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HALFWAY HOME

RACE, PUNISHMENT, AND THE AFTERLIFE OF MASS INCARCERATION

A powerful argument in favor of judicial reform—now.

Imprisonment is a nightmare—and it’s only the beginning of the state’s punitive powers.

A professor at the School of Social Services Administration at the University of Chicago, Miller introduces us to psychologist Winston Moore, a Black man who ran Chicago’s jails in the 1960s and ’70s and chided Black people for tolerating criminals in their midst. The author points out that 40% of the incarcerated population in the U.S. are Black men and women, and 84% are poor. “It is clear to anyone paying attention,” writes Miller, “that the legal system does not administer anything resembling justice but instead manages the nation’s problemed populations.” It’s also part of a “lineage of control” that extends back to slavery and the Jim Crow South. Mass incarceration has grown dramatically since Moore’s day, owing to such race-targeted programs as the war on drugs. But that’s only the beginning, for “mass incarceration has an afterlife…a supervised society.” The formerly incarcerated are barred from participating in many aspects of public life: They are forbidden to vote or hold public office, and they can be denied housing rights, jobs, food stamps, student loans, the right to adopt a child, and the ability to move from one city or state to another. These legal exclusions are close to Miller’s heart. As he writes, his father and brothers were jailed, and it was only thanks to an accident of fate that he became an academic and not a prisoner himself, given the unequal application of the law and its tendency to land hardest on minority populations. “In a supervised society, the prison and the jail and the law frays our closest ties,” writes the author in a memorable passage. “It pulls our families apart. It did this to…me, and it does this to millions of families.” Reminiscent of Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy (2014), Miller’s well-argued book delivers a scarifying account of law gone awry.

A powerful argument in favor of judicial reform—now.

Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-316-45151-2

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020

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LOVE, PAMELA

A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.

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  • New York Times Bestseller

The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.

According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy, which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.

A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.

Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023

ISBN: 9780063226562

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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