Books and journal articles are the most common way to access scholarly research in your field, but each has advantages and disadvantages. Books take longer to research, write, and publish, so the information is not as current as in journal articles, which are shorter and slightly faster to publish. However, because they are longer and took more time to produce, books offer more thorough coverage of a topic, draw on a wider range of preexisting scholarship, and often excel in placing an argument in broader thematic and disciplinary context.
Consider a scholarly book in your own research, and look for the following:
The subject headings used in the library catalog to describe works on criminology and criminal justice will often include one of the following phrases. Consider adding them to your keyword searches to hone in on social aspects of a wide range of topics and cultures.
Remember you do not need to know the full subject heading in advance. Keyword searching for these phrases plus your topic keyword will work too when these phrases appear anywhere in the subject heading, title, or abstract/table of contents of an item.
In this brilliant work, the most influential philosopher since Sartre suggests that such vaunted reforms as the abolition of torture and the emergence of the modern penitentiary have merely shifted the focus of punishment from the prisoner's body to his soul.
Inner-City Black America is often stereotyped as a place of random violence: in fact, violence in the inner city is regulated through an informal but well-known code of the street. How you dress, talk, and behave can have life-or-death consequences, with young people particularly at risk. This incisive book examines the code as a response to the lack of jobs that pay a living wage, to the stigma of race, to rampant drug use, to alienation and lack of hope.
Forty years in, the War on Drugs has done almost nothing to prevent drugs from being sold or used, but it has nonetheless created a little-known surveillance state in America's most disadvantaged neighborhoods. Arrest quotas and high-tech surveillance techniques criminalize entire blocks, and transform the very associations that should stabilize young lives--family, relationships, jobs--into liabilities, as the police use such relationships to track down suspects, demand information, and threaten consequences. Alice Goffman spent six years living in one such neighborhood in Philadelphia, and her close observations and often harrowing stories reveal the pernicious effects of this pervasive policing.
