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WHAT'S PRISON FOR?

Name: WHAT'S PRISON FOR?
Author: Bill Keller
ISBN: 978-1-7359137-4-2

PUNISHMENT AND REHABILITATION IN THE AGE OF MASS INCARCERATION

by Bill Keller ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 4, 2022

A strong single-volume response to a seemingly intractable national dilemma.

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A compassionate argument about why any reckoning with mass incarceration should transform imprisonment itself.

Keller, a founder of the nonprofit Marshall Project and former executive editor of the New York Times, acknowledges he came late to this thorny topic: “My crash course in criminal justice taught me that this country imprisons people more copiously than almost any other place on earth.” While others have outlined the inequities fueling mass incarceration, imprisonment itself remains an invisible cultural archipelago. “Our prisons are not the most transparent institutions,” writes the author, “and out of sight too often means out of mind. But the American way of incarceration is a shameful waste of lives and money.” The author clearly reveals the contemporary prison experience, from intake following conviction to the surreal “afterlife” of parole. At each stage, he shows absurd injustice, brutality, and despair, countered by enlightened approaches in places like Norway and domestic desires for change, including “a political force few saw coming: a reform movement on the right.” Keller initially reviews how American society became increasingly punitive in the early 1970s, as “punishment supplanted rehabilitation in the national discourse.” Yet other factors, including acknowledgement of unjust policing and declining post-1990 violent crime rates, laid the groundwork for a “cultural and generational shift away from the punitive.” We can see this shift in the restorative justice movement as well as “prosecutors questioning what crimes should be prosecuted and judges seeking non-court remedies.” The author also explores less-discussed facets, including the systemic pressures faced by corrections officers, the insidious effect of for-profit incarceration, and the particular marginalization of women prisoners. He portrays education and mentorship as especially crucial. “Almost every conversation I had with prison veterans,” writes Keller, “turned sooner or later to a plea for respect, for dignity.” Though some of the author’s observations have been documented before, the narrative is well researched and lucid.

A strong single-volume response to a seemingly intractable national dilemma.

Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-7359137-4-2

Page Count: -

Publisher: Columbia Global Reports

Review Posted Online: July 29, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022

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ABUNDANCE

by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 18, 2025

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

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Helping liberals get out of their own way.

Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

Pub Date: March 18, 2025

ISBN: 9781668023488

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Avid Reader Press

Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025

Categories:

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | BUSINESS | U.S. GOVERNMENT

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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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.