Elliott Currie

From a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a devastating exploration of the racial disparities in violent death and injury in America and a blueprint for ending this fundamental social injustice In the United States today, a young black man has a sixteen times greater chance of dying from violence than his white counterpart. Violence takes more years of life from black men than cancer, stroke, and diabetes combined. Even black women are more affected by violence than white men, despite its usual gender patterns. These disparities translate into starkly divergent experiences of life and death for whites and blacks in the United States. Yet aside from occasional flare-ups of violence that periodically hit the headlines, the problem has largely receded into the background of public discussion and has nearly disappeared as a target of public policy. The country has been understandably outraged by the recent spate of police shootings of black Americans. But as acclaimed criminologist Elliott Currie points out, the far more widespread problem of “everyday” violent death and injury in black communities has received much less sustained attention or concern. Yet both kinds of violence reflect the same underlying condition: the continuing marginality and structural disadvantage of many black communities in America today. Our unwillingness to confront those conditions helps to perpetuate a level of preventable trauma and needless suffering that has no counterpart anywhere in the developed world. Compelling and accessible, drawing on a rich array of both classic and contemporary research, A Peculiar Indifference describes the dimensions and consequences of this enduring emergency, explores its causes, and offers an urgent plea for long-overdue social action to end it.

The Neglected Toll of Violence on Black America

A Peculiar Indifference

There are five times as many Americans behind bars today as in 1970, yet we remain the most violent industrial society on earth. This hard-hitting and accessible book dissects the myths that have given us both the industrial world's most swollen prison population and its highest rate of violent crime.

Crime and Punishment in America

Jerome H. Skolnick

Social Issues and Public Policy

America's Problems

Martin Carnoy

Michael K. Brown

Troy Duster

David B. Oppenheimer

In an updated new edition of this classic work, a team of highly respected sociologists, political scientists, economists, criminologists, and legal scholars scrutinize the resilience of racial inequality in twenty-first-century America. Whitewashing Race argues that contemporary racism manifests as discrimination in nearly every realm of American life, and is further perpetuated by failures to address the compounding effects of generations of disinvestment. Police violence, mass incarceration of Black people, employment and housing discrimination, economic deprivation, and gross inequities in health care combine to deeply embed racial inequality in American society and economy. Updated to include the most recent evidence, including contemporary research on the racially disparate effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, this edition of Whitewashing Race analyzes the consequential and ongoing legacy of "disaccumulation" for Black communities and lives. While some progress has been made, the authors argue that real racial justice can be achieved only if we actively attack and undo pervasive structural racism and its legacies.

The Myth of a Color-Blind Society

Whitewashing Race

An acclaimed criminologist examines America's ongoing war against violent crime, arguing that ever-increasing rates of imprisonment have not reduced--and will not reduce--crime rates and offering a range of tested alternatives based on deterrence. Tour.

Professors Currie and Skolnick place special emphasis on the underlying economic causes of social problems and the social policies that fail to address them. The text's research-oriented approach introduces students to the empirical aspects of sociology by discussing how research is done and how data is compiled and analyzed. A comparative perspective on major topics exposes students to American social problems in context to other nations. This edition provides in-depth coverage of current social and political issues, such as downsizing, the growing gap between the rich and the poor, and the crisis in health care.

Drugs, the Cities, and the American Future

Reckoning

A compassionate investigation of the root causes of the epidemic of drug abuse, violence, and despair among "mainstream" American teenagers. In the past few years, it has become painfully clear that all is not well with the children of middle-class Americ

Middle-Class Culture and the Crisis of Adolescence

The Road to Whatever

Professor of Criminology Law and Society Elliott Currie

David Wellman

Marjorie M. Shultz

The myth of a color-blind society is deconstructed in this powerful new look at race in America that consults sociologists, economists, criminologists, political scientists, and legal scholars in the search for answers to why so many white Americans think racism is no longer a problem. (Social Science)

"Earnest, free of jargon, lucid...This is a book that ought to be read by anyone concerned about crime and punishment in America."—The Washington Post Book World A Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize When Crime and Punishment in America was first published in 1998, the national incarceration rate had doubled in just over a decade, and yet the United States remained—by an overwhelming margin—the most violent industrialized society in the world. Today, there are several hundred thousand more inmates in the penal system, yet violence remains endemic in many American communities. In this groundbreaking and revelatory work, renowned criminologist Elliott Currie offers a vivid critique of our nation's prison policies and turns his penetrating eye toward recent developments in criminal justice, showing us the path to a more peaceable and just society. Cogent, compelling, and grounded in years of original research, this newly revised edition of Crime and Punishment in America will continue to frame the way we think about imprisonment for years to come.

Elliott Currie

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