A convincing case for criminal justice reform that may alienate some readers.
In this nonfiction book, a reformed sex offender argues for better treatment of felons.
As a young adult, Hardy taught Sunday school, served as a deacon at his church, and was a respected figure in his community. Behind this public facade that “fooled my wife, family,” and friends, the author was a “sex addict,” “manipulator,” and soon-to-be convicted sex offender. After a religious conversion in a suicide watch cell soon after his crimes were revealed, Hardy earned a doctorate, served as a peer recovery coach for the Arizona Department of Corrections Sex Offender Education and Treatment Program, and became the author of an annual devotional calendar circulated among thousands of prisoners across the country. In this book, he blends his personal experiences as an abuser, an inmate, and a rehabilitated ex-felon with a wider commentary on Christianity and the criminal justice system. While sharing the stories of victims and emphasizing the “horrific and heinous” nature of sexual assault, the volume challenges the “myth” that sex offenders “cannot change.” By painting sex offenders as “incurable monsters,” society at all levels, from the media to churches, dehumanizes convicts and makes rehabilitation and reform more difficult. Hardy also urges his fellow Christians to place mass incarceration as a “serious ethical issue” on par with abortion, and apply the religion’s principles of “forgiveness, mercy, and love” to convicted criminals. Backed by solid research and more than 250 endnotes, the book delivers an effective case against the status quo of America’s contemporary criminal justice system. This case is presented in an accessible writing style that combines autobiography, anecdotal stories from both victims and perpetrators, and an ample assortment of charts, graphs, and appendix material. With a target audience of evangelical, traditionalist Christians (noting explicitly that it “is not written for unbelievers or for the ‘casual’ Christian”), the volume may offend many readers with its descriptions of gay sexuality as “sodomy” and a “sexually immoral” sin. And conservative readers will likely be challenged by the book’s discussion of the implications of hardline law-and-order policies.
A convincing case for criminal justice reform that may alienate some readers.Pub Date: March 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63751-167-1
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Cadmus Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
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