Books & ideas

The Police Between Violence and Literature

Christian Chevandier — 2024-11-05T08:00:00Z

Around 1900, when Paris had absorbed its outlying communes and the city's lower depths were populated by a range of shady characters, police officers oscillated between repression and social chronicle. These bulwarks against crime were also painters of poverty, who did not shy away from poetry.

Does the Law Protect the Environment?

Sarah Vanuxem — 2024-09-26T08:55:00Z

Is the law doing enough to protect the environment? Through an analysis of the concept of environmental crime, Grégory Salle shows that legal provisions are limited by a social vision that favors the technical and capitalist exploitation of nature.

Life in the Drug Trafficking Era

Romain Busnel — 2024-02-08T07:18:00Z

Between 2006 and 2021, the war on drugs left almost 300,000 dead and 100,000 missing in Mexico. Instead of presenting a romanticized account of drug trafficking and drug barons, Adèle Blazquez analyses the conditions of life in a rural municipality affected by armed violence.

The Endless Corruption of the Powerful

Alizée Delpierre — 2024-01-23T08:30:00Z

Building on his research on corruption and white-collar crime among the ruling classes, Pierre Lascoumes takes us deep into the institutional mechanisms behind the fraud perpetrated by those who wield political and economic power in France.

Drill, Gangs, and Social Media

Clément Petitjean — 2021-06-28T07:00:00Z

Al Capone's city is regaining a reputation for crime—and is setting it to music. This latter is known as “drill,” a new form of rap that claims to document street life and violent criminality.

A Crash-Course in Femininity?

Alice Bonzom — 2017-10-23T07:00:00Z

While ideal Victorian women were supposed to be “angels in the house”, female criminals were seen as “demons in the jailhouse”. As such, they were a disruptive force and had to be dealt with. Deconstructing and reconstructing these deviants to make them more “womanly” became a major issue in the late 19^th century.

Penal Policy and Racial Prejudice in the United States

Manon Veaudor — 2017-04-27T07:00:00Z

After the war on poverty, the United States declared a war on crime. This history of penal policy since 1960 looks at the intellectual and political roots of the punitive treatment often reserved for minorities.

Who Benefits from the Crime?

Bilel Benbouzid — 2016-10-31T08:00:00Z

Can an algorithm predict crime? For several years, United States police forces have used software that is said to detect the locations of future crimes and offences. Of the many companies working in this field, Predpol is the name that is mentioned the most. But the success of this Californian start-up is more the result of marketing than any actual predictive effectiveness. The stance of this paper is twofold: first, a closer look from the seismologist who developed the algorithm reveals that this solution is far from having the predictive capacity boasted by its promoters. Second, the ethical problem with Predpol's algorithm appears not to be police discrimination, as many feared, but rather the exclusion of a section of the population from the public security offering.

White Collars, Dirty Hands and Clean Records

Jean Bérard — 2015-06-25T05:30:00Z

How do the elites manage to commit crimes without being seen, or seeing themselves, as criminals? This overview by P. Lascoumes and C. Nagels shows the means deployed by the powerful to define, use, sidestep, or avoid criminal law according to their interests.

The Three Dimensions of Ethnography

Alexandra Bidet & Carole Gayet-Viaud & Erwan Le Méner — 2013-04-01T07:30:00Z

Looking back on several decades of intellectual activity, American sociologist Jack Katz explains his vision of a three-dimensional ethnography, combining human interactions, biographical experiences, and historical processes.