A deeply researched, profoundly optimistic vision for a police-free future.
A Black scholar imagines a world without police.
Growing up in the Bronx, McHarris learned early in life that, despite their purported responsibility to promote public safety, the police were actually a danger to him and his Black friends and family. “I’ve been trying to avoid the police for as long as I can remember,” he writes. This lifelong tendency to avoid police, as well as his extensive research for his dissertation for his doctorate in sociology and African American studies at Yale, led to his ability to imagine—and his commitment to advocate for—a society without police. McHarris begins his abolitionist argument with a short history of the American police force, connecting its origins to slave patrols, anti-Asian and anti-Mexican sentiments, and the genocide of Indigenous peoples. After thoroughly uncovering this deplorable history, the author traces the evolution of the police into its modern form, which evolved from the Reagan era war on drugs and continued with then-senator Biden’s racist 1994 crime act. Crucially, McHarris describes these developments alongside alternatives to policing, ranging from modern movements in Miami, Minneapolis, and Philadelphia to historical movements like the “copwatch patrols” instituted by the Black Panthers. In the final section of the book, McHarris gets imaginative about what it might be like to live in a world without police, emphasizing that, in every community, safety is contingent on an equitable distribution of resources. “It’s fundamentally a question of prioritizing lives and people over property and capital,” he writes. The author’s impressive expertise is matched only by his passion for his subject and commitment to radical imagination. While the text is occasionally repetitive, this is a compassionate, comprehensive, and practical guide to envisioning and creating a world free from the oppression and violence caused by police.
A deeply researched, profoundly optimistic vision for a police-free future.Pub Date: July 16, 2024
ISBN: 9781538725665
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Legacy Lit/Hachette
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
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
SEEN & HEARD
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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