Cutting the Edge

Understanding crime, criminals, and criminal justice from a radical/critical perspective is indispensable in today's academic, applied research, and policy sectors. Neglect of this approach leads to narrow-mindedness and the probability of repeating past mistakes or reinventing the wheel. Cutting the Edge by Jeffrey Ian Ross will encourage individuals and organizations, especially students and instructors, to innovatively identify ways of experimenting with new policy initiatives designed to improve not only criminal justice, but social and human justice as well.

Ross has significantly changed this volume to include six new chapters and three revised ones as well. The studies chosen demonstrate the difference between critical criminology and other approaches used to study and explain criminological phenomena. The authors do not approach the inequalities of the criminal justice system as phenomena that should be studied, but as wrongs that must be righted.

Cutting-edge critical criminology combines concerns about fairness in punishment, tools of class analysis and the insights of feminism, postmodernism, and ethnography. The authors included here wield these newer tools with elegance and enthusiasm. Written with passion by experts in the field, the book engages the mind as fully as it engages the emotions.

Jeffrey Ian Ross is associate professor in the division of criminology, criminal justice, and social policy and a Fellow of the Center for International and Comparative Law at the University of Baltimore. He is the author, co-author, editor, and co-editor of twelve books, the most recent being Special Problems in Corrections.

Understanding crime, criminals, and criminal justice from a radical/critical perspective is indispensable in today's academic, applied research, and policy sectors. Neglect of this approach leads to narrow-mindedness and the probability of repeating past mistakes or reinventing the wheel. Reading Cutting the Edge will encourage individuals and organizations, especially students and instructors, to think in innovative and new ways experimenting with new policy initiatives designed to improve not only criminal justice,
but social and human justice as well.

Jeffrey Ian Ross is a professor in the School of Criminal Justice, College of Public Affairs and a research fellow of the Center for International and Comparative Law at the University of Baltimore. In 2003, he was awarded the University of Baltimore's Distinguished Chair in Research Award. From 1995-1998, Dr. Ross was a Social Science Analyst with the National Institute of Justice, a Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. He has researched, written, and lectured primarily on corrections, policing, political crime, violence, global crime and criminal justice, and crime and justice in American Indian communities for over two decades. Ross' work has appeared in many academic journals and books, as well as popular media. He is the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of several books, most recently The Globalization of Supermax Prisons.