A revealing study with broad implications for policymakers and law enforcement.
Eye-opening examination of the different hierarchies and ideologies employed by prison gangs around the world.
In many instances, writes criminology professor Roth, prison gangs are essential units of self-government in places where institutional management is weak. In the Philippines, for example, they provide a “network of social support in what is generously described as an overcrowded and deprived environment.” Similarly, the Neapolitan Camorra was the only branch of the too widely applied term Mafia to have been born inside the prison walls, where its leaders maintained order and discipline on behalf of the wardens for a hefty fee, even while “taxing prisoners for every facet of their prison existence.” Some prison systems have a clear ethnic component. The laws of apartheid South Africa, for example, “guaranteed that a large proportion of black South African males would be exposed to the criminal justice system at one time or another,” and the structure of New Zealand justice is such that while Maoris represent a small portion of the population, they constitute about half of the country’s prisoners. The U.S. is, interestingly, broad-based in its ethnic representation owing to what Roth characterizes as a vast expansion of the prison system beginning in the 1950s. The country has the world’s largest population of prisoners, but “its prisons are comparative sanctuaries of safety and order” in which the bloody riots common in places like Guatemala and El Salvador seldom occur. Even so, American prisons are carved up into territories belonging to groups such as the Mexican Mafia and the Aryan Nations that operate both inside and outside the walls and exact a harsh justice system of their own. Ranging across the world, Roth closes with the ominous prediction that prisons are likely to remain overcrowded and gang-infested well into the future since “a much larger supply of potential gang recruits looms on the horizon as the world’s population gets younger.”
A revealing study with broad implications for policymakers and law enforcement.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-78914-323-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
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
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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