'activist prisoner lawyering'), this article reports on the often-difficult negotiations over roles (litigator v. activist) that such actors face. The article investigates through the stories of activist prison lawyers, in the words of one such respondent, how 'different approaches need to be taken in different settings.' For activist prison lawyers, when a client's life literally hangs in the balance litigation may be the only option. In other instances, using a case to bring public awareness to broader movement objectives may be chosen as a proper course of action. The article elucidates how such negotiations often entail the dilemma of balancing broader goals of the prisoner rights movement with the immediate, indeed sometimes life and death, circumstances facing the individuals and communities they represent. The article concludes with a call for future work on cause lawyers and social movements in other contexts to problematize law as a static, dichotomous variable that either does or does not bring desired institutional or societal change. Viewing law as a dichotomous variable masks the politically significant effects litigation may have for influencing both institutional arrangements and social consciousness over time. Furthermore, the dichotomous conception of law as a catalyst/not a catalyst for social change also glosses over the importance of the meso-level of analysis. By paying attention to the demands of a specific legal context, the immediate circumstances of a specific situation, and the way the former and the latter may be inextricably linked, future studies can make important and nuanced contributions to our understanding of the complex relationship between law, and social change. [Copyright 2006 Elsevier Ltd.]

In this article, I examine 1,155 former capital jurors' punitive & cynical beliefs toward the criminal justice system & punishment for murder. I find that black capital jurors are significantly more cynical of the legal process than are whites. At the same time, however, I find that blacks are no less punitive than whites. The willingness to impose the state's harshest sentence despite a fundamental distrust of the judicial system reveals what I term, "contradictory legal consciousness." Through the analysis of qualitative interview data, I find that when black respondents' evaluate the defendant's criminal responsibility, it leads them to question the legitimacy of the legal process itself, including the felony murder rule. On the other hand, I find that personal experiences with the crime problem & spiritual transformation play an important role for those black respondents found to articulate a narrative of moral redemption. Building on Ewick & Silbey's (1998) seminal study of legal consciousness among ordinary citizens, this contradictory consciousness aids our understanding of legal consciousness more generally & sheds light on its hegemonic character in jurors' life or death decisions. 5 Tables, 1 Figure, 20 References. Adapted from the source document.

"Dying Inside brings the reader face-to-face with the nightmarish conditions inside Limestone Prison's Dorm 16 -- the segregated HIV ward. Here, patients chained to beds share their space with insects and vermin in the filthy, drafty rooms, and contagious diseases spread like wildfire through a population with untreated -- or poorly managed at best -- HIV. While Dorm 16 is a particularly horrific human rights tragedy, it is also a symptom of a disease afflicting the entire U.S. prison system. In recent decades, prison populations have exploded as Americans made mass incarceration the solution to crime, drugs, and other social problems even as privatization of prison services, especially health care, resulted in an overcrowded, underfunded system in which the most marginalized members of our society slowly wither from what the author calls "lethal abandonment." This eye-opening account of one prison's failed health-care standards is a wake-up call, asking us to examine how we treat our forgotten citizens and compelling us to rethink the American prison system in this increasingly punitive age."--Jacket

The focus of this article is to investigate how Latino Americans have been historically racialized in popular culture, key state legislative iniatives, and jurors' death sentencing decisions. While the bulk of the literature on the death penalty and criminal punishment more broadly focuses on racial disparities in sentencing outcomes, far less is know about how the sentencing process is itself racialized. Drawing on the stories of former jurors who served in death penalty cases involving Latino American defendants, we argue that such agents of the state are racially disciplined to punish in capital murder trials. Finally, we comment on directions for a more culturally-centered study of penal action.