A provocative addition to the literature calling for criminal justice reform.
A multifaceted look at the problem of crime, punishment, and injustice.
Many of the contributors to this assemblage by law school professors Dharia, Forman, and Hawilo note that the U.S. is a carceral state. Owing to the Nixon-era war on crime, the country “began to expand the criminal system in a way that was so wide-ranging it enveloped whole communities…[and] punished an ever-increasing number of behaviors for ever-longer periods of time.” One result is that communities of color are vastly overrepresented in the carceral system, with Black males imprisoned at five times the rate of whites. This is both deliberate and in some respects an unintended consequence: The criminal system, write the editors, “isn’t a system at all” but instead “a series of largely disconnected actors, structures, and bureaucracies, each following their own incentives and logics.” In this system, blame is easy to assign; prosecutors blame judges for harsh sentences, judges blame prosecutors for funneling so many cases to the bench and legislatures for imposing minimum sentencing requirements, and so forth. The numbers the contributors adduce are staggering: More Americans work in the criminal justice system than in the auto-manufacturing sector, and nearly a tenth of the nation’s population has been arrested or jailed. While it is true that, as crime reporter Jill Leovy notes, “victims get no press coverage,” much of the criminal justice system works in the shadows, with many criminals whisked away in plea bargains that may net them worse punishment than if they had gone to trial. While some of the contributors support abolition or defunding of police forces, others take a far more conservative position. All agree, however, that the present system is both flawed and fundamentally unjust. Other contributors include Angela Y. Davis, Clint Smith, and Emily Bazelon.
A provocative addition to the literature calling for criminal justice reform.Pub Date: July 9, 2024
ISBN: 9780374614492
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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