Urban Vice Regulation Compared (eBook)

This book uses the early twentieth century surveillance reports of urban vice reformers in New York, Chicago, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, as well as the US vice report for the League of Nations' Special Body on Trafficking in Women and Children (from 1927) and French police memoirs, treatises, and histories of vice enforcement in late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Paris to highlight the way in which American reliance on undercover tactics drove American vice enforcement policy, leading to a clash with French vice enforcement policy before the League of Nations. Both the failure of that early effort to exert international influence on vice enforcement and the American embrace of undercover tactics would set the stage for the later American efforts to promote a global war on drugs. 

Before the League of Nations, in particular, the American delegation's notable lack of success in mobilizing European crackdowns on prostitution created a blueprint for how not to project American influence overseas, once American advocates of narcotics interdiction sought to promote a global war on drugs. Yet private reformers' reliance on undercover tactics to investigate prostitution modeled the investigative tactics on which American law enforcement would come to depend, and which it would later seek to export, as a primary weapon in the war on drugs.

Jacqueline E. Ross is Prentice H. Marshall Professor of Law at the University of Illinois College of Law, where she has taught since 2004. From 2001 to 2004, she was Professor at the John Marshall Law School in Chicago. From 1990 to 2000, she was Assistant US Attorney at the US Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Illinois, in Chicago. Before that she clerked for the Honorable Douglas H. Ginsburg on the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, in Washington, D.C. She received her J.D. with honors from the University of Chicago Law School in 1989, and her Bachelor's of Arts degree, with honors, from the University of Chicago College, in 1984. She has published extensively in the field of comparative criminal procedure and comparative policing, including, most recently, Making Sense of Youth Crime: A Comparative Look at Police Intelligence Analysis in the United States and France, which was published with Cambridge University Press. She is Director of the Universityof Illinois Program in Comparative Criminal Procedure and Policing.