The Big House in America, with few exceptions, is a place where everyone involved (inside and out) should hang their heads...
A withering, deeply depressing tour of the American prison scene from Pulitzer Prize–winning Wall Street Journal reporter Hallinan.
Except for a very few facilities, US prisons have been (and remain) uniformly grim. There have always been plenty of episodes of guard brutality and ungodly conditions in the cells, to which are now added overcrowding, gangs, and a type of administrative segregation—what used to be called solitary confinement—that results in an environment so devoid of mental stimulation that mental collapse is a foregone conclusion. In prose that is crunchy without being lock-jawed or brittle, the author provides a concise history of prisons—from medieval carcers to bridewells to the most up-to-date (and inevitably tagged) supermax—as well as an overview of the (sensible to ridiculous) paths once taken for prisoner rehabilitation, now a practice mostly abandoned: rehab is out, punishment is in; penal theory is out, cost accounting (make that profitability) is in. Hallinan covers the story of the privatization of prisons with as much aplomb as he can muster, for it is often a nasty stew of payoffs and greed and neglect, and he details the growth of the prison industry, a public works project that throws off money like a pinwheel does sparks. Along the way, he chillingly portrays a number of correctional facilities, from classic rock-breaking joints in Alabama (where they have to import the boulders for inmates to crack) to the state of Texas (whose prison system was once characterized as “probably the best example of slavery remaining in the nation,” by the director of Oklahoma’s correctional facilities). Over the whole story hovers the culture of fear that has come to pervade the nation and the subsequent laws (such as the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984) that have packed the prison system.
The Big House in America, with few exceptions, is a place where everyone involved (inside and out) should hang their heads in shame.Pub Date: March 22, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-50263-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
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