This week we talk with Shadd Maruna and Fergus McNeill about their documentary project, The Road From Crime. This documentary was produced as part of the larger Discovering Desistance Project, which aims to share knowledge and improve understanding of why people desist from crime. First, we hear a clip from the opening sequence of the film, then we talk with Shadd and Fergus themselves as they describe the process of producing this project.
In this episode, we talk with University of Pittsburgh School of Law Professor David Harris about his new book Failed Evidence: Why Law Enforcement Resists Science. We discuss the cultural and organizational resistance to adopting scientific techniques into police and prosecutorial practices, and what social scientists can do about it.
This is a special edition of Office Hours: we’re cross-posting the first interview from the all new Contexts Podcast. In this interview, Jessica Streeter speaks with Henry H. Brownstein and Timothy M. Mulcahy, co-authors of the Winter 2012 Contexts feature, Home Cooking: Marketing Meth.
If you like Office Hours, you probably already love Contexts magazine and now you’ve got another great podcast to subscribe to with the Contexts Podcast. So head over to contexts.org to subscribe and while you’re there, check out the new Spring 2012 issue of Contexts!
This week we talk with David Garland about his new book, Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition. Garland discusses why capital punishment persists in the US while it does not in other Western countries, from the structure of our political system to the role of public opinion.
Our Teaching TSP team has also written up a series of classroom questions and exercises to be used alongside this interview. You can check them out here.
This episode we talk with Robert Sampson about his new book, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect. In the face of globalization and the widespread belief that the “world is flat,” Sampson shows how the world is actually very uneven, and that local communities make a great difference in how people live their lives across a wide range of phenomenon, from homicide and child health, to leadership networks, teenage pregnancy, altruism, and home foreclosures.
© 2013 Office Hours
