If there were ever an argument for prison reform, it’s in these pages.
A multivocal tour of hell on Earth: the infamous prison complex that is “out of sight, hard for visitors to reach, closed, and foreboding.”
“We’re talking about a place that smelled like death, vomit, urine, feces, and like the bad train stations in New York City all wrapped up in one.” Welcome to Riker’s Island, the New York City jail, as narrated, in this case, by Yusef Salaam, detained there (wrongly, as it happens) for five years for his presumed part in the Central Park 5 case. Rikers isn’t so much a jail or prison as a series of them, with facilities for mobsters, murderers, shoplifters, youth offenders, and the mentally ill—but sometimes with such populations intermixed. No one, it seems, is quite clear on what Rikers is supposed to do: Is it to rehabilitate or to punish? Notes one defense attorney, “The lessons that are taught by virtue of the way Rikers has worked are not lessons that are constructive in the real world.” One lesson, award-winning journalist Rayman and Blau reveal in this collection of horrifying testimonials, is that it’s easy to be killed at Rikers, whether by the guards or other inmates. Another lesson is that the system protects itself: If you’re beaten to death there, it’s just collateral damage. The system treats prisoners like animals, and the prisoners oblige, in time, by losing their humanity. But not all. One Lucchese family foot soldier recounts striking a humane deal with a hungry mouse, one of an innumerable infestation: “I leave some food all the way in the corner, opposite corner of the cell, and you leave my food alone.” Such moments of understanding are altogether rare in this brutal oral history, with voices ranging from one-time corrections leader Bernard Kerik to a 15-year-old HIV–positive inmate. Nearly all agree on one point: Rikers needs to be demolished, which is now a very real possibility—save that no one knows what will succeed it.
If there were ever an argument for prison reform, it’s in these pages.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-593-13421-4
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
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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