A consistently eye-opening, urgent report on the use and misuse of prisoner isolation.
How solitary confinement defined the lives of 14 former and current prison inmates.
Co-editors Pendergrass, a civil rights attorney for the ACLU, and Hoke (co-editor: Palestine Speaks, 2014), an oral historian, believe that solitary confinement “is the little-known dead end of the US criminal justice system” and that its use (and abuse) remains an atrocity. Reinforcing their viewpoints are intimate profiles of prisoners whose histories and experiences put a human face on prison trauma and aptly reflect the work both editors believe is necessary to abolish this inhumane practice. Each profile raises the more universal moral question of whether or not isolation makes the general population safer in the long run or if it’s simply a cruel and unusual method of punishment. To the editors, these biographies are emblematic of a much larger overlooked and ignored population and an issue deserving of widespread attention. Culled from two years of extensive interviews, the book shares the backgrounds of convicts varying in age and experience. Maryam, confined to “the hole” for refusing to remove a religiously sanctioned headscarf, covered her claustrophobic cell with flowers fashioned from toilet paper; Vernesia, a 25-year-old mother of three, got caught up in her fiance’s troubled past and fought for justice after he died from maltreatment; Candie, a psychologically scarred woman (who was eventually acquitted), describes her time in a rusty Rikers Island solitary cell as hellish. More harrowing is the story of Shearod, convicted of second-degree murder, who describes Michigan’s Ionia Maximum facility as loud, rat-infested, and deadly. Sonya, a transgender woman, poignantly speaks of the peace she now enjoys after years of turmoil and unrest in a penitentiary. The editors also include the deliberations and experiences of two prison officers who share their thoughts about American prison life and the controversies surrounding solitary isolation. Further bolstering this important report is an expanded appendix section providing tools for increased public awareness, the little-known history of solitary confinement, and pro-reform activism.
A consistently eye-opening, urgent report on the use and misuse of prisoner isolation.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-60846-956-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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