New Books in Policing, Incarceration, and Reform

Most employers in the United States routinely conduct criminal background checks on job applicants, weeding out those with criminal convictions—and thus denying opportunities to those who need them most. In The Criminal Record Complex: Risk, Race, and the Struggle for Work in America (Princeton UP, 2025), Melissa Burch sheds light on one of the most significant forces of social and economic marginalization of our time—discrimination on the basis of criminal records. Chronicling the daily interactions of hiring managers, workforce development professionals, and job-seekers with felony convictions in Southern California, Dr. Burch shows that this discrimination is not simply a matter of employer bias. Hiring is shaped by a set of institutions, organizations, and industries that promote the erroneous idea that people with criminal records are dangerous to employ. This “criminal record complex,” as Dr. Burch names it, encourages exclusion and undermines employers’ common-sense ways of assessing candidates. In vivid and intimate detail, Dr. Burch reveals both the futility and devastating human consequences of discriminatory policies.Dr. Burch places today’s routine practice of background screening within racialized notions of risk originating in early capitalist development, tracing how, over decades, criminal background checks became a convenient catch-all, leveraged by entities with a direct interest in growing the practice. Despite this reach, however, Dr. Burch discovers that small business owners tend to put less value on background checks, trusting their own judgment. Approaching the issue from both personal and policy perspectives, The Criminal Record Complex upends what we thought we knew about the causes of criminal record discrimination. It suggests that our best hope for creating safe workplaces lies not in the false promise of background screening, but in building the kinds of economies and communities that support true safety.

Our guest is: Dr. Melissa Burch, who is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan and Director of the Afterlives of Conviction Project.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a writing coach and editor for academics. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast.

Playlist for listeners:

Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine

Carceral Apartheid

Freemans Challenge

Hands Up Don't Shoot

The Names of all the Flowers

The Journal of Higher Education in Prison

Black Boy Out of Time

Secrets of the Killing State

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!
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In Uncivil Guard: Policing, Military Culture, and the Coming of the Spanish Civil War (Louisiana State UP, 2025), Foster Chamberlin evaluates the role of militarized police forces in the political violence of interwar Europe by tracing the evolution of one such group, Spain’s Civil Guard, culminating in the country’s turbulent Second Republic period of 1931–1936. As his analysis shows, political violence provided the main justification for the military coup attempt that began the Spanish Civil War, and the Civil Guard was the most violent institution in the country at that time. Discovering how this police force, which was supposed to maintain order, became a principal contributor to the violence of the republic proves key to understanding the origins of the Civil War. By tracing the institution’s founding in the mid-nineteenth century, and moving through case studies of episodes of political violence involving the group, Chamberlin concludes that the Civil Guard had an organizational culture that made it prone to violent actions because of its cult of honor, its distance from the people it policed, and its almost entirely military training.
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The notion of abolishing prisons strikes some as an impossible dream: could we could reasonably conceive of a society that responded to harm without the possibility of long-term confinement in purpose-built institutions? To others, we already have a template. Didn’t Michel Foucault long ago show us that prisons as they exist now–in all their horror, in all their commitment not just to jail people before trial but also to imprison them afterwards–come about only in the modern episteme, concomitant with capitalism and all sorts of attendant evils?

Actually, nope. Prisons are as old as the Romans and very likely much older than that. In Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration (California, 2025). Mark Letteney (a U Washington historian who wrote The Christianization of Knowledge in Late Antiquity)directs excavations in a legionary amphitheater) and Matthew Larsen (University of Copenhagen, author of Gospels before the Book) document an ancient and durable prison system system with five key features: Centrality, surveillance, separation depth, and punitive variability.

Their RTB conversation explores key aspects of that system and its present-day legacy or parallels. Yet it ends on a note of cautious optimism from Letteney: just because we don’t find a prison-free world in ancient Rome is no reason to give up the struggle. Whatever better solution to societal safety and rehabilitation awaits us in the future, it must be something we ourselves set out to build anew.

Mentioned

Michel Foucault’s foundational Discipline and Punish (1975)

Adam Gopknik reviews Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration in The New Yorker

The Rules of Ulpian (3rd century jurist)

Wengrow and Graeber’s foundational and heavily debated The Dawn of Everything (2021)

Spencer Weinreich’s work on solitary confinement)

Erving Goffman Stigma (1963) and Asylums (1961)

Livy (eg in his History of Rome on prisons and prisoners

Who  Would Believe a Prisoner? Edited by Michelle Daniel Jones and Elizabeth Angeline Nelson

Libanius (on the abuse of Prisoners)

Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The House of the Dead

Samuel Delany Tales of Neveryon
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Why do certain women become icons of evil? Five Evil Women: Hindley, West, Wuornos, Homolka, Tucker (Reaktion, 2026) by Professor Joanna Bourke offers the first comparative, non-sensationalist account of five of the most reviled women in the modern Anglophone world: Myra Hindley, Rosemary West, Aileen Wuornos, Karla Homolka and Karla Faye Tucker. It examines their lives, crimes and cultural reception in the UK, USA and Canada, asking how violence committed by women is understood, judged and remembered. Going beyond moral outrage or tabloid headlines, the book explores how concepts of 'evil' are shaped by history, belief systems and social context. Through historical and ethical reflections, it offers a deeper, more critical engagement with female violence, and considers how society should respond to those who commit acts of unimaginable harm.

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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Séamus McElearney's early days on an FBI organized crime squad were full of grunt work.

For months he was mired in administrative tasks, including the transcription of secret recordings of the DeCavalcante and Bonanno crime families. Eighteen months later, McElearney assisted in his squad's arrest of thirty-nine Mafia suspects; he led the team arresting Anthony Capo, a DeCavalcante soldier linked to stock fraud and conspiracy to commit murder.

Barely a week after Capo's arrest, McElearney accomplished what no other law enforcement agent had ever done in the hundred years of the DeCavalcante crime family's existence: he flipped one of their made men. Anthony Capo confessed to dozens of illegal activities, including two murders and eleven murder conspiracies, and agreed to work with the government to bring down his former family.

What followed was a spiral effect of cooperation as McElearney and colleagues flipped three more DeCavalcante associates, one captain, and an acting boss. Flipping Capo resulted in the Bureau solving eleven murders, convicting seventy-one defendants, and dismantling the DeCavalcante crime family.

Thanks to the redemptive relationship he built with Capo, McElearney helped unmask a criminal network that led to the RICO convictions of the entire DeCavalcante hierarchy, just as the world was coming to know them as the "real Sopranos." Read  Flipping Capo: How the FBI Dismantled the Real Sopranos (Chicago Review Press, 2025)
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