Why the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world and what can be done to address the problem.
Pfaff (Fordham Law School; Sentencing Law and Policy, 2015) challenges the commonly held belief that American prisons are filled with low-level drug offenders as a result of the war on drugs. What is not in dispute is that the U.S. has 5 percent of the world’s population but nearly 25 percent of its prisoners. With a formidable array of statistics, cited in the dense text and often also shown in chart and tabular form, the author examines crimes rates and incarceration rates, giving a useful picture of the prison population over time. Surprisingly, a very small percentage of state prisoners are serving time for nonviolent drug offenses, while more than half are in for violent crimes. From his extensive research, Pfaff asserts that a significant cause of the rise in prison growth are rising admissions, and he points to the increasing rate at which prosecutors filed felony charges against arrestees during years when both crime rates and arrests fell. He proposes several approaches to regulating tough, aggressive prosecutors, whom he calls the engines driving mass incarceration, among them adequately funding public defenders, establishing charging and plea bargaining guidelines, appointing rather than electing prosecutors, and establishing sentencing commissions. If there is a take-home message from Pfaff’s book, it is that the problem of mass incarceration is massive and complicated, that it is a state rather than federal problem, that solutions must come from state and county governments, and that they involve changing public attitudes about balancing the costs of crime and the costs of punishment.
A thorough and demanding examination of a problem that has no easy solutions and a challenge to policymakers to discard prior notions about the nature of the problem and the needed reforms.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-465-09691-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Basic
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
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Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | UNITED STATES | HISTORY | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ETHNICITY & RACE
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