Inside Criminal Justice: Thinking about Police, Courts, and Corrections provides students with a comprehensive and critical exploration of the U.S. criminal justice system. Opening chapters introduce criminal justice as a system, a career, and an academic discipline; identify the main types of crimes in American jurisprudence; define crime; and explain how the criminalization process works. Additional chapters describe approaches to justice in American society, criminal injustice, the complexities and realities of police work, and police reform. Students learn about democratic policing, police powers and the rights of citizens, federal and state courts, the roles of prosecutors and judges in the courtroom, defendants' rights, and the practices of criminal defense attorneys. Sentencing, mass incarceration, institutional corrections, community corrections, the death penalty, and juvenile justice are covered. Learning outcomes, chapter summaries, discussion questions, key terms, and references enrich the student reading and learning experience. Inside Criminal Justice is designed for introductory courses in criminal justice.

Thinking About Criminal Justice: A Reader helps students cultivate greater levels of critical thinking skills and question long-standing criminal justice policies and aspects of the criminal justice system. The anthology presents readers with a tool called a Critical Thinking Scan (CTS), which challenges them to analyze the readings in the text from various angles and to focus internally to push through their innate personal biases and consider new ideas and viewpoints. The anthology is organized into four distinct units. Unit I introduces critical thinking as an essential part of criminal justice and addresses issues of racialized bias and injustice within the discipline. Unit II invites student to consider the types of assumptions they make about the seriousness of certain types of crime and how these assumptions shape their points of view. The readings examine white supremacist terror, cybercrime, and voter fraud. In Unit III, students learn about the intersection of racism, sexism, and the criminal justice system. The final unit addresses good citizenship and the modern call for criminal justice reform with articles that address police-community interactions, sex work, sex trafficking, wrongful convictions, cash bail, and the War on Drugs. Throughout, students are encouraged to apply the CTS method developed by the editor to ask questions, acknowledge bias, reason through logic, diversify thought, and exhibit fair-mindedness. Thinking About Criminal Justice is a thought-provoking and essential reader for programs and courses in the discipline.

According to the Elliot Ness myth, which has been widely disseminated through books, television shows, and movies, Ness and the Untouchables defeated Al Capone by marshaling superior firepower. In Scarface Al and the Crime Crusaders, Dennis Hoffman presents a fresh new perspective on the downfall of Al Capone. To debunk the Eliot Ness myth, he shows how a handful of private citizens brought Capone to justice by outsmarting him rather than by outgunning him. Drawing on previously untapped sources, Hoffman dissects what he terms a "private war" against Capone. He traces the behind-the-scenes work of a few prominent Chicago businessmen from their successful lobbying of presidents Coolidge and Hoover on behalf of federal intervention to the trial, sentencing, and punishment of Al Capone. Hoffman also reconstructs in detail a number of privately sponsored citizen initiatives directed at stopping Capone. These private ventures included prosecuting the gangsters responsible for election crimes; establishing a crime lab to assist in gangbusting; underwriting the costs of the investigation of the Jake Lingle murder; stigmatizing Capone; and protecting the star witnesses for the prosecution in Al Capone's income tax evasion case. Hoffman suggests that as American society continues to be threatened by illegal drugs, gangs, and widespread violence, it is important to remember that the organized crime and political corruption of Prohibition-era Chicago were checked through the efforts of private citizens. Dennis E. Hoffman is an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.