A brisk, thoughtful guide to mass incarceration alternatives, of interest to activists, lawyers, and forward-thinking law...
A clearly written, optimistic road map for moving beyond mass incarceration.
Berman and Adler are directors at the Center for Court Innovation, a think tank that “has created a broad range of alternative-to-incarceration and crime prevention programs in the New York area.” Their thesis is that such finely grained responses can change the ongoing narrative of racially discriminatory penalties, which have led to the current crisis in overimprisonment. They argue their focus in this book is not theoretical but relies on “real-life reforms that state and local policymakers and practitioners can make in the here and now to reduce our reliance on incarceration.” These are expressed in eight brief, punchy chapters, each built around an opening graph or statistic—e.g., a breakdown of who is behind bars or distinctions between high- and low-risk offenders. These lead into examinations of actual narratives of specific cities, such as community-based responses to Newark’s “horrible” municipal jail. There, attempts were made “to offer alternatives to jail and fines for misdemeanors,” changing the overall dynamic. Similarly, the authors argue that the public should accept a different definition of risk than the tough-on-crime model. “Researchers have documented that there are safe and effective alternatives to incarceration….At the heart of the Risk-Need-Responsivity model,” they write, “is the idea that it is possible to make more informed decisions about who is potentially dangerous and who isn’t.” Looking at Rikers Island, which some politicians wish to close, they note “perhaps the best hope for reducing New York City’s jail population is a new, citywide pretrial supervised release program.” They cover similar programs elsewhere to address domestic abuse and parole violation, finding surprising innovations in conservative states like Utah and Mississippi. Their case studies are well-researched and derived from activism and scholarship as well as the rehabilitative experiences of offenders, but their perspective remains realistic. They admit, “undoing America’s over reliance on incarceration will be difficult.”
A brisk, thoughtful guide to mass incarceration alternatives, of interest to activists, lawyers, and forward-thinking law enforcement professionals.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62097-223-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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