Eye-opening to those who didn’t know; another slap in the face to those who did.
A scathing primer on well-known but unaddressed criminal justice system discrimination against the poor, minorities, and the mentally ill.
Debut author Anderson, a prison reformer, National Guardsman, and ex-Marine, takes readers on a short, conscience-jarring excursion into the harsh realities of American justice. Now that the United States far outranks other countries in the sheer number of people behind bars, Anderson deftly highlights the ominous emergence beginning in the 1970s of what he calls an ideology-driven prison-industrial complex that, in addition to being a major government employer, is turning incarceration into a profit center for certain private businesses. Statistics he provides show that in 1970, on the eve of Nixon’s war on drugs, some 400,000 Americans were incarcerated. By 2010, the prison population had leaped to an astounding 2.5 million, including large numbers of low-level, nonviolent offenders whose real crime was not having enough money for adequate legal representation. Few went to trial; nearly all were compelled to cop a plea to avoid potentially heavier sentences. African-Americans make up a disproportionately large share of all inmates, evidence of what Anderson calls the new Jim Crow. This massive, taxpayer-funded lockup is now a multibillion industry that employs, according to Anderson’s statistics, some 750,000 people at the federal, state, and local levels. That’s not counting employees of privately run prisons. Concurrently, Anderson says, the last vestiges of pre-1970s programs for rehabilitation and mental health have given way to a more punishing and unforgiving approach that is quick to throw away the key. Anyone who has seen the crowded parking lots around courthouses, jails, and prisons cannot doubt that perps are, in a perverse way, major employers in an industry that too often produces only broken lives and more of the same. Anderson does a fine job bringing this out. He also scores in suggesting that we, the un-incarcerated, should be alarmed by police armed to the nines, plus the suddenly more common governmental imposition of what amounts to marshal law before and after major storms and in reaction to events such as the Boston Marathon bombing. Anderson gives every indication of being a left-oriented ideologue, but this hardly means we can dismiss all he has to say in this barbed wire blast.
Eye-opening to those who didn’t know; another slap in the face to those who did.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1491746264
Page Count: 150
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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