A timely and haunting look at key elements of incarceration history.
Bernstein, a Harvard University professor and award-winning historian, surveys the origins of the United States’ for-profit prisons in this 19th-century case study.
“American prisons are worksites,” writes the author in an introduction, noting that they generate billions of dollars in commodities and services based on the labor of underpaid (or unpaid) incarcerated people who “do not have the right to refuse to work.” Historians most often trace the origins of such profit-driven labor to the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which banned slavery “except as a punishment for crime”; Bernstein highlights its use more than half a century earlier in an engaging and often infuriating survey of New York’s Auburn State Prison. Bernstein notes how the Auburn’s founders sought not only to punish criminals, but also to “stimulate economic development” with prison-sponsored factories that produced myriad consumer products, from animal harnesses to carpets. In many ways, the book convincingly argues, Auburn created a framework that continues to shape the country’s prison industrial complex, with its inclusion of humiliation rituals (such as a ban on speaking) and its much-imitated black-and-white striped uniform. The book pays particular attention to the case of William Freeman, a Black and Native American young man who was first sentenced to Auburn in 1840when he was 15. Freeman would first defy Auburn’s rules by speaking up against its horrific working conditions, and, later, sought revenge through violence in an incident that rocked mid-1800s New York City. The case is a particularly useful study that allows the author to explore the prison’s policies and engage with the contemporary prison abolitionist movement. The book’s strongest suit is its impressive research, which is backed by nearly 70 pages of endnotes. Bernstein balances her solid understanding of theoretical approaches to American prisons, developed by activist and academic Angela Y. Davis and others, with impressive mining of diaries, letters, newspapers, and other primary sources from the era. The book’s engaging, relevant narrative is accompanied by more than three dozen full-color images, including maps, paintings, blueprints, and newspaper clippings.
A timely and haunting look at key elements of incarceration history.Pub Date: May 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780226744230
Page Count: 288
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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