"An unforgettable and stirring memoir in the vein of Free Cyntoia, Just Mercy, and The Sum of Us that both inspires and upends our understanding about the future of policing in the United States. In 2012, nineteen-year-old Leon Ford was shot five times by a Pittsburgh police officer as he was racially profiled during a case of mistaken identity. When he woke up in the hospital, he was faced with two life-changing realities: he was a new father, and he was paralyzed from the waist down. Now, Ford reveals how he faced these new truths and discovered the power of forgiveness and letting go of his hatred. He explains how his harrowing experience inspired his lifelong commitment to social activism. In the wake of countless similar shootings across the country over the years, he has dedicated himself to bridging the gap between the police and the communities they are supposed to serve. With his compassionate voice, Ford not only offers fresh, counterintuitive advice for social change but also demonstrates how together, we can end police brutality and heal as a country. As he once said, "Lead with love. Start compassionate conversations even with individuals and systems that have caused you pain. I know from experience that you can make your pain purposeful.""--

"Unsettling is a sharp, uncompromising interrogation of the transformation of the southern edge of the United States into a zone of migrant sacrifice and suffering, which culminates in a racist mass execution of twenty-two people in August 2019 in El Paso, Texas"--;"Documents the cruel immigration policies and treatment toward border crossers on the US-Mexico border.On August 3, 2019, a far-right extremist committed a deadly mass shooting at a major shopping center in El Paso, Texas, a city on the border of the United States and Mexico. In Unsettling, Gilberto Rosas situates this devastating shooting as the latest unsettling consequence of our border crisis and currents of deeply rooted white nationalism embedded in the United States. Tracing strict immigration policies and inhumane border treatment from the Clinton era through Democratic and Republican administrations alike, Rosas shows how the rhetoric around these policies helped lead to the Trump administration's brutal crackdown on migration-and the massacre in El Paso. Rosas draws on poignant stories and compelling testimonies from workers in immigrant justice organizations, federal public defenders, immigration attorneys, and human rights activists in order to document the cruelties and indignities inflicted on border crossers. Borders, as sites of crossings and spaces long inhabited by marginalized populations, generate deep anxiety across much of the contemporary world. Rosas demonstrates how the Trump administration amplified and weaponized immigration and border policy, including family separation, torture, and murder. None of this dehumanization and violence was inevitable, however. The border zone in El Paso (which translates to "the Pass") was once a very different place, one marked by frequent and inconsequential crossings to and from both sides-and with more humane immigration policies, it could become that once again"--

"Resistance is everywhere, but everywhere a surprise, especially when the agents of struggle are the colonized, the enslaved, the wretched of the earth. Anticolonial revolts and slave rebellions have often been described by those in power as "eruptions"--volcanic shocks to a system that does not, cannot, see them coming. In Anticolonial Eruptions Geo Maher diagnoses a paradoxical weakness built right into the foundations of white supremacist power, a colonial blind spot that grows as domination seems more complete. Anticolonial Eruptions argues that the colonizer's weakness is rooted in dehumanization. When the oppressed and excluded rise up in explosive rebellion, with the very human demands for life and liberation, the powerful are ill-prepared. This colonial blind spot is, ironically, self-imposed: the more oppressive and expansive the colonial power, the lesser-than-human the colonized are believed to be, the greater the opportunity for resistance. Maher calls this paradox the cunning of decolonization, an unwitting reversal of the balance of power between the oppressor and the oppressed. Where colonial power asserts itself as unshakable, total, and perpetual, a blind spot provides strategic cover for revolutionary possibility; where race or gender make the colonized invisible, they organize, unseen. Anticolonial Eruptions shows that this fundamental weakness of colonialism is not a bug, but a permanent feature of the system, providing grounds for optimism in a contemporary moment roiled by global struggles for liberation"--

The ABA Journal is read by half of the nation's 1 million lawyers every month. It covers the trends, people and finances of the legal profession from Wall Street to Main Street to Pennsylvania Avenue.

Six white former police officers in Mississippi who called themselves the “Goon Squad” have pleaded guilty to raiding a home on false drug charges and torturing two Black men while yelling racist slurs at them, and then trying to cover it up. We speak with Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker about how, on January 24, six deputies in Braxton, Mississippi, raided the home they were staying in and attacked them, and how they are speaking out to demand justice. Meanwhile, the deputies have been linked to at least four violent attacks on Black men since 2019, in which two of the men died. We also speak with civil rights attorney Malik Shabazz, who is representing Jenkins and Parker in a federal lawsuit against the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department. Shabazz asserts that the majority-white Rankin County, which is 20 miles away from majority-Black Jackson, Mississippi, is “infested with white supremacists” who “have decided 'Rankin County is for whites'” and seek to enforce it through state-sanctioned violence and torture, overseen and covered up by Rankin County Sheriff Bryan Bailey. “We demand that Bryan Bailey step down,” says Shabazz. Parker adds, “We want justice for everyone that has gone through this with Rankin County.”

We speak with acclaimed scholar and activist Kimberlé Crenshaw about her new book #SayHerName, which honors the stories of 177 Black women and girls killed by police between 1975 and 2022 whose deaths received little media coverage or other attention. “We can’t give these women back to their families, but we can make sure that they are not lost to history,” Crenshaw tells Democracy Now! She also discusses the ongoing right-wing “attack on Black knowledge,” such as Florida’s new education curriculum that claims slavery had “personal benefit” for enslaved people, as well as the recent death of civil rights scholar Charles Ogletree.

Tou Thao is the last former Minneapolis police officer convicted in state court for his role in the killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020.

More than 70 years later, Lacks' family is finally being financially compensated for her involuntary contributions to medicine.

"The shocking, deeply reported story of a murder-suicide that claimed the lives of six children-and a searing indictment of the American foster care system"--;On March 26, 2018, rescue workers discovered a crumpled SUV and the bodies of two women and several children at the bottom of a cliff beside the Pacific Coast Highway. Investigators soon concluded that the crash was a murder-suicide, but there was more to the story: Jennifer and Sarah Hart, it turned out, were a white married couple who had adopted the six Black children from two different Texas families in 2006 and 2008. Behind the family's loving facade, however, was a pattern of abuse and neglect that went ignored as the couple withdrew the children from school and moved across the country. It soon became apparent that the State of Texas knew very little about the two individuals to whom it had given custody of six children. As a journalist in Houston, Asgarian became the first reporter to put the children's birth families at the center of the story. We follow the author as she runs up against the intransigence of a state agency that removes tens of thousands of kids from homes each year in the name of child welfare, while often failing to consider alternatives. Her reporting uncovers persistent racial biases and corruption as children of color are separated from birth parents without proper cause. The result is a riveting narrative and a deeply reported indictment of a system that continues to fail America's most vulnerable children while upending the lives of their families.

"From the co-creators and co-hosts of the Peabody- and Pulitzer-nominated podcast comes this illuminating view of prison life, as told by presently and formerly incarcerated people. The United States locks up more people per capita than any other nation in the world--600,000 each year and 2.3 million in total. The acclaimed podcast Ear Hustle, named after the prison term for eavesdropping, gives voice to that ever-growing prison population. Co-created for the Radiotopia podcast network from PRX by visual artist Nigel Poor and inmate Earlonne Woods, who was serving thirty-one years to life before his sentence was commuted in 2018, Ear Hustle was launched in the basement media lab of California's San Quentin State Prison. As the first podcast created and produced entirely within prison, it has since been globally lauded for the rare access and perspective it contributes to the conversation about incarceration. Now, in their first book, Poor and Woods present unheard stories that delve deeper into the experiences of incarceration and share their personal paths to San Quentin as well as how they came to be co-creators. This unprecedented narrative, enhanced by forty original black-and-white illustrations, reveals the spectrum of humanity of those in prison and navigating post-incarceration. Bringing to the page the same insight, balance, and charismatic rapport that has distinguished their podcast, Poor and Woods illuminate the full--and often surprising--realities of prison life. With characteristic candor and humor, their portrayals include unexpected moments of self-discovery, unlikely alliances, and many ingenious work-arounds. One personal narrative at a time, framed by Poor's and Wood's distinct perspectives, This Is Ear Hustle tells the real lived experience of the criminal justice system"--

"The Pulitzer Prize-winning, bestselling author of Evicted reimagines the debate on poverty, making a new and bracing argument about why it persists in America: because the rest of us benefit from it. The United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why? Why does this land of plenty allow one in every eight of its children to go without basic necessities, permit scores of its citizens to live and die on the streets, and authorize its corporations to pay poverty wages? In this landmark book, acclaimed sociologist Matthew Desmond draws on history, research, and original reporting to show how affluent Americans knowingly and unknowingly keep poor people poor. Those of us who are financially secure exploit the poor, driving down their wages while forcing them to overpay for housing and access to cash and credit. We prioritize the subsidization of our wealth over the alleviation of poverty, designing a welfare state that gives the most to those who need the least. And we stockpile opportunity in exclusive communities, creating zones of concentrated riches alongside those of concentrated despair. Some lives are made small so that others may grow. Elegantly written and fiercely argued, this compassionate book gives us new ways of thinking about a morally urgent problem. It also helps us imagine solutions. Desmond builds a startlingly original and ambitious case for ending poverty. He calls on us all to become poverty abolitionists, engaged in a politics of collective belonging to usher in a new age of shared prosperity and, at last, true freedom"--

With unparalleled access to key players, a CNN senior legal analyst and Supreme Court expert provides an urgent and inside look at the history-making era of the Supreme Court during the Trump and post-Trump years, including its reversal of Roe v. Wade.;"Nine Black Robes displays the inner maneuverings among the Supreme Court justices that led to the seismic reversal of Roe v. Wade and a half century of women's abortion rights. Biskupic details how rights are stripped away or, alternatively as in the case of gun owners, how rights are expanded. Today's bench--with its conservative majority--is desperately ideological. The Court has been headed rightward and ensnared by its own intrigues for years, but the Trump appointments hastened the modern transformation. With unparalleled access to key players, Biskupic shows the tactics of each justice and reveals switched votes and internal pacts that typically never make the light of day, yet will have repercussions for generations to come"--

"In Indivisible, historian and law professor Joel Richard Paul tells how Daniel Webster, a young New Hampshire attorney turned politician, rose to national prominence through his powerful oratory and popularized the ideals of American nationalism that helped forge our nation's identity. In his speeches, Webster argued that the Constitution was not a compact made by states but an expression of the will of all Americans. As these ideas took root, they influenced future leaders, among them Abraham Lincoln, who drew on them to hold the nation together during the Civil War"--

"An eye-opening look at how young Arab- and Muslim- Americans are forging lives for themselves in a country that often mistakes them for the enemy. Just over a century ago , W.E.B. Du Bois posed a probing question in his classic The Souls of Black Folk: How does it feel to be a problem? Now, Moustafa Bayoumi asks the same about America's new "problem"-Arab- and Muslim-Americans. Bayoumi takes readers into the lives of seven twenty-somethings living in Brooklyn, home to the largest Arab-American population in the United States. He moves beyond stereotypes and clichs to reveal their often unseen struggles, from being subjected to government surveillance to the indignities of workplace discrimination. Through it all, these young men and women persevere through triumphs and setbacks as they help weave the tapestry of a new society that is, at its heart, purely American."--

"A bold new assessment of the multipronged attack on American rights, and how to push back, from experts at the Fletcher School at Tufts and the Carr Center at Harvard. In fifteen accessible chapters dealing with voting rights, freedom of speech, criminal justice, gun rights, LGBTQ+ rights, disability rights, religious freedom, privacy, immigration, and more, three renowned thought-leaders, including a former assistant secretary of state, John Shattuck, Sushma Raman, and Mathias Risse present a comprehensive account of the current state of rights in America-along with concrete recommendations to policy makers and citizens for reimagining them"--

"A legendary lawyer and a legal scholar reveal the structural failures that undermine justice in our criminal courts. The Fear of Too Much Justice offers a timely, trenchant, firsthand critique of our criminal courts and points the way toward a more just future"--

Fresh Air from WHYY, the Peabody Award-winning weekday magazine of contemporary arts and issues, is one of public radio's most popular programs. Hosted by Terry Gross, the show features intimate conversations with today's biggest luminaries.Subscribe to Fresh Air Plus! You'll enjoy bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening - all while you support NPR's mission. Learn more at plus.npr.org/freshair

The Justice Department announced today that it has opened a civil pattern or practice investigation into the City of Memphis and the Memphis Police Department (MPD). The investigation will seek to determine whether there are systemic violations of the Constitution or federal law by MPD. The investigation will focus on MPD’s use of force and its stops, searches and arrests, as well as whether it engages in discriminatory policing.

"The moving, eye-opening memoir of an innocent man detained at Gauntanamo Bay for 15 years: a story of humanity in the unlikeliest of places and an unprecedented look at life at Gauntanamo on the eve of its 20th anniversary"--;"At the age of 18, Mansoor Adayfi left his home in Yemen for a cultural mission to Afghanistan. He never returned. Kidnapped by warlords and then sold to the US after 9/11, he was disappeared to Guantanamo Bay, where he spent the next 14 years as Detainee #441. Don't Forget Us Here tells two coming-of-age stories in parallel: a makeshift island outpost becoming the world's most notorious prison and an innocent young man emerging from its darkness. Arriving as a stubborn teenager, Mansoor survived the camp's infamous interrogation program and became a feared and hardened resistance fighter leading prison riots and hunger strikes. With time though, he grew into the man nicknamed "Smiley Troublemaker": a student, writer, advocate, and historian. Wanamo, he wrote a series of manuscripts he sent as letters to his attorneys, which he then transformed into this vital chronicle, in collaboration with award-winning writer Antonio Aiello. With unexpected warmth and empathy, Mansoor unwinds a narrative of fighting for hope and survival in unimaginable circumstances, illuminating the limitlessness of the human spirit. And through his own story, he also tells Guantanamo's story, offering an unprecedented window into one of the most secretive places on earth and the people--detainees and guards alike--who lived there with him." -- inside front jacket flap.

"A surge in interest in black reparations is taking place in America on a scale not seen since the Reconstruction Era. The Black Reparations Project gathers an accomplished interdisciplinary team of scholars-members of the Reparations Planning Committee-who have considered the issues pertinent to making reparations happen. This book will be an essential resource in the national conversation going forward. The first section of The Black Reparations Project crystallizes the rationale for reparations, cataloguing centuries of racial repression, discrimination, violence, mass incarceration, and the massive black-white wealth gap. Drawing on the contributors' expertise in economics, history, law, public policy, public health, and education, the second section unfurls direct guidance for building and implementing a reparations program, including draft legislation that addresses how the program should be financed and how claimants can be identified and compensated. Rigorous and comprehensive, The Black Reparations Project will motivate, guide, and speed the final leg of the journey for justice"--

Countless generations of Arabs and Muslims have called the United States "home." Yet while diversity and pluralism continue to define contemporary America, many Muslims are viewed by their neighbors as painful reminders of conflict and violence. In this concise volume, renowned historian Yvonne Haddad argues that American Muslim identity is as uniquely American it is for as any other race, nationality, or religion. Becoming American? first traces the history of Arab and Muslim immigration into Western society during the 19th and 20th centuries, revealing a two-fold disconnect between the cultures���America's unwillingness to accept these new communities at home and the activities of radical Islam abroad. Urging America to reconsider its tenets of religious pluralism, Haddad reveals that the public square has more than enough room to accommodate those values and ideals inherent in the moderate Islam flourishing throughout the country. In all, in remarkable, succinct fashion, Haddad prods readers to ask what it means to be truly American and paves the way forward for not only increased understanding but for forming a Muslim message that is capable of uplifting American society.

Arab Americans are one of the most misunderstood segments of the U.S. population, especially after the events of 9/11. In Arab America, Nadine Naber tells the stories of second generation Arab American young adults living in the San Francisco Bay Area, most of whom are political activists engaged in two culturalist movements that draw on the conditions of diaspora, a Muslim global justice and a Leftist Arab movement.Writing from a transnational feminist perspective, Naber reveals the complex and at times contradictory cultural and political processes through which Arabness is forged in the contemporary United States, and explores the apparently intra-communal cultural concepts of religion, family, gender, and sexuality as the battleground on which Arab American young adults and the looming world of America all wrangle. As this struggle continues, these young adults reject Orientalist thought, producing counter-narratives that open up new possibilities for transcending the limitations of Orientalist, imperialist, and conventional nationalist articulations of self, possibilities that ground concepts of religion, family, gender, and sexuality in some of the most urgent issues of our times: immigration politics, racial justice struggles, and U.S. militarism and war.

"The American Dream isn't a thing of the past, but a miracle of the present. Now more than ever it's easy to focus on the divisions that plague our nation. It may seem as if our best days are behind us, but bestselling author and senator Tim Scott believes we have yet to realize the fullness of our identity. We are in the midst of a story that's still unfolding. And beautiful opportunities await. In this powerful memoir, Scott recounts formative events of his life alongside the inspiring stories of other Americans who have risen above hardship and embodied the values that make our nation great. Together these personal and inspirational accounts call readers to embrace: the mountaintops as well as the valleys on the journey to a more perfect union; a path marked by optimism, hope, and resolve; and a future characterized by endurance, unity, and strength. Both a clear-eyed reckoning with our nation's failures and an ode to its accomplishments, America, a Redemption Story issues a clarion call for all of us to rise courageously to the greatness within our reach." --

"Published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, historian Felicia Kornbluh delivers an urgent book about two key reproductive rights victories in New York that set the tone for the nation. A Woman's Life Is a Human Life is the story of two movements that transformed the politics of reproductive rights: the fight to decriminalize abortion and the campaign against sterilization abuse, which happened disproportionately in communities of color. Their victories occurred just before and after the Roe v. Wade decision, and their histories cast new light on the case and the fate of reproductive choice today. From dissident Democrats who were first to try reforming abortion laws, to clergy leading the nation's largest abortion referral service, to Puerto Rican activists who introduced sterilization abuse to the reproductive rights agenda, and Black women who took the cause global, A Woman's Life Is a Human Life chronicles the diverse ways activists changed the law and demanded reproductive justice. With firsthand accounts and previously unseen sources--including from her mother, who drafted New York's law decriminalizing abortion, and their across-the-hall neighbor, Dr. Helen Rodriguez-Trias, a Puerto Rican doctor and leader in the movement against sterilization abuse--Felicia Kornbluh shows how grassroots action overcame the odds-and how it might work today"--

"During the 1990s the United States undertook the greatest social policy reform since the Social Security Act of 1935. In Welfare Reform: Effects of a Decade of Change, Jeffrey Grogger and Lynn Karoly assemble evidence from numerous studies, including nearly three dozen social experiments, to assess how welfare reform has affected behavior. To broaden our understanding of this wide-ranging policy reform, the authors evaluate the evidence in relation to an economic model of behavior. The evidence they collect reveals the trade-offs that policymakers face in achieving the conflicting goals of promoting work, reducing dependency, and alleviating need among the poor. Finally, the authors identify numerous areas where important gaps remain in our understanding of the effects of welfare reform." "The book will be a crucial resource for policy economists, social policy specialists, other professionals concerned with welfare policy, and students."--Jacket.

Across the country, in courts, classrooms, and the media, Americans are deeply divided over the use of race in admitting students to universities. Yet until now the debate over race and admissions has consisted mainly of clashing opinions, uninformed by hard evidence. This work, written by two of the country's most respected academic leaders, intends to change that. It brings a wealth of empirical evidence to bear on how race-sensitive admissions policies actually work and what effects they have on students of different races.;William G. Bowen, argue that we can pass an informed judgment on the wisdom of race-sensitive admissions only if we understand in detail the college careers and the subsequent lives of students - or, to use a metaphor they take from Mark Twain, if we learn the shape of the entire river. The heart of the book is thus an unprecedented study of the academic, employment, and personal histories of more than 45,000 students of all races who attended academically selective universities between the 1970s and the early 1990s.

"In a high-tech command center in downtown Los Angeles, a digital map lights up with 911 calls, television monitors track breaking news stories, surveillance cameras sweep the streets, and rows of networked computers link analysts and police officers to a wealth of law enforcement intelligence. This is just a glimpse into a future where software predicts future crimes, algorithms generate virtual "most-wanted" lists, and databanks collect personal and biometric information. This bookintroduces the cutting-edge technology that is changing how the police do their jobs and shows why it is more important than ever that citizens understand the far-reaching consequences of big data surveillance as a law enforcement tool. Andrew Guthrie Ferguson reveals how these new technologies - viewed as race-neutral and objective - have been eagerly adopted by police departments hoping to distance themselves from claims of racial bias and unconstitutional practices. After a series of high-profile police shootings and federal investigations into systemic police misconduct, and in an era of law enforcement budget cutbacks, data-driven policing has been billed as a way to 'turn the page' on racial bias. But behind the data are real people, and difficult questions remain about racial discrimination and the potential to distort constitutional protections. In this first book on big data policing, Ferguson offers an examination of how new technologies will alter the who, where, when and how we police. These new technologies also offer data-driven methods to improve police accountability and to remedy the underlying socio-economic risk factors that encourage crime"--

Cose examines the effects of continuing discrimination on middle-class African Americans.

"A former prosecutor turned law professor explains the rise of Mass Incarceration and the path to reform. The book offers an in-the-trenches perspective that solves the riddle of how thousands of local police, prosecutors, and judges, acting independently, produced the world's highest incarceration rates, while solving a shockingly low percentage of even serious crimes"--;The United States imprisons a higher proportion of its population than any other nation. Mass Incarceration Nation offers a novel, in-the-trenches perspective to explain the factors--historical, political, and institutional--that led to the current system of mass imprisonment. The book examines the causes and impacts of mass incarceration on both the political and criminal justice systems. With accessible language and straightforward statistical analysis, former prosecutor turned law professor Jeffrey Bellin provides a formula for reform to return to the low incarceration rates that characterized the United States prior to the 1970s.

The Color of Law brilliantly recounted how government at all levels created segregation. Just Action describes how we can begin to undo it.