Nigel South

This book is the first green criminology text to focus specifically on Latin America. Green criminology has always adopted a broad horizon and explicitly emphasised that environmental crimes and harms affect countries and cultures around the world. The chapters collected here illuminate and describe the "theft of nature" and the "poisoning of the land" in Latin America through and from processes of agro-industry expansion, biopiracy, legal and illegal trafficking of free-born non-human animals, and mining. An interdisciplinary study, this collection draws on research from a wide range of international experts on not only green criminology, but also social justice, political ecology and sociology. An engaging and thought-provoking work, this book will be an essential text for anyone interested in current issues in environmental crime.

"This ... collection of original essays explores the relationship between social conflict and the environment--a topic that has received little attention within criminology. The chapters provide a systematic and comprehensive introduction and overview of conflict situations stemming from human exploitation of environments, as well as the impact of social conflicts on the wellbeing and health of specific species and ecosystems. Largely informed by green criminology perspectives, the chapters in the book are intended to stimulate new understandings of the relationships between humans and nature through critical evaluation of environmental destruction and degradation associated with social conflicts occurring around the world."--Publisher's Web site.

This volume draws together an impressive series of papers that explore enduring and new problems in the construction and analysis of social policy. Critical but accessible, the various chapters cover: methodological issues and the nature of competing claims about social policy 'knowledge'; racism and health services; citizenship and access to housing and other amenities; and the importance of the environment as an emerging area for social policy debate. This collection appears at a time when it is widely recognised that whichever political party is in power in the late 1990s, the familiar model of the 'classic' British welfare state is increasingly distant. Domestic issues and local contexts are linked to broader global changes and different chapters engage in theoretical debate and empirical analysis in ways which make this a strong contribution to work defining the 'new social policy'. The editors describe the agenda of this new social policy and introduce the collection, identifying the key themes of the volume as 'citizenship', 'exclusion' and 'difference'.

Compares prison systems of 15 nations, and addresses crisis and change in penology which occurred during 1980s and 1990s. The contributors identify various problems which face penal systems throughout the world, and compare a variety of these systems by employing sociological analysis.