Criminal Justice: An Examination is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Julian Roberts, Professor of Criminology at the University of Oxford. Julian Roberts is an international expert on sentencing throughout the common-law world and is strongly involved in connecting scholars with practitioners as well as promoting greater public understanding of sentencing. This thought-provoking conversation covers a wide range of topics related to criminal justice, including plea bargaining, the involvement of victims in criminal sentencing procedures, victim impact statements, parole, sentencing multiple and repeat crimes, community-based sentencing, alternate dispute resolution, rehabilitation, and more. Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

New Books in Public Policy

Julian Roberts, “Criminal Justice: An Examination” (Open Agenda, 2021)

James Russell’s The Labor Guide to Retirement Plans: For Union Organizers and Employees (NYU Press, 2021) is a helpful how-to for workers navigating their retirement and pension options, from the labor organizer's perspective. Researching retirement plans should not take the rest of your life, even if deciphering the relevant paperwork seems to have become a full-time job. Deliberately elaborate legalese is obscuring the efforts of financial elites to seize control of workers' collective retirement savings—and The Labor Guide to Retirement Plans is here to translate. This nuts-and-bolts book provides a much-needed demystification of the retirement system. Even more than that The Labor Guide to Retirement Plans enables us to take charge of our own personal futures, as a first step towards taking back what belongs to us all. Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service & Nonprofit Leadership program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

James W. Russell, "The Labor Guide to Retirement Plans: For Union Organizers and Employees" (NYU Press, 2021)

What is the future of care? In The Care Crisis: What Caused It and How Can We End It? (Verso, 2021),  Emma Dowling, an associate professor at the Institute for Sociology University of Vienna, introduces the extent of the global crisis of care. Drawing on a feminist perspective, the book thinks through the multiple ways that care is rendered invisible in contemporary society, subject to a public storm of privatisation and austerity. The crisis is exacerbated by broader social trends, from the monitoring and exploitation of precarious workers to the individualisation of self-care. Most crucially, the book offers ways to properly value care, democratising and de-financialising this most important part of society. The book is essential reading. Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Emma Dowling, "The Care Crisis: What Caused It and How Can We End It?" (Verso, 2021)

The current opioid epidemic in the United States began in the mid-1990s with the introduction of a new drug, OxyContin, viewed as a safer and more effective opiate for chronic pain management. By 2017, the opioid epidemic had become a full-blown crisis as over two million Americans had become dependent on and abused prescription pain pills and street drugs. The Opioid Epidemics in the United States: Missed Opportunities and Policy Failures (Routledge, 2021) examines the origins, development, and rise of the opioid epidemic in the United States from the perspective of the public policy process. The authors, political scientists Kant Patel and Mark Rushefsky, discuss institutional features of the American political system that impact the making of public policy, arguing that the fragmentation of that system hinders the ability to coherently address policy problems, taking the opioid epidemic as an example. The book begins with a brief historical examination of the history of the problem of opioid addiction and crises in the United States and public policy responses to past crises, but the main focus is on the current national public health emergency. Geert Slabbekoorn works as an analyst in the field of public security. In addition he has published on different aspects of dark web drug trade in Belgium. Find him on twitter, tweeting all things drug related @GeertJS. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Kant Patel and Mark E. Rushefsky, "The Opioid Epidemics in the United States: Missed Opportunities and Policy Failures" (Routledge, 2021)

There’s nothing more vital to survival than water. “Water water everywhere, and not a drop to drink!”, said the Ancient Mariner, in the poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Besides widespread water shortage, too much of America’s water is undrinkable. From big cities and suburbs to the rural heartland, chemicals linked to cancer, heart disease, obesity, birth defects, and lowered IQ routinely spill from our taps. The tragedy is that existing technologies could launch a new age of clean, healthy, and safe tap water for only a few dollars a week per person. Scrupulously researched, Troubled Water: What's Wrong with What We Drink (Thomas Dunne, 2020) is full of shocking stories about contaminated water found throughout the U.S. and about the everyday heroes who have successfully forced changes in the quality and safety of our drinking water. Contamination is not the only critical water issue.  The U.S. government predicts that forty of our fifty states-and 60 percent of the earth's land surface-will soon face alarming gaps between available water and the growing demand for it. Without action, food prices will rise, economic growth will slow, and political instability is likely to follow. Let There Be Water illustrates how Israel can serve as a model for the United States and countries everywhere by showing how to blunt the worst of the coming water calamities. Even with 60 percent of its country made of desert, Israel has not only solved its water problem; it also had an abundance of water. Israel even supplies water to its neighbors-the Palestinians and the Kingdom of Jordan-every day. Based on meticulous research and hundreds of interviews, Let There Be Water reveals the methods and techniques of the often-offbeat inventors who enabled Israel to lead the world in cutting-edge water technology. Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Seth M. Siegel, "Troubled Water: What's Wrong with What We Drink" (Thomas Dunne, 2020)

Called the “quarterback of the new anti-drug movement,” Kevin Sabet received his Ph.D. in social policy from the University of Oxford and has worked in drug policy for over two decades. He’s served as an advisor for three presidential administrations, Pope Francis and the United Nations, and in 2013 he founded the group he still leads, Smart Approaches to Marijuana, better known as SAM, which opposes cannabis legalization and commercialization. His new book, Smokescreen: What the Marijuana Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know, was released by Forefront Books earlier this year.  ﻿Emily Dufton is the author of Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America (Basic Books, 2017). A drug historian and writer, her second book, on the development of the opioid addiction medication industry, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Kevin A. Sabet, "Smokescreen: What the Marijuana Industry Doesn't Want You to Know" (Forefront Books, 2021)

J.C. Salyer’s Court of Injustice: Law Without Recognition in U.S. Immigration (Stanford UP, 2020) is an important look at the histories and processes of immigration law in the US. The book engages with US immigration policy by both tracing the history of US immigration law in the US and considering contemporary practices. Not just a history of law or assessment of policy, Court of Injustice is ethnographically grounded in New York City immigration courts, as well as the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project (NYIFUP). Salyer’s work shifts in scope—from past to present, from New York City to the whole of the U.S, from theoretical considerations of nation-state sovereignty to individual experiences of immigration law—in a way that masterfully paints a compelling portrait of the US immigration courts. By considering context alongside contemporary practice, Court of Injustice provides a way to think through the threads of migration, geography, and xenophobia alongside arguing for concrete ways the under-resourced US immigration courts could change to provide more just outcomes. Throughout the book, Salyer considers not just the experiences of immigrants with immigration law, but also how immigration lawyers come to understand immigration courts. Additionally, Court of Injustice links past to present, and provides a needed context that clearly demonstrates that contemporary shifts in US immigration law—including those under the Trump administration—are not something new, but part of a long history that includes the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), and other policies that sought to limit migration to the US and “thicken” the US border. Salyer’s socioeconomic history of immigration courts in the U.S. would be of great interest to a wide readership, from those studying migration academically to non-academic members of the public seeking a more in-depth understanding of U.S. immigration policy. Rine Vieth is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at McGill University, where they research the how UK asylum tribunals consider claims of belief. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

J.C. Salyer, "Court of Injustice: Law Without Recognition in U.S. Immigration" (Stanford UP, 2020)

To many observers, Congress has become a deeply partisan institution where ideologically-distinct political parties do little more than engage in legislative trench warfare. A zero-sum, winner-take-all approach to congressional politics has replaced the bipartisan comity ofpast eras. If the parties cannot get everything they want in national policymaking, then they prefer gridlock and stalemate to compromise. Or, at least, that is the conventional wisdom. In The Limits of Party: Congress and Lawmaking in a Polarized Era (U Chicago Press, 2020), James M. Curry and Frances E. Lee challenge this conventional wisdom. By constructing legislative histories of congressional majority parties’attempts to enact their policy agendas in every congress since the 1980s and by drawing on interviews with Washington insiders, the authors analyze the successes and failures of congressional parties to enact their legislative agendas. Their conclusions will surprise many congressional observers: Even in our time of intense party polarization, bipartisanship remains the key to legislative success on Capitol Hill. Frances E. Lee is Professor of Politics and Public Affairs in the Department of Politics at Princeton University. James Curry is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Political Science at the University of Utah. Their book, The Limits of Party, won the American Political Science Association's Gladys M. Kammerer Award for the best book in the field of US national policy. Host Ursula Hackett is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her Cambridge University Press book America's Voucher Politics: How Elites Learned to Hide the State won the 2021 Education Politics and Policy Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association. Her writing guide Brilliant Essays is published by Macmillan Study Skills. She tweets @UrsulaBHackett. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

James M. Curry and Frances E. Lee, "The Limits of Party: Congress and Lawmaking in a Polarized Era" (U Chicago Press, 2020)

In Who Gets What — and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design (Mariner Books, 2015), Nobel Memorial Prize Winner Alvin Roth explains his pioneering work in the study of matching markets such as kidney exchange, marriage, job placements for new doctors and new professors, and enrollments in schools or colleges. In these markets, “buyers” and “sellers” must each chose the other, and getting the prices right is only a small part of what makes for a successful transaction, if cash is even involved at all. Roth’s work has led the way in taking microeconomics outside the halls of academic theory to become a practical “engineering” tool for policymakers and businesses. In our interview, we range far beyond the examples from the book to discuss the implications of his work for the design of tech’s market-making “platform” businesses like Airbnb, Amazon, Lyft, or Uber, the challenges he faces when countries or people view some kinds of transactions as “repugnant” or morally unacceptable, and the reasons why San Francisco’s school district (unlike Boston’s or New York’s) chose not to implement the un-gameable school choice plan his team devised for them. Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new digital economy-focused Master's program in Applied Economics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Alvin E. Roth, "Who Gets What--and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design" (HMH, 2015)

How can we create a healthier world and prevent the crisis next time? In a few short months, COVID-19 devastated the world and, in particular, the United States. It infected millions, killed hundreds of thousands, and effectively made the earth stand still. Yet America was already in poor health before COVID-19 appeared. Racism, marginalization, socioeconomic inequality--our failure to address these forces left us vulnerable to COVID-19 and the ensuing global health crisis it became. Had we tackled these challenges twenty years ago, after the outbreak of SARS, perhaps COVID-19 could have been quickly contained. Instead, we allowed our systems to deteriorate.  Following on the themes of his award-winning publication Well, Sandro Galea's The Contagion Next Time (Oxford UP, 2021) articulates the foundational forces shaping health in our society and how we can strengthen them to prevent the next outbreak from becoming a pandemic. Because while no one could have predicted that a pandemic would strike when it did, we did know that a pandemic would strike, sooner or later. We're still not ready for the next pandemic. But we can be--we must be. In lyrical prose, The Contagion Next Time challenges all of us to tackle the deep-rooted obstacles preventing us from becoming a truly vibrant and equitable nation, reminding us of what we've seemed to have forgotten: that our health is a public good worth protecting. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Sandro Galea, "The Contagion Next Time" (Oxford UP, 2021)

This is a book about the American Dream: how to understand this central principle of American public philosophy, the ways in which it is threatened by a number of winner-take-all economic trends, and how to make it a reality for workers and their families in the 21st century. Integrating political philosophy and the history of political thought with recent work in economics, political science, and sociology, Joshua Preiss' book Just Work for All: The American Dream in the 21st Century (Taylor & Francis, 2020) calls for renewed political and policy commitment to "just work." Such a commitment is essential to combat the negative moral externalities of an economy where the fruits of growth are increasingly claimed by a relatively small portion of the population: slower growth, rising inequality, declining absolute mobility, dying communities, the erosion of social solidarity, lack of faith in political leaders and institutions, exploding debt, ethnic and nationalist backlash, widespread hopelessness, and the rapid rise in what economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case call deaths of despair. Covid-19 threatens to pour gasoline on these winner-take-all fires, further concentrating economic and political power in the hands of those best suited to withstand (and even profit from) the pandemic-driven economic crisis. In this book, the author provides a model for understanding the American Dream and making it a reality in a post-Covid-19 economy. A tour de force, this book is essential reading for scholars and researchers of political philosophy, political economy, political theory, and economics, as well as for the layperson trying to make sense of the post-pandemic world. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Joshua Preiss, "Just Work for All: The American Dream in the 21st Century" (Taylor & Francis, 2020)

Interviews with Scholars of Public Policy about their New Books

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New Books in Public Policy

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