A brisk, thoughtful guide to mass incarceration alternatives, of interest to activists, lawyers, and forward-thinking law...
A clearly written, optimistic road map for moving beyond mass incarceration.
Berman and Adler are directors at the Center for Court Innovation, a think tank that “has created a broad range of alternative-to-incarceration and crime prevention programs in the New York area.” Their thesis is that such finely grained responses can change the ongoing narrative of racially discriminatory penalties, which have led to the current crisis in overimprisonment. They argue their focus in this book is not theoretical but relies on “real-life reforms that state and local policymakers and practitioners can make in the here and now to reduce our reliance on incarceration.” These are expressed in eight brief, punchy chapters, each built around an opening graph or statistic—e.g., a breakdown of who is behind bars or distinctions between high- and low-risk offenders. These lead into examinations of actual narratives of specific cities, such as community-based responses to Newark’s “horrible” municipal jail. There, attempts were made “to offer alternatives to jail and fines for misdemeanors,” changing the overall dynamic. Similarly, the authors argue that the public should accept a different definition of risk than the tough-on-crime model. “Researchers have documented that there are safe and effective alternatives to incarceration….At the heart of the Risk-Need-Responsivity model,” they write, “is the idea that it is possible to make more informed decisions about who is potentially dangerous and who isn’t.” Looking at Rikers Island, which some politicians wish to close, they note “perhaps the best hope for reducing New York City’s jail population is a new, citywide pretrial supervised release program.” They cover similar programs elsewhere to address domestic abuse and parole violation, finding surprising innovations in conservative states like Utah and Mississippi. Their case studies are well-researched and derived from activism and scholarship as well as the rehabilitative experiences of offenders, but their perspective remains realistic. They admit, “undoing America’s over reliance on incarceration will be difficult.”
A brisk, thoughtful guide to mass incarceration alternatives, of interest to activists, lawyers, and forward-thinking law enforcement professionals.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62097-223-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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