Unterman’s Uncle Sam’s Policeman is a delightful romp through more than 100 years of the United States’ pursuit of fugitives from the law. She begins her study by exploring the ways in which the United States’ determination to follow the rule of law in the 1880s allowed embezzlers, for the most part, to walk across the Detroit–Windsor (or El Paso–Ciudad Juárez) bridge to evade the rule of law. She ends her study a century later when the United States adopted the practice of extraordinary rendition (extralegal kidnapping) in order to place potential terrorists into black sites and locations such as Guantanamo that are beyond the reach of the law.
The meat of the book focuses on the crimes of mobility that emerged as a result of new technologies that facilitated greater flows of goods and higher levels of economic activity. On the one hand, the availability and accessibility of railroads...