New Books in Policing, Incarceration, and Reform

Jesse Montgomery joins Michael Stauch to discuss It Is Not Enough to Survive: The Young Patriots Story (UNC Press, 2026). They examine how young white migrants from Appalachia and the South fought police brutality, racism, economic exploitation, and displacement through community organizing, and even joined forces with Fred Hampton’s Black Panther Party and the Young Lords to create the original Rainbow Coalition in the streets of Chicago in the 1960s and ‘70s.

Highlights include:

How the Young Patriots evolved from street gang to political organizers active in Chicago’s “Hillbilly Harlem,” the Uptown neighborhood;

A reminder that poor white workers made up the large majority of migrants from the South during the Great Migrations of the 20th century;

How the Young Patriots attempted to “re-signify” the Confederate flag, paralleling efforts by “race traitors” like Noel Ignatiev to reframe white workers in a context of interracial class solidarity;

How the story of the Young Patriots is also a story of urban renewal, and the fight against it, in Chicago;

A discussion of Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” and the role of country music in the culture wars of the 1960s.

Guest: Jesse Montgomery is a visiting assistant professor of English at Berea College who works on American literature after 1945, Appalachian outmigration, and radical culture. Jesse holds a Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt University. His writing has appeared in n+1, Popula, Full Stop, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies.

Host: Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025.
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Kristian Williams, longtime activist and writer, joins Michael Stauch to discuss his new book Policing the Progressive City: Portland, Oregon, from Settlement to Uprising" (AK Press, 2026) about police reform in Portland. Billed as perhaps the nation’s most “progressive” city, Williams explores how “law and order” in Portland has been shaped for over two hundred years by business interests, political climbers, and social campaigners — as well as its history of mass resistance to police brutality.

Highlights include:

The contrast between image and reality in Portland’s history of policing;

Portland’s role as an experimental site of police reform in the 20th century;

When community policing arrived in Portland and how it shaped the city’s progressive image;

How the city’s history of activism against both police brutality and fascism influenced events during the George Floyd Summer in 2020.

Guest: Kristian Williams has been writing about and organizing against the police since the mid 1990s. He is the author of seven books, including Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America, and lives in Portland, Oregon.

Host: Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025.
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As the First World War came to a chaotic end, Europeans feared that a wave of crime and anarchy would sweep across their continent. The upheavals of the war and of the subsequent violent breakup of the Habsburg, German, and Ottoman empires magnified longstanding fears that an increasingly interconnected world offered the enterprising and unscrupulous new opportunities to break the law and evade capture. New kinds of international criminals and criminal enterprises demanded novel forms of international cooperation. Thus was born the International Criminal Police Commission, known today as Interpol. In the 1920s and 1930s, Interpol's police officials and the lawyers who collaborated with them created lasting programs to combat counterfeiting, sex and drug trafficking, terrorism, and human smuggling, and other forms of international crime, which they labelled "a scourge of humanity."

Drawing on press reports, police files, and criminal records in numerous languages and across multiple countries, in A Scourge of Humanity: The Origins of Interpol and the End of Empire in Central and Eastern Europe (Oxford University Press, 2025), Dr. David Petruccelli explores the origins of Interpol and the role Central and Eastern European actors played in developing criminal policing and law during the interwar period to bring stability to their region and reshape international institutions and norms. He shows how legal experts replaced a liberal focus on individual rights with an emphasis on a collective of international societies and of police officers who looked to the international sphere as a space for eluding the constraints of the rule of law at home. In doing so, their initiatives posed an alternative to the imperial and liberal internationalist programs pursued by many Western Europeans and Americans and laid the groundwork for more radical forms of persecution during the Second World War.

While bringing to life the stories of individuals involved in shady activities across borders, A Scourge of Humanity explores the vigorous policing and harsh criminal laws established by Interpol to combat their crimes and highlights illiberal forms of internationalism that have left a lasting mark on our world.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book
focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty
negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative
analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find
Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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In America today, police enjoy unmatched power. On the streets,
officers employ violence at their own discretion. Behind closed doors,
they are even more powerful. In city halls, police strong-arm local
leaders and nullify attempts at public oversight. And in state
legislatures and Washington, DC, police lobbyists and union leaders
zealously uphold a bipartisan consensus against even mild reform. Yet as recently as fifty years ago, police still served at the pleasure of
democratically elected politicians, not the other way around. In Blue Power: How Police Organized to Serve and Protect Themselves (Basic Books, 2026), Stuart Schrader narrates the rise of a bottom-up movement of rank-and-file officers who lifted policing above the law.

Organizers launched their campaign in the 1960s, courting a public
backlash to urban uprisings and civil rights. City by city, county by
county, they formed unions and other organizations and won control over
working conditions, impunity from oversight, and insulation from lean
budgets. By the 2000s, this movement had triumphed nationally, shoring
up the power of the police to overrule the public interest in the name
of law and order.

Through deep archival detective work, Blue Power reveals how police forced American democracy to back the blue.

Stuart Schrader is an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, where he is the director of the Chloe Center for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, and Colonialism.

Michael Stauch is an associate professor of modern US history at the University of Toledo, specializing in policing and incarceration, urban studies, and social movements.
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“The poor, of whatever color, do not trust the law and certainly have no reason to, and God knows we didn't. ‘If you must call a cop,’ we said in those days, ‘for God’s sake, make sure it's a white one.’ We did not feel that the cops were protecting us, for we knew too much about the reasons for the kinds of crimes committed in the ghetto; but we feared black cops even more than white cops, because the black cop had to work so much harder—on your head—to prove to himself and his colleagues that he was not like all the other n******.” James Baldwin (1967)

Professor and journalist Steven Thrasher, author of the critically acclaimed The Viral Underclass (one of Kirkus Reviews best books of 2022), explores in The Overseer Class: A Manifesto (Amistad, 2026) what happens when members of historically minoritized groups are selected for high-visibility positions of power within existing institutions—law enforcement, academia, the military, for profit and not-for-profit corporations, and government—under the conditions of a kind of Faustian bargain.

This is a conversation, and a book, not to be missed.

You can find author Steven Thrasher on Bluesky and Instagram.

Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts.
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