Beyond These Walls
Rethinking Crime and Punishment in the United States
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- CHF 12.00
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- CHF 12.00
Beschreibung des Verlags
“You should definitely read this book… What really struck me in reading Beyond These Walls was that Tony Platt had very seriously and carefully considered the contributions of social movements—feminist, queer, disability, and labor.” —Angela Davis
Beyond These Walls is an ambitious and far-ranging exploration that tracks the legacy of crime and imprisonment in the United States, from the historical roots of the American criminal justice system to our modern state of over-incarceration, and offers a bold vision for a new future. Author Tony Platt, a recognized authority in the field of criminal justice, challenges the way we think about how and why millions of people are tracked, arrested, incarcerated, catalogued, and regulated in the United States.
Beyond These Walls traces the disturbing history of punishment and social control, revealing how the criminal justice system attempts to enforce and justify inequalities associated with class, race, gender, and sexuality. Prisons and police departments are central to this process, but other institutions – from immigration and welfare to educational and public health agencies – are equally complicit.
Platt argues that international and national politics shape perceptions of danger and determine the policies of local criminal justice agencies, while private policing and global corporations are deeply and undemocratically involved in the business of homeland security.
Finally, Beyond These Walls demonstrates why efforts to reform criminal justice agencies have often expanded rather than contracted the net of social control. Drawing upon a long tradition of popular resistance, Platt concludes with a strategic vision of what it will take to achieve justice for all in this era of authoritarian disorder.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Platt (The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency), a justice studies professor, offers a well-sourced critique of American criminal justice institutions. He investigates why America's practices of punishment and social exclusions persist, giving concrete examples of a "double system" of justice in America, one for poor people and people of color and another for well-off white people. The book traces through American history the impulses and ideas that characterize the "carceral state," such as the confining of Native Americans on prisonlike reservations and post-Reconstruction racial terror. Platt argues that the carceral state today consists not only of courts and prisons but also of other institutions, including a punitive welfare system, a militaristic model of policing, powerful corporations (e.g., gun manufacturers) that profit from societal preoccupation with "insecurity," and federal counterterrorism organizations that surveil the populace. Many readers may find too radical Platt's assertions that numerous institutions are intentionally designed to maintain social control, but they will also find it difficult to discount his well-crafted, well-documented arguments.