"Should We Abolish Prisons?"

By Wade Lee Hudson

In his July 22, 2024, review of recent books advocating the abolition of prisons, Adam Gopnik argues that the “frequent brutality and ingrained indifference” seen in prisons calls us to “freely imagine alternatives,” but he differs from the abolitionists.

He strongly supports those such as Michelle Alexander who see American incarceration as “a mechanism that preserves racial hierarchy.” Incarceration in her now famous formulation acts as the new Jim Crow.” Black people in New York State, for instance, are fifteen percent of the overall population and almost fifty percent of the prison population.

However, Gopnik rejects the argument that mass incarceration is a product of capitalism,

politicalWade Lee HudsonAugust 2, 2024criminal justice, mental healthComment

America’s Refusal to Address the Roots of Violence

By Khalil Gibran Muhammad

As I thought about writing this review, I imagined an opening paragraph summarizing the events of this summer’s nationwide protests against police violence. How observers and participants parsed the civil unrest along the familiar lines of peaceful protesters, rioters and looters, drawing competing moral distinctions between nonviolence and violence. How the police deployed official violence to punish and intimidate activists. How heavily armed, self-deputized white men threatened and used vigilante violence against demonstrators. How President Trump called for state violence against human beings to protect property. And how the residents of many cities committed acts of violence against their intimate partners, neighbors and fellow citizens, including small children.

And then, after finishing Elliott Currie’s “A Peculiar Indifference: The Neglected Toll of Violence on Black America,” a smart, timely, deeply disturbing and essential book by a veteran scholar and leading expert on the criminal legal system, I realized that the details of every precious life harmed or lost this summer reveal a bigger truth about the nation….