"Have you guys been here before?" a female high schooler asks two young guys in baseball caps and shorts. "We have," she goes on. "We liked it so much we came back a second time." I hear an older man saying to his family, with just a tinge of irony, ...
Reviewed by Daniel Burton-Rose
Lee Dickenson writes in the voice of an embittered veteran. For more than a decade and a half he manned a war zone, where the monotonous routine was sharply punctuated by life or death crises. He believed in his work and gave his heart to it, ...
David C. Anderson The New Press, 182 pgs., $25.00
The programs David C. Anderson lauds in Sensible Justice are everything that alternatives to prison should not be. They stress the punitive over what could reintegrate an offender into society; the individual's culpability over any consideration of the lives the offenders ...
Allen M. Hornblum
Routledge, 297 pgs., $25.00
by Daniel Burton-Rose
The ignominious story of U.S. medical experimentation on prisoners is rarely one that makes the history books. Tests using prisoners as human guinea pigs included World War II efforts against cholera, malaria and smallpox. In the Holmesburg county jail in ...
No one can imagine. What it's like. Not unless you've gone through it. Christina Foos has. While incarcerated in a for-profit prison in Arizona, Christina says she was accosted by a guard, Ernesto Rivas, as she stepped out of the shower in March of 1997. Christina told Prison Legal News ...
H. Bruce Franklin,Editor, Penguin, 1998
by Daniel Burton-Rose
Closing a conversation about how hideous and abysmal prisons are these days, the great ex-con sociologist John Irwin remarked to me with a muted note of pleasure which I found somewhat unethical at the time: "Yeah, but one thing, there's going to ...
by Steven R. Donziger, Editor Harper Perennial, 1996, $15.00
by Daniel Burton-Rose
The Tough-On-Crime Myth: Real Solutions to Cut Crime, by Peter T. Elikann Insight Books, 1996, $24.95
The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison: Ideology, Class and Criminal Justice , by Jeffrey Reiman, Allyn and Bacon, 1998, ...
Jeffrey Reiman's book is an excellent antidote to The Real War on Crime and The Tough on Crime
Myth. First published in 1979 and now in its fifth revised edition, The
Rich Get Richer is a classic attempt to tear-down the socially-constructed barriers that obscure the class bias in the ...
American penal reform movements have a long and distinguished history: that of middle-class activists working to check the excesses of the centralized state against the underclass. Some of the reformers had good hearts, some didn't. Either way, they're responsible for many of the most hellish elements of incarceration, from the ...
In October, 1997 the international human rights organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) released Cold Storage: Super-Maximum Security Confinement in Indiana , a report on the Maximum Control Facility at Westville and the Secured Housing Unit at the Wabash Valley Correctional Facility. Cold Storage vigorously condemns the extreme isolation regimen as ...
