A bracing look at how the nation’s jails—and the nation itself—ought to be reformed.
A study of how jails perpetuate injustice and a host of possible solutions.
In this brief but insightful debut book, investigative journalist Fedderly explores the history of the Rikers Island jails and reflects on what it tells us about the cruelty and senselessness of the criminal justice system in the U.S. The author’s commentary on the conditions at the jails is informed by the input of a broad range of people who have encountered the institution in different roles, from prisoners to police officers, judges, psychologists, and the families of the incarcerated. A rough consensus can be discerned among all parties: The decision to close Rikers and replace it with a new jail system does not address deep-seated problems, rooted in systemic inequity, racism, and a broader social indifference to the fate of those accused of criminal behavior. In making her case, Fedderly vividly catalogs some of the worst problems at Rikers: overcrowding, unsanitary environments, routine violence, rampant and unaddressed mental health problems, and extraordinarily long wait times before court dates. (For further eye-popping details on the inhumane conditions at Rikers, see Graham Rayman and Reuven Blau’s Rikers.) The author describes several cases in wrenching detail, such as that of Kalief Browder, a teenager who committed suicide after being held at Rikers for three years, more than half of which was spent in solitary confinement. Also striking is Fedderly’s examination of the racist ideology informing the treatment of the incarcerated. “Both reformists and abolitionists agree that incarceration picked up where slavery left off,” she writes, “fortifying and enabling racism and discrimination in a new way, using the architecture of prisons and jails to conceal it.” The author concludes convincingly that versions of restorative justice, the expansion of community policing, and broader efforts to reduce poverty and promote social equity are essential to making the penal system more just and humane.
A bracing look at how the nation’s jails—and the nation itself—ought to be reformed.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781982193911
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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