Though the author sometimes makes it sound as if no one had ever before leveled these criticisms, his striking portrayal of...
The flip side of the American dream—jail—depicted in all its pathos, tragedy, and grim ironies.
More pervasive than the Chinese gulags, as dreadful as its Siberian counterparts, able to incarcerate two million souls in the blink of an eye, the US prison system is grotesquely out of control, says freelance journalist Abramsky. Nearly one percent of the nation is now behind bars, half of them for nonviolent, victimless crimes, and the political system that spawned the jail explosion bears much of the blame. Though not ground-breaking, Abramsky's investigation ties together a wealth of strands that contributed to the burgeoning prison population and the current emphasis on punishment rather than treatment or rehabilitation. He examines the whole topic of crime and how it came to be manipulated for electoral gain by politicians from Nixon to Giuliani, who gathered votes as they rode a wave of fear generated as much by media spin-meisters as by criminals. Abramsky details the evolving national anti-crime, anti-welfare, anti-immigration sentiments, the ways in which the justice system maintains racial hierarchies, the divorcing of the drug question from considerations of poverty and unemployment. He raises some simple, discomfiting questions: why, for example, if jailing is deemed so effective, is the crime rate the same now as it was when the move to incarcerate began? Bringing the critique home, Abramsky uses two individuals as examples of how the system works. The failure is Billy Ochoa, a doper and pathetic small-time career thief now doing 300-plus years for welfare fraud. The success is former California governor Pete Wilson, whose sleazy opportunism on the crime topic won him political office and a presidential bid.
Though the author sometimes makes it sound as if no one had ever before leveled these criticisms, his striking portrayal of Ochoa and the kind of political zealotry that conceived the three-strike law provides valuable ammunition for reformers.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26811-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
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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