Robert P. Weiss is a Professor in the Criminal Justice Department. His scholarly career has been inspired by his love of history, his dislike of corporate and governmental abuse of power, and his concern for the incarcerated. Weiss has published extensively on the emergence and transformation of private policing in the US (a field of inquiry he helped pioneer), the political economy of penal industry, the social history of criminal justice, and the privatization of government services under neoliberalism. Weiss’ research has been informed by the neo-Marxist tradition of social history, which applies interdisciplinary and comparative perspectives to the understanding of the social control of ordinary people. Weiss’s scholarly publications include ten refereed articles in international professional journals, including _Criminology_, _Social History_, _The Historical Journal_, and _Social Justice_; fifteen chapters in edited volumes, and two edited books, _Comparing Prison Systems_ (1998), with Nigel South of Essex University, and _Social History of Crime, Policing and Prisons_ (1999). He is a long-time editorial board member of the journal, _Social Justice_. In his 34-year association with that journal, he guest edited five special thematic issues with contributors from around the world representing a variety of professional backgrounds. Additionally, he has delivered scores of invited papers to history and criminology conferences, and has written numerous book reviews and essays for _Asian Studies Review_, _Social & Legal Studies_, and a variety of international criminology journals. In June of 2012, Dr. Weiss was invited to give the plenary address at Leeds University Law School to an international symposium of scholars interested in private sector involvement in criminal justice. His talk will be included as a chapter in a forthcoming reader (Palgrave) on criminal justice privatization. He is currently working on a chapter about Ford Motor Company’s early labor policing for an international collection on corporate security, edited by two leading Canadian criminologists.
Articles
From Cowboy-Detectives to Soldiers of Fortune: The Recrudescence of Primitive Accumulation Security and Its Contradictions On the New Frontiers of Capitalist Expansion, Social Justice (2008)
'Repatriating' Low-Wage Jobs: The Political Economy of Prison Labor Reprivatization in the Postindustrial United States, Criminology (2001)
Applying Rusche and Kirchheimer's theory regarding labor markets and penal change, this paper examines recent...