Profound reflections on the unacknowledged inhumanity of the nation’s prisons.
What prisoners can tell us about the true costs of incarceration.
This book brings together—and provides edifying commentary on—a selection of writings by incarcerated Americans who reflect on their experiences as inmates. Larson, a professor of literature and co-founder and director of the American Prison Writing Archive, seeks to “reassess law, crime, punishment, and justice, and the triggers between them.” This is a consistently searing indictment of the ways in which prisons harm prisoners, as well as their families and communities, while doing little to fulfill the institution’s ostensible objectives: enacting appropriate retribution, promoting rehabilitation, containing criminality, and deterring future offenses. The author frames prisoners’ writings with revealing accounts of the original goals of the American penitentiary system, its evolution and divergence from foreign models, and the contemporary political dynamics driving policies of mass incarceration. Larson ably demonstrates the cruelty and illogic of prison environments, which systematically dehumanize the incarcerated and preclude possibilities for genuine atonement. “A convicted person, once confined, must identify with the person they were outside in order to acknowledge that it was their actions for which punishment is being imposed,” writes the author. “Yet imprisonment aggressively severs life inside from life outside.” Many of the writers, he notes, “describe manufactories of indiscriminate personal and social disaster.” Larson makes abundantly clear the moral significance of bridging that divide and harmonizing the stated ideals of the justice system with its actual functions. Also compelling are the suggestions given for plausible reforms, including the incorporation of prisoners’ stories into legal training so that lawyers might better comprehend the stakes involved in sentencing. As this compelling text shows, filling in longstanding silences about what prisons actually do may have far-reaching and desperately needed benefits for those inside and outside the institution’s walls.
Profound reflections on the unacknowledged inhumanity of the nation’s prisons.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781479818006
Page Count: 320
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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