A timely consideration of the geopolitical role of American prisons.
How America used prisons to consolidate its global power.
Weber, a professor of African American and African studies, shows us how “prison imperialism” has repeatedly been employed by the American government to subjugate groups identified as threatening to the nation’s ambitions. “Over successive eras of empire building,” writes the author, “intersecting ideas about race, crime, and punishment, not only within the United States but around the globe, have been central to making mass incarceration and the modern American state.” Weber explores not only how a teeming “purgatory” was created by large-scale prisons, but also how long-standing efforts at resistance were carried out, beginning on slave ships and extending to contemporary prison abolitionists. The author makes a compelling, well-illustrated case for how American methods of controlling those deemed unruly have been guided by an ideology of white supremacy. Especially incisive are the sections detailing the significance of techniques developed by American prison officials in the Philippines, including a “banal and bureaucratic form of record keeping [that] became a lynchpin of the rise of the American surveillance state.” Also striking are Weber’s discussions of brutal policies commonly deployed in penal colonies, such as family separation and forced labor. The author delivers a convincing overview of America’s use of incarceration as an imperial tool, though the treatments of some complex subjects—such as how Native Americans responded to the colonialist aims of boarding schools or how American penitentiaries adapted techniques developed in other parts of the world—are sometimes rushed and in need of elaboration. Nevertheless, Weber drives home the importance of reckoning with the nation’s penal history: “As the migration to American cities of militarized police and torture techniques from overseas sites like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib renew concern over the consequences of war making at home, the United States continues to train police forces and export its model of incarceration abroad.”
A timely consideration of the geopolitical role of American prisons.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9781620975909
Page Count: 304
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
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
The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist (1900–45) collected his work from WWII in two bestselling volumes, this second published in 1944, a year before Pyle was killed by a sniper’s bullet on Okinawa. In his fine introduction to this new edition, G. Kurt Piehler (History/Univ. of Tennessee at Knoxville) celebrates Pyle’s “dense, descriptive style” and his unusual feel for the quotidian GI experience—a personal and human side to war left out of reporting on generals and their strategies. Though Piehler’s reminder about wartime censorship seems beside the point, his biographical context—Pyle was escaping a troubled marriage—is valuable. Kirkus, at the time, noted the hoopla over Pyle (Pulitzer, hugely popular syndicated column, BOMC hype) and decided it was all worth it: “the book doesn’t let the reader down.” Pyle, of course, captures “the human qualities” of men in combat, but he also provides “an extraordinary sense of the scope of the European war fronts, the variety of services involved, the men and their officers.” Despite Piehler’s current argument that Pyle ignored much of the war (particularly the seamier stuff), Kirkus in 1944 marveled at how much he was able to cover. Back then, we thought, “here’s a book that needs no selling.” Nowadays, a firm push might be needed to renew interest in this classic of modern journalism.
Pub Date: April 26, 2001
ISBN: 0-8032-8768-2
Page Count: 513
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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