An eye-opening, damning indictment of the American prison system and the way its sins reverberate around the globe.
A writer and social activist chronicles her visits to prisons around the globe to gain insight into what works and doesn’t work.
This anthropological examination by Dreisinger (English/John Jay Coll. of Criminal Justice, CUNY; Near Black: White to Black Passing in American Culture, 2008) wears its agenda proudly, which is not a bad thing given the level of intellectual insight and emotional struggle the author brings to her argument. Though she founded the Prison-to-College Pipeline program in 2011 to help prisoners transition successfully back into society, she still had questions. “I decided I needed a shock to the system, to unseat basic truths, to ask myself what I used to get asked all the time, before my world became overwhelmingly filled with people who shared my passions and premises,” she writes. “Why care so passionately about the so-called wrongdoers of the world?” To that end, Dreisinger traversed the globe to speak with genocide survivors in Rwanda, reggae enthusiasts behind bars in Uganda and Jamaica, and imprisoned mothers in Thailand. In Brazil, the author met men broken by the savagery of solitary confinement. “Anything not to be in a cell,” one prisoner said. “I will do anything to escape being so alone. All those hours. I believe in love—in love as redemption. There is no love here.” Yet while she made a concerted effort to connect on a personal level, her ultimate goal was to understand the big picture. In Australia, she struggled, for example, with whether privatization of incarceration for profit can be humane. Dreisinger’s refusal to offer sweeping generalizations or simple directives in the name of restorative justice is bold and as confrontational as her sessions with her students. “I’m not trying to be cryptic; the reality is that there is no pat answer to the big questions around race and crime,” she writes. “Humanity is complex and contradictory; any system addressing it must be equally so.”
An eye-opening, damning indictment of the American prison system and the way its sins reverberate around the globe.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59051-727-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
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