Outlaw Capital

Outlaw Capital

With an ethnography of the largest contraband economy in the Americas running through Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, Outlaw Capital shows how transgressive economies and gray spaces are central to globalized capitalism. A key site on the China-Paraguay-Brazil trade route, Ciudad del Este moves billions of dollars’ worth of consumer goods—everything from cell phones to whiskey—providing cheap transit to Asian manufacturers and invisible subsidies to Brazilian consumers. A vibrant popular economy of Paraguayan street vendors and Brazilian “ant contrabandistas” capture some of the city’s profits, contesting the social distribution of wealth through an insurgent urban epistemology of use, need, and care. Yet despite the city’s centrality, it is narrated as a backward, marginal, and lawless place. Outlaw Capital contests these sensationalist stories, showing how uneven development and the Paraguayan state made Ciudad de Este a gray space of profitable transgression. By studying the everyday illegalities of both elite traders and ordinary workers, Jennifer L. Tucker shows how racialized narratives of economic legitimacy across scales—not legal compliance—sort whose activities count as formal and legal and whose are targeted for reform or expulsion. Ultimately, reforms criminalized the popular economy while legalizing, protecting, and “whitening” elite illegalities.

Capital Punishment

Capital Punishment

Numerous people face legal execution in the United States. Their presence in death rows throughout the country refutes a basic premise of our judicial system, for the use of capital punishment denies the existence of universal rehabilitation. There is another paradox-juries continue to sentence men and women to death; yet few ever get executed. Whether one is for or against capital punishment, one cannot approach the issue without deep emotion and conviction. James McCafferty provides an even-tempered, eminently reasonable discussion of the issue with balanced commentary from both sides of the debate. McCafferty presents not only empirical data and analyses of the nature of capital punishment, but provides perspectives on the larger issues of our approach to lawbreakers and their rehabilitation. The claims of both those who want to retain capital punishment and those who want to abolish it are included. The arguments consider whether capital punishment deters crime as well as the question of discrimination. A wealth of references, an extremely useful bibliography, and a final chapter delineating the legal issues facing the courts at the time the book was originally published in 1972 complete this unusually incisive and balanced study. Capital Punishment remains an important volume in the field of criminal justice. It seeks to educate rather than propagandize. It is intended for use in numerous courses in sociology and political science as well as in law schools. Anyone wishing to gain a perspective on what remains a controversial issue more than thirty years later would be well advised to study this work by world-class scholars.