An important, first-of-its-kind book.
An in-depth study of misdemeanor justice in New York City.
In 1994, the city initiated “Broken Windows” (or quality-of-life) policing, under which low-level offenses—noise complaints, panhandling, public drunkenness, etc.—became important enforcement priorities in an effort to restore a “society of civility” and prevent minor criminals from growing into major criminals. The approach, championed by Police Commissioner William Bratton, has since been widely adopted elsewhere. In this startling scholarly debut, Kohler-Hausmann (Law and Sociology/Yale Univ.) explores what happened to all those arrests when they arrived in the criminal courts. After three years of research and interviews, she finds the hundreds of thousands of individuals who flooded the lower courts—“almost exclusively poor people of color from the city’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods”—did not face sentences based on guilt or innocence. Rather, their arrests were used as a form of social control. Each defendant underwent a process of sorting, testing, and monitoring, aimed at gathering information to help identify “potential deviants” for later court encounters. Under this managerial rather than adjudicative approach, the courts exerted their power through “the techniques of marking through criminal justice record keeping, the procedural hassle of case processing [long waits, filthy conditions, frequent court appearances, etc.], and mandated performance [drug treatment, community service, etc.] evaluated by court actors.” Based on a dissertation and burdened by the weight of its scholarly apparatus, the book steps gingerly around the troublesome conclusion that “Broken Windows” arrests in New York are being used to keep close tabs on repeat minor offenders and to keep the lid on heavily policed black and Hispanic communities. While overly detailed, it offers vivid examples of the courtroom experiences of illegal peddlers, squeegee cleaners, and other subfelony offenders and raises innumerable questions about “Broken Windows,” how its information-collecting and surveillance aspects live on in the courts, and the ongoing relationship between disadvantaged New Yorkers and the criminal justice system.
An important, first-of-its-kind book.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-691-17430-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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