Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

by Jill Leovy

The homicide problem lost two of its great intellectual prophets in the course of the events described in this book—William J. Stuntz and Eric Monkkonen. Both scholars believed that an understanding of violence must proceed from a study of the structure of law and the working of formal legal institutions. Both died young, of cancer. It remains for others to do the considerable work required to turn back the plague. Stuntz died in 2011. His summation still applies: “Poor black neighborhoods see too little of the kinds of policing and criminal punishment that do the most good, and too much of the kinds that do the most harm.” Monkkonen, a professor at UCLA, died in 2005. He did not live to see the recent, stunning homicide declines here in L.A. But he left these lines for the future: “The challenge for the twenty-first century,” he wrote, “is to keep pushing for lower rates even when it seems as though this is happening automatically.”

Wow. Just wow.