A valuable platform for advocates of judicial, penal, and police reform.
A searching examination of the criminal justice system in America, each of whose components is found wanting.
“American criminal justice is in crisis. It doesn’t do nearly enough to prevent crime, and it doesn’t deliver nearly enough justice.” So writes Stanford law professor and former U.S. attorney Sklansky. The four major elements of the justice system, from policing to punishment with prosecution and adjudication in between, are all hopelessly broken, the author argues. Policing focuses, oppressively, on poor people of color, most of whom would welcome equitable treatment, since “crime has devastating, disproportionate impacts on poor people and people of color, especially Black Americans.” Sklansky is not an advocate of defunding the police, but he does see numerous ways in which meaningful reforms can be carried out. Reforms in the other three areas of justice are also wanted. As Sklansky writes, prosecutors wield too much power overall, and much legal defense falls either on overworked and underpaid civil servants or on attorneys in private practice who effectively subcontract to governments of various levels. One way of reining in prosecutorial power, Sklansky writes in a provocative turn, is to put more responsibility on juries’ shoulders by explaining to them the possible outcomes of their decisions and having those juries do the sentencing: “Telling them forthrightly about the practical stakes of their verdict, whether or not they can weigh in on the sentence, will encourage them to take collective responsibility—as adjudicators and later, after the trial, as citizens.” To make this happen effectively, Sklansky adds, juries must be fair—which means they must be representative of the population, which means they must be far more diverse. Finally, reforms in sentencing toward restorative justice and away from creating a permanent underclass of criminals and ex-cons are badly needed.
A valuable platform for advocates of judicial, penal, and police reform.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9780674293663
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 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
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
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