Bruce Western

i'd say this book is absolutely essential for anyone interested in the justice system and creating a better world going forward. i've read a few radical justice + abolition books/essays and one of the most frequent critiques i see is that there is a lack of concrete ideas for how to change things. that critique is understandable but i also believe that change needs to be collaborative and one must not hold all the answers to have their view taken seriously. that being said, i love that this book does hold concrete ideas and means of change that we can implement in different sectors of the justice system, activist spaces, etc! the language and information presented is super accessible and i found myself questioning things i had never thought of before- one of the most prominent passages being about how we must not paint others as the villains in our story to seek change ("Children not criminals"). really challenging ideas that more people should reckon with as we move forward in our current reform/defund/abolish climate… (plus d'informations)

Parsimony and Other Radical Ideas About Justice, edited by Jeremy Travis and Bruce Western, is a collection of essays that work toward figuring out what a truly just system would look like and be based on.

For this type of review, I'm not going to try to distill many of the points presented. Partly because each essay is, while related to the others, a self-contained argument, so each deserves separate consideration as well as consideration as part of the larger argument. I will say that the key is to treat every citizen as a human being, whether the one who made a mistake or one who was harmed by another's mistake. The one thing that must be done before our criminal legal (not justice since there is no justice in our system) system can even begin to be trusted is to acknowledge the complete and utter failure it has been to this point to actually serve ALL citizens. Otherwise, it will remain untrusted and an arm of a white supremacist "government."

There is both abstract ideas as well as concrete first steps here, but there is also an understanding that this is a project that will require a lot of work and every step will need to be considered, reconsidered, and then monitored once adopted. So this is not some pie in the sky, plug and play solution, this is an attempt to begin to build a just society.

Most readers will question some elements, though I think the writers all do a good job of answering most of the questions that might make someone uneasy about the ideas. Even coming away from this book with a couple things you're not sure you can get behind (yet) will still have opened the dialogue for you to think about how the ends can be accomplished while respecting the humanity of everyone.

We don't, as a society, have to insist on the maximum pain and suffering while withholding opportunities for someone to successfully rejoin society. Especially when our laws and our enforcement of those laws are not simply uneven but downright unjust and targeting those already held back by other institutional obstacles, not to mention some rather evil people with an unwarranted sense of entitlement and superiority.

Highly recommended for anyone interested in changing our system to one that is both just and equitable, whether you're a scholar, part of the legal system, or an activist. Debate is good and this book offers plenty to consider and discuss.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.… (plus d'informations)

Professor David Downes has chosen to discuss Bruce Western’s Punishment and Inequality in America on FiveBooks as one of the top five on his subject -Crime and Punishment, saying that:



“…The most compelling documentation of the character and consequences of the cataclysmic rise of mass imprisonment in the USA over the past three decades. Western spells out its adverse effects for black and Hispanic communities in particular – four decades ago, they were 30 per cent of the prison population, now they constitute 70 per cent. ‘The basic brute fact of incarceration in the new era of mass imprisonment is that African-Americans are eight times more likely to be incarcerated than whites… The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that in 2004 over 12 per cent of black men aged 25-29 were behind bars, in prison or jail.’ (p3) Over 2.3 million US citizens, mostly male, are in prison on any one day, a figure so huge it conceals substantial levels of poverty, inequality and unemployment by taking them out of the frame..…”



The full interview is available here: http://fivebooks.com/interviews/david-downes… (plus d'informations)