by Lauren-Brooke Eisen ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 7, 2017
Important documentation of the free market’s aggressive intersection with the war on crime.
Evenhanded investigation of private prisons, focused on industry opacity and the moral problems behind its largely unchecked growth.
Former New York City assistant district attorney Eisen, senior counsel in the Brennan Center’s Justice Program, utilizes both criminal justice narrative and financial analysis to address her query: “what does the increasing reliance on the private prison industry since the 1980s mean for American justice?” She begins with the familiar, disturbing narrative of how the drug war and tough-on-crime policies created a culture of mass incarceration. In the ’80s, Ronald Reagan turned hostility toward bureaucracy into a drive toward privatization for all aspects of governance. A fast-growing corporate structure was thus positioned to sell itself as a solution to the overcrowded prisons that resulted. The author illustrates how the industry has mushroomed, primarily through the establishment of powerful lobbying and exploitative income streams from all aspects of imprisonment. “The nation’s prison industrial complex relies on a vast infrastructure of financial incentives,” she writes. She also coolly documents the moral questions raised by this situation. “The very existence of private prisons,” she writes, “let[s] policy makers off the hook for recalibrating our nation’s system of punishment.” Eisen shows how private prisons have proven a risky investment for small towns; she visited some in which a private prison’s oscillating fortunes led to economic collapse. The author also discusses related issues such as the recent movement for colleges to divest and the industry’s inroads into immigrant detention in the Trump era. Eisen regards the industry as having dubious motives, exacerbated by their consistently giving her the PR runaround—though she visited some facilities—but she also takes a fairly restrained critical stance, believing the volatile industry to be firmly entrenched but in need of better monitoring arrangements. It's an admirably researched look at an ominous aspect of criminal justice, though it may seem dry to casual readers or mild to progressives.
Important documentation of the free market’s aggressive intersection with the war on crime.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-231-17970-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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