“The Truth About Crime offers a powerful account about crime, policing, and the modern state. The book is a “criminal anthropolgy” that guides the reader towards understanding what precisely is different or new about crime and punishment in modern societies. Recognizing how crime and policing have become constitutive of our everyday lives, Jean and John L. Comaroff trace how crime – in particular policing as a core function of the criminal justice system – are constitutive of contemporary life. With special attention on the United States and South Africa, the book is theoretically sharp and expansive, and consolidates their previous work on law, disorder, governance, citizenship, and the post colonial state. It is an important contribution that offers scholars across the fields of law, criminology, anthropology, political science, sociology, and human rights a clear understanding about the social production and increasing fear of lawlessness and criminality in societies.”