What's Prison For?
Punishment and Rehabilitation in the Age of Mass Incarceration
-
-
5.0 • 3 Ratings
-
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
What happens inside our prisons?
What’s Prison For? examines the “incarceration” part of “mass incarceration.” What happens inside prisons and jails, where nearly two million Americans are held? Bill Keller, one of America’s most accomplished journalists, has spent years immersed in the subject. He argues that the most important role of prisons is preparing incarcerated people to be good neighbors and good citizens when they return to society, as the overwhelming majority will.
Keller takes us inside the walls of our prisons, where we meet men and women who have found purpose while in state custody; American corrections officials who have set out to learn from Europe’s state-of-the-art prison campuses; a rehab unit within a Pennsylvania prison, dubbed Little Scandinavia, where lifers serve as mentors; a college behind bars in San Quentin; a women’s prison that helps imprisoned mothers bond with their children; and Keller’s own classroom at Sing Sing.
Surprising in its optimism, What’s Prison For? is an indispensable guide on how to improve our prison system, and a powerful argument that the status quo is a shameful waste of human potential.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Former New York Times executive editor Keller debuts with a brisk and impassioned indictment of the U.S. prison system. Drawing on his experience at the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that investigates "the causes and consequences of mass incarceration," Keller argues that "the American way of incarceration is a shameful waste of lives and money, feeding a pathological cycle of poverty, community dysfunction, crime, and hopelessness." He shows how rehabilitation has been neglected, especially in the South, where Black prisoners became a source of unpaid labor after the Civil War, and compares American prisons to their foreign counterparts, noting that in Germany, prison staff are considered "less as jailors and more as therapists or social workers." Keller also explains how "mass incarceration flows along the lines of social and economic inequality," concentrating its effects "on low-income communities of color," and contends that the privatization of the prison industry has allowed it to metastasize "into a large, little regulated, and often predatory industry of corrections services." Among a handful of model reentry programs, Keller cites the Prison Entrepreneurship Program in Texas, which trains inmates in "the skills and attitudes necessary to start a business, or at least to find a secure foothold in an existing business." Detailed and empathetic, this is an airtight case for reform.
