Summary from newjimcrow.com: The New Jim Crow is a stunning account of the rebirth of a caste-like system in the United States, one that has resulted in millions of African Americans locked behind bars and then relegated to a permanent second-class status—denied the very rights supposedly won in the Civil Rights Movement. Since its publication in 2010, the book has appeared on the New York Times bestseller list for more than a year; been dubbed the “secular bible of a new social movement” by numerous commentators, including Cornel West; and has led to consciousness-raising efforts in universities, churches, community centers, re-entry centers, and prisons nationwide. The New Jim Crow tells a truth our nation has been reluctant to face.

Summary: In the documentary 13^th, Filmmaker and Director Ava DuVernay explores the historical and legal root of the mass incarceration of Black Americans in the United States. This documentary highlights the systemic racism of the U.S. judicial and penal systems as well as offers a case for the prison abolition movement.

Abstract: This paper argues that covert ethnographic research has a legitimate and innovative voice in criminology, despite the increasing regimentation of ethical governance in social research. It also stresses that covert research has had a somewhat submerged and maligned history due to its perceived ethical transgression and is in need of rediscovery. It is argued that covert research, on closer inspection, has both a vibrant and diverse corpus of studies beyond the limited number of exemplars popularly associated with covert research. This paper explores the wide range of covert ethnographies in the study of deviance, criminality and illicit subcultures. It takes a critical stance on the appropriateness of an overly strict adherence to informed consent and suggests that ethical safeguards can stifle creative forms of criminological ethnography. The paper contends that, although covert ethnography clearly occupies a niche position in criminology, it is a necessary part of the criminological imagination.

Summary: In this article, the author explores the process of listening to the experience of violence and injustices. He argues that certain testimonies of violence, which  may be simultaneously local in different spaces and temporalities, may challenge larger notions about transitional justice.

Summary: In this series for The Society for Cultural Anthropology, there are numerous writings on the concept of Justice from an anthropological point of view, including small ethnographies and more theoretical writings.

Summary from publisher: Before the early 19th century, European ideas of crime and punishment tended to involve very public displays of the power of the monarch and the power of the state against the offending individual. Nowhere was this tendency more evident than in the spectacle of public executions. Those convicted of murder, piracy, counterfeiting, or other notable capital crimes would be taken to a public place for hanging or decapitation, and certain kinds of crimes warranted particularly gruesome punishments. In Discipline and Punish, social theorist Michel Foucault directly confronts and challenges a number of existing ideas surrounding the prison reforms of the late 1700s and early 1800s, and even into the twentieth century. By looking at the evolution of justice systems (focusing primarily on France), he suggests that the shift away from public executions and towards the idea of incarceration and reform within prison walls was a means of reframing the image of the power of society over the individual. Public executions often had the effect of making a criminal into a public martyr, and the ballads and broadsides printed for the common people did less to condemn the crime and more to glorify the criminal. By shifting the focus of justice into the prison and out of the public eye, authorities would have more direct control over the lives of those who had violated the norms of society.

Summary: This book explores the subfield of legal anthropology and the anthropology of law, the specific areas of research legal anthropologists do, and the challenges and main research questions that are centered in the subfield today.

Abstract: Justice is so familiar a feature of daily life that we seldom pause to examine it. Anthropologists have only rarely been interested in cross-cultural conceptions of justice and almost never concerned with comparative conceptions of injustice The truth is, however, that anthropologists have provided the data for a comparative understanding of justice without often using the concept itself.

Summary: In this book, Niezen outlines the relationships between human rights and culture, specifically in the field of international law. He explores how anthropology as a discipline influences the politics of human rights.

Abstract: Mohawk Interruptus is a bold challenge to dominant thinking in the fields of Native studies and anthropology. Combining political theory with ethnographic research among the Mohawks of Kahnawà:ke, a reserve community in what is now southwestern Quebec, Audra Simpson examines their struggles to articulate and maintain political sovereignty through centuries of settler colonialism. The Kahnawà:ke Mohawks are part of the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois Confederacy. Like many Iroquois peoples, they insist on the integrity of Haudenosaunee governance and refuse American or Canadian citizenship. Audra Simpson thinks through this politics of refusal, which stands in stark contrast to the politics of cultural recognition. Tracing the implications of refusal, Simpson argues that one sovereign political order can exist nested within a sovereign state, albeit with enormous tension around issues of jurisdiction and legitimacy. Finally, Simpson critiques anthropologists and political scientists, whom, she argues, have too readily accepted the assumption that the colonial project is complete. Belying that notion, Mohawk Interruptus calls for and demonstrates more robust and even handed forms of inquiry into indigenous politics in the teeth of settler governance.