San Antonio College Library

America's founders extolled a nation of laws, for they knew that only a fairly enforced legal system could protect liberty and property against corruption and tyranny. Nearly two and a half centuries later, that system remains the ultimate safeguard for us all. With concise but penetrating and provocative insights, the eminent Peter Charles Hoffer recaptures the spirit of this grand enterprise while never losing sight of its human face. The distillation...

"Have newcomers to American cities been responsible for a disproportionate amount of violent crime? Dangerous Strangers takes up this question by examining the incidence of criminal violence among several waves of immigrant and ethnic groups in San Francisco." "By looking at a variety of groups - primarily Irish, German, Italian, and Chinese - and their different experiences at varying times in the city's history, this book addresses the issue of...

"A powerful, engaging book that critiques the history of race, law, and justice by examining where race lives and breathes across the U.S. criminal-legal system"-- How we can understand race, crime, and punishment in the age of Black Lives Matter When The Color of Crime was first published in 1998, it was heralded as a path-breaking book on race and crime. Now, in its third edition, Katheryn Russell-Brown's book is more relevant than ever, as police...

From Puritan Execution Day rituals to gangsta rap, the black criminal has been an enduring presence in American culture. To understand why, Jeannine Marie DeLombard insists, we must set aside the lenses of pathology and persecution and instead view the African American felon from the far more revealing perspectives of publicity and personhood. When the Supreme Court declared in Dred Scott that African Americans have "no rights which the white man...

"In 1985, Anthony Ray Hinton was arrested and charged with two counts of capital murder in Alabama. Stunned, confused, and only twenty-nine years old, Hinton knew that it was a case of mistaken identity and believed that the truth would prove his innocence and ultimately set him free. But with no money and a different system of justice for a poor black man in the South, Hinton was sentenced to death by electrocution. He spent his first three years...