A literal insider’s view of the troubling social warehousing function of mass incarceration.
Engrossing, intimate account of “city time,” short-term sentences served within New York’s notorious Rikers Island.
Co-authors Campbell and Shanahan term this work a “participant-observer ethnography,” noting they “experienced city time both as scholars studying it and as inmates.” They explain, “We were both arrested for protest activity and were locked up begrudgingly.” Thus, this immersive portrait acknowledges the authors’ relative privilege while exploring how such short sentences entrap many working-poor, addicted, or mentally struggling individuals in a pointless retributive cycle. Though some academic synthesis is present, the book is structured around “its authors’ personal experiences and observations of city time, organized as systematically as possible.” These aspects include not only the physically oppressive environment and endless bureaucracy and rules, but also the “social intake” provided by fellow inmates, a kind of protective institutional memory; both authors learned, and document, that “a complex and often ad hoc inmate code structures social life in countless ways.” Though prisoners’ relationships with the working-class corrections officers are equally complex, they find that “the COs inhabit a malicious, predatory, and dysfunctional social world.” Otherwise, they effectively reveal the daily grind of dormitory life, diversions of work and commissary visits, and the dire mental health care situation. Throughout, their goal is clearly to contrast the resilience of prisoners with “not just the brutality of city time but the banality, stupidity, and waste that characterize every second of it.” Noting that “the onset of COVID-19 caused considerable disruption in whatever normalcy could be said to define city time,” one author describes participating in an inmate strike for better pandemic responses that demonstrated surprising cohesion. The pair are deft and balanced collaborators, writing with academic rigor, as well as humor and compassion.
A literal insider’s view of the troubling social warehousing function of mass incarceration.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2025
ISBN: 978-1479828999
Page Count: 336
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
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
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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