Essential reading in the ongoing national re-examination of mass incarceration.
A chilling portrait of America’s “securest and most punitive” prisons.
Opened in 1989, Pelican Bay State Prison, located in rural Crescent City, California, contains 1,055 windowless concrete isolation cells measuring 8 by 10 feet and filled with “stale air and fluorescent light.” By 2010, more than 500 prisoners had lived there for more than 10 years; 78 have been isolated for more than two decades. With no visitors or human contact for 23 hours per day, such inmates face “the tedium, the psychological trauma, the existential terror” of indefinite long-term isolation. Human rights groups call the practice torture. In this deeply researched book, Reiter (Law/Univ. of California, Irvine; co-editor: Extreme Punishment: Comparative Studies in Detention, Incarceration and Solitary Confinement, 2015) tells the full story of Pelican Bay and opens a window on the rise in recent decades of Supermax prisons throughout the U.S., which now house some 20,000 prisoners deemed the “worst of the worst” criminals by prison officials. Based on her doctoral dissertation, Reiter’s book relates the history of Supermaxes, which began as “prison officials’ response to the radical civil rights movement of the 1970s.” Built quietly in out-of-the-way places at prison administrators’ discretion, the facilities were considered a new tool for controlling dangerous prisoners like George Jackson, the black activist and author who was shot to death by guards in San Quentin Prison. Reiter captures the ceaseless misery of daily life at Pelican Bay, where suicide is common and survivors adhere to rigid routines. Despite protests and hearings, reforms have only placed limits on who can be placed in solitary. The author calls the “worst of the worst” criteria a myth, with little distinction made between bad and insane inmates. Failing to end prison violence, she writes, Supermaxes have succeeded only in silencing radicals. Her stories of the psychological impact of isolation—and the experiences of released Supermax prisoners—are both disturbing and moving.
Essential reading in the ongoing national re-examination of mass incarceration.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-300-21146-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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