The Politics of Restorative Justice: A Critical Introduction
Andrew Woolford (Fernwood Publishing, 2009)

This book invites the reader to reconsider restorative justice and its politics. Through an examination of restorative themes, theories and practices, three distinct ways in which politics affect restorative justice are explored. First, restorative justice is situated in a context in which political actors, as well as structural forces, either enable or obstruct its practice. Second, restorative justice is understood as a contributor to political power in that its practice helps govern individual and collective behaviour. Finally, restorative justice is described as a social movement requiring an enabling politics that will allow it to promote a justice that does more than affirm the status quo – it must aspire toward a transformative politics concerned with class-based, gendered, racialized and other injustices.

What’s Law Got To Do With It? The Law, Specialized Courts and Domestic Violence in Canada
Edited by Jane Ursel, Leslie M. Tutty, and Janice Lemaistre (Cormorant, 2008)

In the past two decades, public awareness of domestic violence has increased dramatically, and established institutions have been called upon to alter their practices and improve their response to domestic violence. What’s Law Got To Do With It? examines changes in the Canadian justice system from the introduction of protection order legislation, to family law, to changes in criminal court procedures.
From the Yukon to downtown Toronto, specialized domestic violence courts are exploring new strategies to aid victims and hold perpetrators accountable. In What’s Law Got To Do With It? we learn from the perspective of prosecutors, victims, and researchers of the efficacy of these changes. The authors present recent, original research on the impact of specialized courts, the utilization of protection orders, and questions about custody in family violence cases.  

Out There/In Here: Masculinity, Violence, and Prisoning
Elizabeth Comack (Fernwood Publishing, 2008)

Elizabeth Comack explores the complicated connections between masculinity and violence in the lives of men incarcerated at a provincial prison. Moving between the spaces of ‘out there’ and ‘in here,’ the discussion traces the men’s lives in terms of their efforts to ‘do’ masculinity and the place of violence in that undertaking. In drawing out these connections, similarities with the lives of other men become apparent. In the process, we also learn that prisons are not a solution to public concerns about crime and violence. Prison is a gendered space in which violence is a systemic feature and the pressures on men to ‘do’ masculinity are even more pronounced. Sending racialized and economically marginalized men to prison only encourages and reaffirms aggression, dominance and the exercise of brute power as legitimate social practices.

Criminology: A Canadian Perspective
Edited by Rick Linden (Nelson Education, 2008)

This best-selling introductory text offers a strong balance of theoretical perspectives, along with an outstanding list of contributing authors. It is the most solid and accessible introduction to the discipline available. Criminology provides students with basic background information about crime as well as a clear understanding of all the major theories of criminology including sociological and psychological explanations. It concludes with a discussion on the most serious and frequent types of crime. Written by Canadians for Canadians, Criminology, sixth edition, continues to present the work of this country''s foremost criminologists in combination with the most relevant research from around the world. This new edition has 2 new chapters and includes cutting edge content that is not covered in many criminology texts.

Global Criminology and Criminal Justice: Current Issues and Perspectives
Edited by Nick Larsen and Russell Smandych (University of Toronto Press, 2008)

From the Foreword by Piers Beirne, University of Maine: "Because our world in the new millennium differs so profoundly from the twentieth-century one inhabited by Durkheim, recognition of this overwhelming difference is one of several organizing principles employed by editors Nick Larsen and Russell Smandych.  As they rightly stress, a comparative approach to the understanding of crime and justice cannot properly capture the full complexity of globalization at the dawn of the twenty-first century.  We need a global criminology now!"

Global Criminology and Criminal Justice brings together 22 articles that constitute some of the most important recent literature in the field.  Theory and research is situated within a broader discussion of the historical shift over the past three decades from comparative to international, to global criminology.

Informal Reckonings: Conflict Resolution in Mediation, Restorative Justice, and Reparations
Andrew Woolford and R.S. Ratner (Routledge-Cavendish, 2007)

The 'reparational turn' in the field of law has resulted in the increased use of so-called 'informal' approaches to conflict resolution, including primarily the three mechanisms considered in this book: mediation, restorative justice and reparations. While proponents of these mechanisms have acclaimed their communicative and democratic promise, critics have charged that mediation, restorative justice and reparations all potentially serve as means for encouraging citizens to internalize and mimic the rationalities of governance. Indeed, the critics suggest that informal justice's supposed oppositional relationship to formal justice is, at base, a mutually reinforcing one, in which each system relies on the other for its effective operation, rather than the two being locked in a struggle for dominance.

Locating Law: Race/Class/Gender/Sexuality Connections (2nd Edition)
Edited by Elizabeth Comack (Fernwood Publishing, 2006)

One primary concern within the study of law has been to understand the law/society relation. Underlying this concern is the belief that law has a distinctly social basis; it both shapes and is shaped by the society in which it operates. This book explores the law/society relation by locating law within the nexus of race/class/gender/sexuality relations in society. Recognizing that inequalities along these lines exist in society raises important questions: What role has law historically played in generating today’s inequalities? Is law part of the problem or part of the solution? Can we use law as a strategy to achieve meaningful change? The essays in this new edition of Locating Law demonstrate law’s role in a variety of specific contexts, including perpetuating colonialism in Canada, protecting corporations and holding women responsible for sexual violence against them. These analyses are sure to generate discussion and debate and, in the process, enhance our understanding of this important relation between law and society.

Criminalizing Women: Gender and (In)justice in Neoliberal Times
Edited by Gillian Balfour and Elizabeth Comack (Fernwood Publishing, 2006)

This book introduces readers to the key issues addressed by feminists in their engagement with criminology over the past four decades. It explores the narratives of women’s lives as “errant females,” sex trade workers, “gang” members and drug traffickers to map out the connections between the choices women make and the conditions of their lives. It shows how criminalized women and girls have been disciplined, managed, corrected and punished as prisoners, patients, mothers and victims through imprisonment, medicalization and secure care. And it considers the feminist strategies that have been used to address the conditions inside women’s prisons, to defend criminalized women’s human rights and to draw attention to the systemic abuses against poor and racialized women.

Cultural Imperialism: Essays on the Political Economy of Cultural Domination
Edited by Bernd Hamm and Russell Smandych (Broadview, 2005)

Critical thinking on cultural imperialism now cuts across many academic disciplines and subfields of interdisciplinary study. This is clearly reflected in the contents of the current book, which offers a diverse range of essays on the state of current research, knowledge, and global political action and debate on cultural imperialism. These 19 chapters, written by authors coming from many fields of interest and geographical backgrounds, provide compelling evidence of the close connection between cultural imperialism and the global power structure and the political and economic objectives behind current American attempts at global domination. However, as several of the chapters also show, cultural imperialism is certainly, historically, not an American invention, and it will probably long outlive the current American Empire.

Between Justice and Certainty: Treaty Making in British Columbia
Andrew Woolford (UBC Press, 2005)

The BC treaty process was established in 1992 with the aim of resolving the outstanding land claims of First Nations in British Columbia. Two discourses have since become prominent within the treaty negotiations between First Nations and the governments of Canada and British Columbia. The first, a discourse of justice, asks how we can remedy the past injustices imposed on BC First Nations through the removal of their lands and forced assimilation. The second, a discourse of certainty, asks whether historical repair can occur in a manner that provides a better future for all British Columbians. In Between Justice and Certainty, Andrew Woolford examines the interplay between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal visions of justice and certainty in the first decade of the BC treaty process to determine whether there is a space between the two concepts in which modern treaties can be made.

The Power to Criminalize: Violence, Inequality and the Law
Elizabeth Comack and Gillian Balfour (Fernwood Publishing, 2004)

Law’s power to criminalize—to turn a person into a criminal—is formidable. Traditional legal doctrine argues that law dispenses justice in an impartial and unbiased fashion. Critical legal theorists claim that law reproduces gender, race and class inequalities. The Power to Criminalize offers an analysis that acknowledges the tensions between these two views of law. Drawing from crown attorneys’ files on violent crime cases and interviews with defence lawyers, the authors reveal the complex ways in which discourses of masculinity, femininity, race, class and social space inform the strategies used to litigate these cases. This analysis raises questions about the prospects of challenging law to realize a more just society.