This deeply researched book seeks to unravel the changing patterns of thought and policy linking race and crime in northern American cities between 1890 and 1940. The author begins with the 1890 U....

The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America

knowledge. Methods That Matter reflects the now widespread recognition that forward movement in the social sciences will happen when scholars take an ecumenical standpoint visà-vis the choice of methodological tools for answering questions about social patterns and behaviors. However, the volume’s collective motivation—that mixed methods yield integration across the social sciences and have proved valuable in the careers of important social scientists—seems like a point whose arrival is late to the party. Halfway through my reading, I wanted a volume that more tightly cohered around how the state of knowledge in human development science, especially that related to ecocultural theory, was advanced through mixed methods approaches. Instead, when reading this volume, a reader who is not steeped in the debates within the human development science field is left to read between the lines about the nature of the ruptures or bridges in that field and at a loss to draw meaningful comparisons to other social science fields where there have been more or less significant moves towards methodological pluralism.

From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America:

The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. By Khalil Gibran Muhammad (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. vii plus 380 pp.)

Community-level factors and incidence of gun violence in the United States, 2014-2017.

In Bleeding Out: The Devastating Consequences of Urban Violence—and a Bold New Plan for Peace in the Streets, Thomas Abt makes a forceful case for addressing urban violence as a ‘‘national emergency that demands our urgent attention’’ (p. 4). While Abt sprinkles in stories and insights from ‘‘dozens of faceto-face interviews’’ (p. 10) in several cities and his own experience as a former prosecutor, anti-violence practitioner, and researcher, the book is more synthesis than original contribution. It is, however, a provocative and vigorous synthesis—one based in Abt’s authoritative review of policy evaluations and recent sociological and criminological research on the causes of and treatments for urban violence. In ‘‘Part I: Diagnosis,’’ Abt begins by delineating a clear framework for setting evidence-informed policy priorities for addressing urban violence. A policy, he argues, ought to be focused, balanced, and fair. First, a policy must focus on ‘‘the violent few’’ (p. 43) and the handful of violent blocks of a neighborhood rather than posited ‘‘root causes’’ like poverty, culture, and segregation. Second, the approach must balance prevention and punishment. For instance, an effective approach would be ‘‘focused on high-activity places and people’’ and include both hot-spots policing and prevention programming—that is, both ‘‘tough’’ and ‘‘soft’’ approaches to crime (p. 49). The third principle is fairness, or the ‘‘how’’ of implementation. Laws must be enforced and programs must be implemented ‘‘according to widely accepted values, including transparency, impartiality, proportionality, and equality’’ (p. 61). We live in a time of profound legal cynicism—the deeply held belief among many that the criminal justice system is incompetent, illegitimate, and unresponsive (p. 63). Procedural fairness, therefore, is not only a high-minded ethical aim to be pursued, for Abt, but also an absolutely essential onthe-ground ingredient for any policy or program that seeks lasting peace on the streets. With these principles established, Abt lays out his review of violence-prevention efforts in ‘‘Part II: Treatment’’ with another clear-cut trio of targets: people, places, and behaviors. The first chapter, ‘‘Pacifying Shooters,’’ a chapter about ‘‘hot people’’ at the highest risk for killing and being killed, may be the most compelling in Bleeding Out. In it, Abt establishes three categories for focus: would-be shooters, someday shooters, and bona fide shooters. For ‘‘would-be shooters,’’ he proposes three main strategies—focused deterrence, street outreach, and cognitive behavioral therapy—in the book’s most detailed and lengthy section (and the one in which Abt has the most personal experience, going back to his days with Group Violence Reduction Strategy in Boston). For younger ‘‘someday shooters,’’ Abt outlines a few general programs like Functional Family Therapy and Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports. For ‘‘bona fide shooters,’’ there’s ‘‘isolation and quarantine’’ (p. 108). While Bleeding Out offers a readable synthesis of cutting-edge research on urban violence and a clearly articulated plan of action, some readers may take issue with the book’s technocratic tone and approach. Abt spotlights evaluation studies, interventions tested in randomized controlled trials, and a top-down approach guided by local elites. The book is packed with prescriptive ‘‘should’’ and ‘‘must’’ assertions from Abt about how our politics, policy-making, and community-based and law enforcement efforts ought to operate. He argues, for instance, that an effective anti-violence approach, in order to avoid politics, would not be open to the public and would draw on ‘‘elite members of their respective professions’’ (p. 204). This ‘‘local A team,’’ as he calls it, would be well funded, have authority to respond in real time, and ‘‘must work in shifts in order to be available at all hours’’ (p. 205). In another instance, Abt recounts correcting the thinking of a community leader who said to Abt that 232 Reviews

Bleeding Out: The Devastating Consequences of Urban Violence—and a Bold New Plan for Peace in the Streets:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/socf.12538

Once in Parkland, a Year in Hartford, a Weekend in Chicago: Race and Resistance in the Gun Violence Prevention Movement

Most research portrays the gun violence prevention (GVP) movement as predominantly white, dominated by national Washington DC-based policy organizations and recently by white middle-class women see...

Jordan McMillan

Papers

Once in Parkland, a Year in Hartford, a Weekend in Chicago: Race and Resistance in the Gun Violence Prevention Movement

Beyond Gun Control: Mapping Gun Violence Prevention Logics: