MICHAEL WELCH is a Professor in the Criminal Justice program at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey (USA). His research interests include punishment and social control, and his writings have appeared such journals as Theoretical Criminology, Punishment & Society, Justice Quarterly, Journal of Research in Crime & Delinquency, The Prison Journal, Crime, Law & Social Change, and Critical Criminology. Welch is author of Scapegoats of September 11th: Hate Crimes and State Crimes in the War on Terror (2006, Rutgers University Press), Ironies of Imprisonment (2005, Sage), Detained: Immigration Laws and the Expanding I.N.S. Jail Complex (2002, Temple University Press), Flag Burning: Moral Panic and the Criminalization of Protest (2000, de Gruyter), Punishment in America (1999, Sage), and Corrections: A Critical Approach (2nd edition, 2004, McGraw-Hill). His forthcoming book is titled: Crimes of Power & States of Impunity: The U.S. Response to Terror (2009, Rutgers University Press). He has lectured and delivered papers throughout the United States as well as in Canada, England, Scotland, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Finland, Thailand, Argentina and Venezuela. Recently, he served as a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Human Rights at the London School of Economics, as well as a Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Bologna (Italy) and Facultad de Ciencias Juridicas y Sociales of the Universidad Nacional del Litoral (Santa Fe, Argentina).