Going Up the River

Starred review from March 1, 2001
If crime rates are dropping, why is the number of prisons growing rapidly? What are the cause and implications of the "prison boom"? Hallinan, winner of a Pulitzer Prize and Harvard's prestigious Nieman Fellowship, delivers a clear-eyed, sleekly written and deeply disturbing tour of the privatized prison landscape of America circa 2000, with a welcome (if unnerving) focus on the human aspect of maximum incarceration. "The merger of punishment and profit reshaping this country," he argues. Beginning with Texas ("Texas is to the prison culture of the 1990s what California was to the youth culture in the 1960s"), Hallinan details the cold calculation that fosters anticrime hysteria and the competition among postindustrial, "job-hungry" regions for a piece of the boom or "prison-industrial complex" by offering perks like tax abatements and job training. While he draws sympathetic portraits of mild-mannered wardens and ordinary folks attracted to the high pay of corrections work, he also shows how some have been transformed-not for the better-by this work. Hallinan proposes that punitive mandatory minimum sentencing and federal prosecutorial zeal inflate penal and police spending and that the post-Reagan privatization of prisons by a small group of powerful corporations has led to harsh "unintended circumstances" ranging from escapes, to the brutalization of nonviolent offenders, to inmate deaths resulting from medical negligence. Hallinan's documentation of malfeasance exposes the persistent erosion of important aspects of the country's social contract. This essential portrait of the current state of American justice continues a line of analyses pursued by other authors such as Christian Parenti in Lockdown America. Agent, Jane Dystel. (Mar. 20) Forecast: The National obsession with crime as well as Hallinan's sterling reputation will guarantee review coverage for this title, and a five-city author tour will further draw attention to this controversial argument.

February 1, 2001
Since America is often called "The Land of the Free," readers may be surprised that Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Hallinan sees it as "A Prison Nation." He documents how in the past 20 years the country has built more prisons and incarcerated more offenders than any other nation in the world. This phenomenon, he reveals, owes itself to America's war on crime, its draconian drug laws, and its recognition of prisons as tremendous public works projects. Although costly for taxpayers, prisons, from construction to maintenance, provide much-needed jobs for the often-depressed communities in which they are located. Alas, prisons are also rife with kickbacks for those who work on the inside. From Beeville, TX, to Tamms, IL, Hallinan saw much of the same story: largely without public awareness or consent, prisons have become big business while taking their toll in human terms. Highly recommended.--Frances Sandiford, Green Haven Correctional Facility Lib., Stormville, NY

Copyright 2001 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2001
Hallinan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, recounts his travels across the nation to visit prison systems and document the horrific state of prison policy. Since the end of the cold war, the "military-industrial complex has given way to the prison-industrial complex," pitting job-hungry small-town America against urban minorities who constitute the bulk of the prison populations. To illustrate the inequities of drug sentencing, Hallinan zeroes in on the Groves family in North Carolina. Three generations of Groveses are jailed for drug trafficking, offenses elevated to kingpin operation by drug sentencing laws. Much of the book is focused on Texas, a state that has used prison industry as "engines of economic salvation." Hallinan also explores the history of prisons, examining how social policy has changed from "punishing to rehabilitation to producing pointlessly punitive" prisons throughout the U.S. He recounts trends in penology from education and training to medical treatment, including plastic surgery and sterilization. This is an eye-opening look at the U.S. prison system and the troubling trend of mixing the profit motive of the private prisons with social objectives of punishing criminals.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2001, American Library Association.)