Progressive Punitivism in the Animal Protection Movement

Juno the Dog
Image result for juno dog oregon newcomb
Juno, the dog from Oregon v. Newcomb. Image
courtesy BarkPost.
A while ago, I read and commented on Oregon v. Newcomb, a Fourth Amendment case involving animal cruelty charges. The case was very interesting both from an animal rights perspective and from a search-and-seizure perspective: A cop was called to a woman’s house following complaints of abuse and neglect of her dog. Upon arriving, the cop found the dog emaciated, seized him, and took him to the police vet. The vet took a blood test, found out there was nothing wrong with the dog except he was being starved, and charges were filed against the woman. She filed a motion to suppress the blood test results, arguing that it was a warrantless search of her property.
The Oregon Supreme Court wrote a wonderful opinion from an animal rights perspective: Even though the Fourth Amendment protects people’s “effects” from unreasonable search and seizure, some “effects” differ from others in that they are sentient. From a Fourth Amendment perspective the decision was more nebulous; it is unclear whether the court meant that the blood test was not a “search”, or a permissible search due to exigent circumstances because of Juno’s condition.
But there was one thing that caught my eye as I was reading the decision, and I highlighted it in my review:

It’s not difficult to read between the lines in Newcomb, even though the Court doesn’t really do that. Newcomb said to the police officer that she fed the dog WinCo food bought in small packages. WinCo is a low-grade kibble that sells in bulk at Costco, chock-full of grains, chemicals, and artificial fillers. It’s telling that the defendant did not buy the kibble in bulk, but rather in small packages: poor people can’t afford to spend on bulk and reap the savings, which is true for every product. As Yesim Orhun and Mike Palazzolo found in a study based on Nielsen data, frugality is hard to afford.

Hastings is located in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, which is a window into the lives of people ravaged by extreme poverty. We frequently see folks who live in the streets with pets, which almost always seem groomed, well-fed, and very much loved. But since homeless people’s lives, by their very nature, are exposed to the eyes of strangers, the ability to detect animal welfare and neglect is heightened, to the point that the police might intervene more frequently than when it gets reports of neglect in houses. Obviously, Newcomb was not homeless. But the reason she provided for the dog’s emaciated condition is very telling, and might also explain the police’s zealousness in following up on the complaint.

Don’t get me wrong: I think the court’s decision is 100% correct. The rights of an animal that is mistreated should trump the “ownership” rights of whoever owns him or her, regardless of social class. But I think it does raise questions as to whether we enforce these laws equitably, and whether we should develop means to report and expose animal abuse and neglect in other settings.

Happily, my colleague Justin Marceau from Denver University has addressed this issue much more thoroughly in his excellent new book Beyond Cages. Marceau’s main argument is that, amidst the diverse and varying opinions and philosophies underpinning human enthusiasm for protecting nonhuman animals, the movement, such as it is, tends to coalesce around the lowest common denominator: crying out for harsher and harsher punishments for animal cruelty. And, just so that we understand, this rarely manifests in thorough investigations against corporate giants propagating animal cruelty, such as Smithfield Foods or Sunrise Farms (suppliers of the so-called ‘humane meat/eggs’ to Whole Foods and Amazon): much more common is taking out our collective ire at individuals, because, as both Marceau and Sherry Colb argue, this allows us to keep engaging in everyday complicity in cruelty to animals (via consuming animal products, visiting zoos and circuses, wearing leather, etc.,) while pretending that cruelty to animals is an aberration, a personal pathology of deranged, psychopathic individuals who abuse and neglect the animal we most care about as a society: our beloved, anthropomorphized pets (for a fascinating critique of pet ownership, see Jessica Pierce’s fantastic and thoughtful book.)

One of my students wrote a marvelous seminar paper last spring about touch deprivation in the lives of the homeless and, among her other arguments, she highlighted how we dehumanize homeless people while purporting to care for the welfare of their pets. I’m not 100% on board with her (well made) arguments, because I don’t see the animals raison d’être as providing companionship to people, but I loved that she problematized the criminalization of poverty through arguments of animal cruelty.

As an animal rights person, I am so glad people are making this point, because I think this recurrence to punitivism weakens, rather than strengthens, the animal rights movement; but it seems that Marceau sees this as an aberration of the animal rights movement compared to other civil rights movements. Marceau writes:

The animal protection movement – on an organizational and individual level – regard the fight to secure protections for animals as a civil rights issue. Analogies to women’s rights, LGBTQ legal victories, and even the abolition of slavery and the fight against racism are common tropes. But is the movement seriously interested in civil rights and broad social change? Incarceration is a most unlikely ally for a movement that might earnestly desire far-reaching social reform. Never has a social change or civil rights cause been so thoroughly immersed in the coercive, prosecutorial arm of the State. Indeed, the animal protection movement’s commitment to ever harsher criminal punishments and more aggressive enforcement of the criminal law may serve as a case study for understanding how other movements should conceive of their relationship with the carceral state.

Unfortunately, if other movements have not managed to co-opt the “coercive, prosecutorial arm of the State” for social justice ends, it’s not for lack of trying. As I explain here, here, here, here, and here (coming soon to a database near you via Vol. 68 of the Buffalo Law Review), a considerable thrust of the social justice struggle’s energy has been devoted to shaming, discrediting, obliterating, calling for prosecution and incarceration of, and taking away due process protections from the people these movements dislike. The latest example (for shame!) is the absurd and obscene persecution of Judge Persky; the scorched-earth mentality knows no bounds and has followed him off the bench as well. If anything, the animal rights movement is an example of what happens when this animus, which enjoys considerable success in destroying and ruining people’s lives via the cyber-guillotine of social media, is coupled with state cooperation.

Indeed, that we see this phenomenon operating in distinct and separate activist spaces such as the animal rights movements and, say, #metoo, is proof of what I argue in my Progressive Punitivism piece: that this is not some isolated pathology of the left, but rather part of the collective disease we all suffer from–across the entire political spectrum–as a consequence of marinating in the carceral state logic for the last fifty years. When we’ve been consistently taught, since Nixon (and perhaps even before), that all problems are criminal justice problems, and that all of them can and should be solved by locking people up, is it really any surprise that we see this logic operating in entirely different spheres of the social activism world?

Precisely because the animal rights movement regularly makes comparisons to other social justice causes (which I, for one, see as perfectly apt and insulting only if one views them through a speciest lens), it should lead the way in seeking to liberate, not to incarcerate. The true meaning of intersectionality lies in finding common ground and uniting struggles, not in hairsplitting the left apart. If this movement wants to expend energy in the direction of the criminal process, it must do so by providing strong support to open rescuers arguing for a necessity defense; for people who are facing the carceral state, not propping it up.

Book Review: Plausible Crime Stories by Orna Alyagon-Darr

Recently, I had the absolute treat to read Orna Alyagon Darr’s new book Plausible Crime Stories, in which she provides a riveting analysis of almost 150 sexual offense cases tried before the British Mandate courts of Palestine, prior to the inauguration of the State of Israel.
The evidentiary process in criminal courts involves efforts by factfinders to establish a factual truth in the face of often conflicting stories about what happened. In doing so, they recur to several different mechanisms, which Alyagon Darr discusses in the book: probability (which the official evidentiary standard endorses), credibility (whether a witness is telling the truth or a lie) and plausibility (which story makes sense.) Alyagon Darr’s book deals mostly with the latter, and its main argument is this: when deciding whether a story is plausible, factfinders rely on a lifetime of experience that is embedded in their place and time. People make assumptions about how a particular event went down on the basis of their beliefs about what makes sense, and these in turn are shaped by their status, ethnicity, and milieu. In this case, the factfinders were British colonial judges, whose approaches were shaped by notions shaped in the British metropole as well as by their stereotypes and understanding of the population of Middle-Eastern colonists they encounter. 
Alyagon-Darr tells, for example, of cases involving homosexual relations, which to the British simply could not entail love or an emotional connection. The narratives that made sense were shaped by what they considered a “typical” story: an older man of higher social status penetrates a younger man of lower status in exchange for money. Stories that fell into this narrative pattern were plausible; stories about love or mutuality were not. Similarly, in Mandatory Palestine relationships between Jewish women and Arab men were so stigmatized and unthinkable that, to make sense of them, the women in question had to be cast as problematic and coming from dysfunctional families.
These are only two examples of many fascinating ones that Alyagon-Darr discusses in the book. Her analysis made me think of Nicola Lacey’s Women, Crime, and Character. Lacey’s argument is that, throughout the 19th century, the treatment of women as offenders morphed as the criminal process evolved from reputation-based to evidence-based. What Alyagon Darr’s book seems to suggest is that this shift–whether or not completed in the British metropole–was not complete in the colonies in the early 20th century. Reputation, or assumptions about reputation, appear to be the lynchpin of both credibility and plausibility. Whether someone’s story about a sexual encounter that happened to them–consensual, nonconsensual, forceful, unexpected–is plausible or not depends on reputational factors such as the character’s ethnicity, age, or assumed sexual practices. In that respect, little has changed–just look at the many unchecked assumptions that underlined the Kavanaugh-versus-Ford debacle. What is interesting about the colonial society brought about by the Pax Britannica is that reputational assumptions pertained not only to individuals, but to entire communities, on the basis of ethnicity as the main characteristic. Which raises another question–should they have set these assumptions aside? Did these stereotypes persist because they were found to be true frequently enough to be valuable tools for judging reputation, character, and plausibility? Alyagon Darr wisely leaves these value questions to the readers, doing the kind of careful historical analysis that we need to do. 
Interestingly, just as I’m writing about this book, I came across the recent embarrassment surrounding Naomi Wolf’s new book Outrage. I was mortified for Wolf–it is regrettable, but very human, to fall in love with one’s theory (in this case, that consensual same-sex relations were harshly punished) to the point of misunderstanding the data. Alyagon Darr’s book is a great counterexample. It leaves open questions, intelligently interrogates the context of the period and the milieus involved, and has enough compassion to understand that not everyone in Mandatory Palestine was born holding the postmodern intersectionality handbook. It is laudable effort to understand historical actors on their own terms, as Ashley Rubin has recently called upon historians and others to do. 
But there’s something else going on here: echoes of Lombroso’s L’Uomo Delinquente, for sure. Alyagon Darr quotes an early 20th century criminologist, Paltiel Dikshtein, discussing “colonial criminology’. It is not a coincidence that the colonists had such appetite for reductionist, essentialist judgments on behavior in the colonies by ethnicity. At the time, Great Britain, particularly in the colonies, was enthralled with the power of science, measurements, and the use of medical tools and classifications. Because of the Lombrosian, scientist-looks-at-primitive-animals perspective, this was especially appealing in the colonies, and could explain Binyamin Blum’s findings about the emergence of forensic science in the colonies. Importantly, as David Horn explains so well, Lombroso’s scientific analysis of crime came of age during the unification of Italy, and should be understood in the context of making sense of differences in crime patterns among different Italian provinces. It’s not a coincidence to find similar mechanisms underpinning the ethnic hodgepodge created by the Pax Britannica, particularly in the complicated, diverse ethnic world of Mandatory Palestine. Similar to the Lombrosian project, what we see in the British is an effort to harmonize norms across the different population under their control. The need to govern and the enthusiasm about scientific inquiry of crime yielded the perfect storm: in criminological laboratories, it would manifest as essentialist diagnoses, and in courtroom settings, as essentialist findings of plausibility. 
Finally, an important word about the emotional impact of the book. It goes without saying that Alyagon-Darr is discussing events that happened a long time ago. Her clear and empathetic writing evinces the kind of compassionate care (without compromising attention to detail) that one would offer a friend of loved one who was hurt five minutes ago. Her descriptions of the horrific crimes people experienced, the betrayals in other people’s versions, the humiliating and dehumanizing medical examinations children had to undergo, read as fresh now as they must have felt to these people a hundred years ago. It makes one wonder about the impact that these open wounds had on the cultural psyche of the Jewish and Arab peoples, and the extent to which unspoken trauma and injury have fed into the larger mess that is today’s Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Good Intentions, Bad Consequences: Appreciating the Value of “We Blew It” Explanations of Mass Incarceration

In his 1985 masterpiece Visions of Social Control, criminological giant Stanley Cohen starts off by identifying the main features that transformed the way Western industrialized societies control deviance, which were largely completed by the 19th century: increased state involvement, increased classification of deviants, increased segregation into total institutions, and the decline in the infliction of bodily pain. He goes on to sketch three primary templates in which scholarly literature has sought to explain this transformation:

Uneven Progress: this story is an “arc of progress” trope, which essentially sees shifts in social control as overall benign. Not only are they motivated by a desire to do good, but they actually do good: in the overall scheme of things, our ideas of appropriate punishment become more humane and sophisticated, and the occasional misstep along the way will course-correct itself in time.

Good (but Complicated) Intentions – Disastrous Consequences: this story, of which David Rothman’s Conscience and Convenience is the perfect example. Notions of enlightenment and benevolence (often misguided by paternalistic perceptions of who the underclass is and what’s best for them) shape  basic notions of what the solution should be, but along the way the values become diluted and the original plan is undermined by managerial and practical goals.

Finally, the Discipline and Mystification story, whose best representatives are structural Marxists and Foucault, argue that the terrible system we’ve come to create is exactly what it is intended to be. Controlling and repressing the underclass is the goal of the capitalist elite, or the ultimate aim of governmentality. This is a much more cynical view than the one espoused by the previous model: we actually don’t want to do good–what we really want is to produce docile workers and citizens and our social control systems achieve exactly that.

While Cohen mostly addresses the classic subject of the emergence of the prison and other confinement institutions (in other words, the shift that Foucault addressed in Discipline and Punish and Rusche and Kirchheimer addressed in Punishment and the Social Structure), I find that his classification of templates applies well to the study of mass incarceration as well. Visions was published in 1985, when a rise in incarceration patterns in both the United States and the United Kingdom was already becoming evident but not near its maximum rate circa 2008 (and the declining crime rates were probably not a clearly pronounced trend yet.) Since the publication of Visions, many scholars of punishment and social control have provided their own accounts of the rise of mass incarceration, and while the accounts conflict with each other on various theoretical and practical points, one feature they tend to share is eschewing the “uneven progress” perspective. You’d be hard pressed to find an analysis of mass incarceration that thinks that the shift in incarceration patterns has been positive. Criminologists look at the mirror through a negative slant, one that is not solely attributable to bias: in a lot of ways, things *have* gotten worse, or at least it is easy to problematize the argument that they have gone better. For example, is it really better to give lethal injections in highly controlled and supposedly medicalized conditions than to hang people in the town square? The rate of botched executions would suggest not. And, is it really better to put people in county jails ill-equipped to provide for their needs than to warehouse them in giant, overcrowded facilities? The complaints about basic conditions and health care would suggest not. If there are narratives of progress, uneven or not, they are usually to be found in official communiques of correctional authorities and institutional actors, not in scholarly critiques.

As to the more critical paradigms, perhaps because of the dramatic influence of radical criminologies and Foucaultian thinking (see also here), most classic and new accounts of mass incarceration tend to fall into the “discipline and mystification” category. These employ categories of class and race (less frequently, gender) to argue that the system is deliberately shaped to oppress, control, and marginalize the bottom rungs of the social hierarchy. This theme became even more pronounced with the rise to prominence of the conversation about neoliberalism (at least the way we have redefined the concept) and with the vast popularization of critical race analyses of mass incarceration (which not so much offer theoretical novelty, but have had a dramatic effect on the world outside academia.)

It is easy to see the appeal of the “discipline and mystification” approach. First, virtually all punishment and society scholars agree that mass incarceration has been, overall, an unqualified evil, and the natural tendency is to look for blame, mostly among people and institutions we find objectionable. And second, the world of criminal justice does offer clear examples of people and institutions whose bad will cannot be denied. The Southern judge in Mona Lynch’s Hard Bargains comes to mind, as does the prosecutor that opens Nicole Gonzalez van Cleve’s Crook County. Similarly, Joe Arpaio (to whom Lynch has appropriately referred to as a “penal cartoon”) is not someone you have to strain much to ascribe bad will to–and neither is Harry Anslinger.

These folks make for easy cases. But much of the perspectives that assume bad will, or some negative design from inception, do not actually feature ill-willed individuals at the helm, but rather the argument that individuals’ reactions to events are shaped by deeper systemic inequalities. The source of evil, in other words, lies in society, culture, or established state institutions, and people operate largely within these structural boundaries, thus fulfilling the goal of evil that the institutions intend. These larger-scale analyses follow the theoretical frameworks of Foucault and the Marxists, neither of whom pointed fingers at individuals, and all of which, especially Foucault, actually emphasized the impersonal nature of evil.

The appeal of this perspective is obvious in the American context. Many accounts of American mass incarceration start at the outset by pointing fingers toward Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan as Bad Guys no. 1 and 2 (for a classic example see Katherine Beckett.) In both of these cases, especially regarding Nixon, we have enough evidence to know that there was actual bad animus behind the decisions. The more recent punishment and society works, however, have been expanding the circle of blame to institutions and individuals previously perceived as part of the “good guy” bloc. In Governing Through Crime, Jonathan Simon argues that politicians of every stripe, including progressives, benefit from posturing as tough on crime. In The Prison and the Gallows, Marie Gottschalk places some of the blame for mass incarceration on the shoulders of prisoners’ rights advocates and death penalty opponents. In The First Civil Right, Naomi Murakawa attributes much of the evil of mass incarceration to civil-rights liberals. And in From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, Elizabeth Hinton argues that Nixon was not so much an aberration, but rather a direct continuation of the oppressive, paternalistic, racist approaches to crime control of his predecessors, Kennedy and Johnson, who were assisted by the oppressive, paternalistic, and racial top-down policies espoused by their academic advisors, criminologists Cloyd Ohlin and Richard Cloward.

We could debate the factual assertions underlying these works. While many of the arguments they advance are grounded in careful historical inquiry, others overlook the ways in which liberals and progressives have fought against the incarceration sprawl (I have some classic examples of this in Yesterday’s Monsters, where I show that, contrary to received wisdom, many civil rights organizations saw right through determinate sentencing and, back in the mid-1970s, warned that it would bring about a bloated correctional apparatus.) Maybe some of the tendency to blame liberals and progressives comes from an effort to “overcorrect” previous literature, which relegated the blame to Nixon, Reagan, and their cronies, without any self introspection on the left. But for our purposes here, I think it’s more helpful to look at tone. To the extent that these folks have “blown it” and contributed to the scale of imprisonment and its adjacent, or embedded, racial injustices, should we spend scholarly effort at looking at their intentions, or at the structural constraints within which they were working? The tendency in the field is clearly to do the latter, which is why I find two recent books so refreshing.

The first of these is James Forman’s Locking Up Our Own, which uses as its case study Washington D.C., a city characterized by robust participation of African American politicians and law enforcement officials in its structure of policymaking structure. Forman takes on the question why these African American stakeholders ended up supporting some of the policies that brought about increased crime control crackdowns in the streets, as well as punitive sentencing policies. The book revolves around several historical axes: the advent of the war on drugs, the crossroad on gun control policies, sentencing policies, the response to the crack epidemic, and the expansion of stop-and-frisk police strategies.

What is important about Forman’s account is that at no point does he make light of the gravity of the problems faced by the African American community. Violent crime and drug-related devastation, as well as the proliferation of illegally-obtained weapons, were all real things that were happening in real neighborhoods to real people, and raised serious problems that imperiled and burdened communities already burdened by institutional racism (of course, these problems themselves originated from institutional racism as well; this is the tragic double-winged problem of racialized law enforcement, that both criminality and criminalization stem from the same poisoned fountain of stunted opportunities and crippling poverty.) Moreover: Forman does not doubt at all the altruistic motivation of the actors–police chiefs, journalists, lawmakers–who, in the name of wanting to assist their community in its plight, ended up espousing policies that, in hindsight, yielded disastrous consequences. The urge to clean up the streets from drugs led to aggressive, disproportionate enforcement. The desire to help people help themselves against armed assailants exacerbated the proliferation of guns. Sentencing reforms filled prisons and fueled punitive animus, and adding stop and frisk to the police’s toolbox disintegrated any trust between the police and the communities they were hoping to serve.

But it is important to recognize that, even as African American stakeholders participated in locking up their own, their own biographies and stories show their genuine good intentions. Forman’s account shines with historical nuance when he delves into the personal history of Burtell Jefferson, Washington D.C.’s first African-American Chief of Police. Jefferson rose through the ranks making ten times the effort of his white counterparts, overcoming immense structural racism and outsmarting the racist selection policies by excelling in the promotion tests so that his blackness could not count against him by those who sought to exclude him from rank. Jefferson shines as someone whose truly admirable rise through the ranks was motivated by a desire to do well for a plighted community, and as someone who spent an enormous effort mentoring others who followed in his footsteps. Jefferson is just one example of the people Forman introduces in the book, most of whom were motivated by a similar genuine desire to help their communities. Their motivations, except when he finds evidence to the contrary, are taken at face value, even as he places them in the context of the structurally rotten situation they were in.

Forman’s answer to the main question animating his book is therefore not one of evil, mystification, and bad faith: it all boils down to lack of imagination. When you have a hammer, he argues, everything looks like a nail. In the absence of workable public health models for handling the drug crisis, or a memory of using more innovative models, people sought, in good faith, to represent the interests of the community and assist it in its plight. It is valuable to acknowledge, as Forman does, the tragedy in the fact that violent crime–which was and is a real problem in urban neighborhoods–disproportionally implicates as well as victimizes people of color. Because of this, the politicians’ and cops’ demands for a crackdown is not merely motivated by racial animus, but by the value of protecting the very community that produced both the crime and the victimization. Was the fix worse than the problem? Sure. Could it be avoided? We can only tell in hindsight. Can we fault the architects of the fix? Only for their lack of prescience.

Heather Schoenfeld’s Building the Prison State offers a similar nuanced analysis, though her take on the reformers is somewhat less benign than Formans. The book looks at the growth of mass incarceration in Florida, identifying the root of the problem as a cynical exploitation of a loophole left in the consent decree in Costello v. Wainwright. In the case of Schoenfeld book, the interventions that paved Florida’s path toward astronomical growth in incarceration were not so much front-end policing reforms, but rather the construction of additional institutions. The growth of the state’s population by two million throughout the sixties,  as well as the actual rise in crime and the new policing techniques, meant that between 1968 and 1972 the prison population grew by 31 percent (p. 74). The warden, Wainwright, was amidst a modernization project, and saw the overcrowded and outdated facilities as hurdles on his path to implement more rehabilitative programming behind bars. Civil rights attorney Toby Simon, who fought for the inmates who suffered from the overcrowding, prevailed, but so did prison officials who wanted updated facilities. Since the entire Florida system was overcrowded, Wainwright would not be able to reduce overcrowding by moving inmates from facility to facility, but by pursuing one of two courses of action: releasing prisoners (via good behavior or parole) or increasing capacity (via building more prisons.) The political developments in the years that followed, argues Schoenfeld, and the law-and-order sense that releasing inmates was a non-starter, led to the latter strategy–which was not only technically compliant with the consent decree, but also true to its spirit: Judge Scott gave equal weight to both strategies. It was the historical aftermath, complete with the rise in racist animus, that led to the increase in incarceration.

At each junction of her narrative, Schoenfeld emphasizes that the disastrous outcomes of the implementation of Costello could have been avoided. But her accounts of the motives of individuals show an interesting mix of institutional agents along the political spectrum, most of whom genuinely wanted to fix what they perceived as substandard incarceration conditions. That the outcome became coopted as the raison d’être of a big construction project does not contradict the fact that, absent evidence to the contrary, people’s good intentions–both Simon’s and Wainwright’s–are taken at face value.

Schoenfeld’s answer to the question why incarceration spiked in Florida is therefore nuanced and complicated. Far from top-down villainy, it seems to be a combination of the federal court’s reluctance to lean on the state, and perhaps a lack of prescience about the possible implications of prison construction.

Both Forman and Schoenfeld’s accounts of mass incarceration are attentive to the structural constraints–as Schoenfeld calls them, racial projects–underlying assumptions about crime, criminality, and the need to protect the public. But neither of them goes as far as to deem the disastrous outcome foreseeable, planned, or self-serving. The characters they describe operate within these constraints, but they are not powerless pawns in the clutches of an oppressive machine: they wield power to do what they genuinely believe will make the situation better. This approach is far from naive: it is sensitive to the convergence of institutional interests and to the dilution and perversion of ideals. But it does not assume “intelligent design” in the carceral architecture.

This approach is very promising for various reasons. First, it is historically genuine. Delving into the micro-level of institutional and individual motivations does not superimpose our current ideas about governmentality or neoliberalism on the factual patterns. Analyses in the tradition of the “discipline and mystification” family of approaches can play out in ahistorical ways, ascribing bad intentions and villainy to people and ideas in ways that were far from obvious in their time. A good example is Hinton’s critique of Ohlin’s support for top-down reforms to address juvenile delinquency. Ohlin, a prominent criminologist, did a substantial amount of public service, as special consultant on delinquency to the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare under John F. Kennedy,  associate director of the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice under Lyndon B. Johnson, and a member of the National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice under Jimmy Carter. Today’s scholarship on racialized criminal control, infused by the deconstructionist approaches exemplified in Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s Condemnation of Blackness, question and critique the emergence of a link between race and criminality; but in a world in which Merton’s now-obvious arguments about inequality and criminality was still fresh, Cloward and Ohlin’s attribution of crime among low income people of color as a product of diminished opportunities was fresh and revolutionary. In other words, they made strides that today seem reactionary but at the time were perceived as progressive, rehabilitative, and far less oppressive than the alternative. Should they have built on community strengths, rather than espousing a top-down approach that looked at the pathologies of the black family as the causes of crime? In hindsight, sure. But in the 1960s, they did not have the benefit of Muhammad and Hinton’s scholarship. Hinton admits that their intentions were likely good, but her analysis for the most part criticizes them for being, essentially, men of their time. In other words, relying on a “good intentions-disastrous outcomes” as the default position fosters another virtue that we tend to fall short on in criminological research: a historically informed approach fosters some understanding, empathy, and forgiveness for reformers, who–like us–wanted to do what they thought as best.

Another advantage of pausing before attributing bad will is that the way we analyze history also shed light on how we should make sense of the present. Many readers of this blog post were (and perhaps still are) ardent supporters of the Ban the Box initiative, because we all want to bring about a reality in which people with criminal records are not excluded from employment and opportunity. Not only do we want to see better reentry and integration of returning citizens into society–especially given what we know of the immense hurdles to successful reentry–but we also harbor serious concerns that discrimination on the basis of criminal records disproportionately burden people of color, widening interracial gaps in employment. But much to our collective dismay, the successful campaign on behalf of Ban the Box has had mixed outcomes.

The policy has increased callback rates for people with criminal records and “effectively eliminated” the effect of having a criminal record on receiving a callback. Case studies from specific cities support these results, showing that hiring rates for people with criminal records increased after ban the box was implemented. Additionally, ban the box as a social movement has drawn attention to the plight of people with criminal records and has increased awareness of the challenges they face beyond employment.  But recent research has concluded that ban the box also reduces the likelihood that employers call back or hire young black and Latino men. These findings suggest that when information about a person’s criminal history is not present, employers may make hiring decisions based on their perception of the likelihood that the applicant has a criminal history. Racism, harmful stereotypes, and disparities in contact with the justice system may heavily skew perceptions against young men of color. In other words, rather than using people’s criminal records as a proxy for their race, in the post-Ban-the-Box world we use people’s race as a proxy for their possible criminal records.

An improvement in reentry odds, employment, and racial equality? Not really. But does this mean that those of us who supported Ban the Box and advocated for it was part of the overall design to continue to oppress marginalized populations? Despite the disastrous consequences of the policy, which we must strive to correct, the very fact that we managed to put together a coalition advocating for reentry and equal opportunity is important. It shows that it is possible to organize and advocate. The lessons from the story might be more complicated. Maybe we should conclude that we have to be more imaginative in our predictions of unintended consequences. Maybe we should be wary of falling in love with particular reforms, and maintain the flexibility required to “course correct” once it is evident that something we espoused does not work as well as we’d hoped. Or, more pessimistically, maybe the embedded racial animus in society means that racism always finds a gap through which to sneak in and sabotage people’s dreams of equality and opportunity, and we have to find ways to work against it while forgiving ourselves for not being perfect. In any case, the Ban the Box example, as well as the examples Forman and Schoenfeld discuss, remind us that some humility is in order whenever assessing failed criminal justice reforms.

Finally, assuming good will on the part of criminal justice reformers that we fear are taking us on the wrong track is more conducive to dialogue, and to the use of facts, than disengaging from opponents because we perceive them as ill-motivated, or as captives in systemic inequality. Of course, sometimes the lack of good will will be obvious, but when there is no evidence of sinister machination, we have nothing to lose from engaging with others–especially when dealing with people on the same side of the political map, who have a largely similar vision for a good society and might disagree only on the way to get there.

Book Review: 23/7 by Keramet Reiter

It’s somewhat encouraging to read Keramet Reiter’s book 23/7 in 2017, after two hunger strikes in solitary confinement and dramatic changes in solitary placement policies. Indeed, those of you who followed this blog in 2011 and 2013 remember that the list of demands made by the hunger strikers opened a window into one of our most shameful penal practices: indeterminate segregation, complete with physical and mental health neglects, social deprivations on an unimaginable scale, and a deeply problematic regime for leaving solitary (which Reiter referred to elsewhere as “parole, snitch, or die.”) A prisoner-led resistance organization, organized under impossible conditions, yielded a class action lawsuit that resulted in a settlement agreement that shifted the grounds for isolation from status and gang assumptions to behavior and created less harmful alternatives.

Reiter’s book, therefore, could evoke some sentiments of smugness among readers: yes, things were bad, but we overcame them and our segregation regime is much more humane than it was. But I think the book teaches us lessons whose relevance goes far beyond solitary confinement, and here is some elaboration on three of those.

First, the history of long-term solitary confinement is a classic example of penal expansion. A regime is created explicitly for “the worst of the worst,” envisioning vicious serial killers from movies, quietly creeps out and starts applying to people with far less exotic criminal histories and less evidence of immediate dangerousness. This is a trend we see elsewhere in the criminal justice system as well: with sex offenders, we’ve seen concerns about risk creep beyond the few people who were serial predators to infect the entire universe of people convicted of sex offenses. With violent offenders, we’ve seen all of them painted with the same brushstroke, and serious hesitation about reforming sentencing for violent offenses (as opposed to people doing time for nonviolent drug offenses.) An idea of who is the worst infects our mind, and gradually the policies we fashioned to handle the worst expand to affect others that do not resemble this ideal type.

Second, good intentions can yield horrible consequences. The book tells the story of Madrid v. Gomez, a lawsuit involving intolerable cruelty to a solitary inmate, and reflects the horror of Judge Thelton Henderson as he was exposed to conditions in the facility. “This cannot be constitutional,” he is remembered to have said, and he placed the prison under federal supervision (it remained so until 2011.) But by allowing the basic regime to continue, albeit under supervision, solitary itself became normalized, and the concern is that our desensitization to this regime allowed it to last for so long.

Third, it is not always clear how cruelty manifests itself. Is being safe, away from violent people, and without sharing a cell with companions one didn’t choose, the ultimate good? Or do we find out, after decades, that isolation generates irrevocable damage to one’s mental health? Recall that the early penitentiary reformers thought that solitude was good for the soul, to the point that advocates of Eastern State and of Albany battled about the best way to isolate people. Sometimes it takes years to realize just how horrible a regime is.

The book leaves open several important issues. First, by ending its account before the Ashker compromise, it avoided the classic “happy end”, and it would be good to see future editions with an additional chapter on the lawsuit and settlement. And second, since solitary cells cannot be easily converted to other confinement uses, what is to become of them now? And what might be the conditions we need to worry about, which may lead to a repopulation of these cells?

The book is highly recommended, written in beautiful and lively language, and tells the story of the inmates’ struggle for minimal conditions with engaging realism and empathy.

Book Review: Mona Lynch’s Hard Bargains

Jeff Sessions’ career as Attorney General started exactly with what you would expect from him: a revocation of the Obama Administration’s commitment to end reliance on private prisons for domestic inmates and the promise to ramp up marijuana enforcement. Both of these are examples of this government’s effort to find the most reasonable, fiscally responsible, and decent thing that should be done and then do the exact opposite.

We know that private prisons in the federal system are not big players in the overall incarceration picture. The Obama Administration’s declaration that they would cease to rely on them seemed more a symbolic move than something that would actually make a difference (not that they could intervene in state incarceration matters anyway.) Moreover, throughout that period, private facilities were still used (and are still used) for incarceration of immigrants before deportation, and there was never any talk of stopping that practice.

We also hear the federal government arguing for a dinosaur-era approach to marijuana, featuring a new lie: that marijuana usage is related to opioid overdosing, which is unsupported by research and harkens back to the dark days of the Anslinger war on drugs in the 1920s.

These developments make Mona Lynch‘s new book, Hard Bargains, remarkably timely. In the book, Lynch conducts a careful and perceptive ethnography of three federal district courts: one in the Northeast, one in the Southeast, and one in the Southwest. Lynch is well aware that federal prosecutions are not the driving force behind mass incarceration, but she uses federal drug enforcement as an interesting laboratory for the study of prosecutorial discretion.

Indeed, the main takeaway from the book is the unhealthy combination of two seemingly contradictory factors: the existence of tough sentencing laws, which presumably bind discretion (albeit less so since 2005), and the existence of broad prosecutorial discretion, which allows them full use of these draconian sentencing provisions. On the back cover, Kate Stith, whose excellent book with Jose Cabranes Fear of Judging was a well-informed and passionate cry against sentencing guidelines,  interprets Lynch’s analysis as pointing to lack of discretion. I think the lack of discretion is only half of the problem. With the advent of extreme sentencing laws, how they are deployed is up to individual prosecutorial ideology, and as an outcome, a different culture of federal sentencing develops in the three different districts.

Not that any of these is particularly appetizing. Lynch’s account of the Northeast depicts a court that is captive in the hands of a zealous prosecutor on a mission to “rescue” people from themselves and from the streets, who basically wrangles minor drug cases out of the states’ hands and pushes them into the federal system, sometimes in violation of the Petite policy of refraining from double prosecution. In his enthusiasm to end the drug epidemic, he imposes lengthy and unreasonable restrictions on their freedom, which the court almost invariably approves. In the Southeast, there isn’t even a pretense of rehabilitation: an elderly judge delivers moralizing lectures to defendants on the receiving end of obscene, decades-long sentences for nonviolent drug crimes. And in the Southwest, marijuana backpackers–poor, undocumented immigrants carrying marijuana by foot as payment to their coyotes–are rounded up, summarily shifted to “flip flop court” for misdemeanor charges, where they are made to plead guilty in batches and march off to detention before deportation.

It’s difficult to figure out which of the three models is the most horrible. The variations confirm, though, that when outrageous mandatory minimums, unreasonable calculations of criminal histories, and breathtaking arbitrariness in terms of offense categories, come together, the problem is not, or at least not exclusively, lack of discretion. The problem is that a dazzling array of options, including very frightening and oppressive ones, is on the table, and prosecutors get to pick and choose which of these to deploy.

The extent of prosecutorial power here cannot be underrated. The publication of Hard Bargains coincides with the publication of John Pfaff’s Locked In, which looks at the unfettered discretion and power of county prosecutors (and which I’ll review in a future post). Lynch and Pfaff’s analyses are complementary.

As in her previous book Sunbelt Justice, Lynch is not only a meticulous and perceptive observer but also a master storyteller. The defendants, prosecutors, and judges come to life in her vignettes from court cases she witnessed. Her description of the poor, disenfranchised immigrants forced to plead guilty in batches is particularly disheartening (my students were in tears when I read this section aloud in class yesterday.) Lynch has a keen psychologist’s eye for personalities and motivations, and she realistically captures the ideologies and worldviews that make her characters tick.

It is horrifying to think of how this system, already bloated, draconian, and rotten in the Obama years, could wreak more havoc and destruction in Trumpistan, and the news from the last two days suggest at least two directions in which things could get even worse: reintroducing the profit mechanisms that drove private incarceration by improving these companies’ relationship with the feds, and inflicting the awful drug sentencing scheme on marijuana defendants to an even greater extent (with the obvious potential victims being the people at the bottom of the Trumpistani social ladder: poor immigrants from Mexico.) I dread to think that the horrors and inhumanities described by Lynch could be something we might come to miss in the years to come.

Book Recommendation: Vegan Richa’s Indian Kitchen

Indian food! Delicious, complex, labor intensive… I adore it. Indian restaurants are among the few I still frequent, because it is difficult to replicate the textures and tastes at home. But Richa Hingle’s wonderful book and its companion website are true game changers.

With crystal-clear, detailed explanations, careful seasoning, and creative ingredient list, Vegan Richa’s Indian Kitchen is an invaluable contribution to our cookbook shelf. It occupies the necessary gap between vanity vegan books, which show pretty but unrealistic concoctions, and basic vegan books, with recipes I already know how to make.

Yesterday we made two of her recipes – palak paneer, which features homemade almond paneer in a rich spinach sauce, and malai kofta, in which the lovely dumpling balls are made of cabbage, cashew, and chickpea flour and cooked in savory tomato sauce. What an incredible meal! Making the paneer and the kofta is very labor intensive, but also intriguing, and the result is impeccable in taste and texture.

Geared toward folks who are not proficient in traditional Indian cooking, and yet not oversimplified, the book empowers us to venture beyond our comfort zone and dare to cook authentic meals with authentic spices. I highly recommend it!

Food Forests and Other Bright Futures for the Planet

A couple of weeks ago I finished reading Starhawk’s new book, City of Refuge. I was very much looking forward to it, being a long-time fan of Walking to Mercury and The Fifth Sacred Thing.  And it was an overall enjoyable experience: familiar characters experiencing new adventures. The two later novels in the chronology are set in the 2040s, after an ecological disaster affects California, splitting it into a Northern utopia-in-recovery and a Southern patriarchal theocracy. The novels interrogate the possibilities that these futures offer by incorporating many elements of present-life Bay Area delights and keeping the environmental stuff as real as possible: San Francisco (“Califia”) is a city of water, in which people shuttle around in gondolas on the river, a-la The Blue Greenway. 

But there is one aspect of the new book that made me cringe with discomfort. One of my favorite ecofeminist heroes and authors got it wrong–very wrong–with regard to food.

The citizens of Califia eat very well, and their concoctions, as well as Bay Area booze, are extensively described in the book, especially contrasted to the faux-nutrition “chips” and “sweeties” consumed by the Southerners. Indeed, echoing and crystallizing much of the recent scholarship on our consumption of faux foods, the Southerners have a hard time adjusting to the real food in the north. The book made me feel like Starhawk conjured her favorite meals from the present and planted them in a future in which people’s agricultural ingenuity strives the overcome the effects of an ecological horror. Much time is spent in the book on the ways in which my beloved heroes, Madrone and Bird, start their “city of refuge” in the South by starting agricultural production, and the (real) magic of compost is explored in depth.

But what is on the menu in Califia? Much to my surprise, quite a lot of meat, cheese, and eggs, sometimes (but not often) hailed as “humanely raised.” Our heroes are served beef and chicken and lamb, eat honey by the bushels, and enjoy dairy with quite some frequency. Oh, there are vegans, of course, but that’s briefly described as a “personal choice”, with an “option” to order a chickpea-quinoa stew at a restaurant, side by side with the default meat choices.

Not only is this a deeply upsetting culinary repertoire for a presumed utopia, but it’s also massively unrealistic, because one has got to ask oneself–where the heck do they even raise all these animals?

Surely, Starhawk must be aware of the massive contribution of animal pasture areas and feedlots to the deforestation and corruption of the earth. Surely she knows that every burger we eat is the equivalent of months of showering. Surely she’s heard of waste and manure lagoons covering vast areas and endangering our health. As an avid permaculturist, surely she knows that vegan options are possible, realistic, and cost-effective. In a future affected by climate change, veganism will not be a “personal choice”–it will be a fact of life for everyone.

And, where are all these mysterious cows, lambs, and chickens raised? Where do the chickens lay their eggs? Where are the utopian slaughterhouses? Or do we just not like to talk about the fact that meat comes from animals?

And that’s before we even discuss the cruelty involved in the gratuitous raising and killing of animals for our own consumption, which doesn’t even begin to be portrayed as being at odds with the deeply Pagan, one-with-nature vibe of Califia. People pray over their food and give thanks to the animals–to the Goddess, to spirit, to whatever–which may make them feel great and a part of the cycle of life, but all these spiritual feel-good florid incantations don’t actually affect the animal’s fate one bit. For more on the “but I express gratitude for my wild salmon” sensibility and its hypocrisy, read Sherry Colb’s excellent Mind If I Order the Cheeseburger?, focusing on the chapter on Native Americans.

Actually, without much effort one could envision a Northern Californian utopia just by looking at one marvelous permacultural initiative: the food forest. Here are several examples of food forests around the world, and for the Hebrew readers among you here’s a great story about the new one in Israel. The animals in food forests aren’t “raised”: they LIVE there. Birds nest in the trees, rodents run around collecting nuts, etc. To the extent that we benefit from their presence there, it’s as we would from any naturally-occurring phenomenon.

A world in which all the territories formerly devoted to animal farming are repurposed as food forests and homes for wild animals? Now THAT’s what I would consider a really inspiring utopia.

My New Cookbooks

To get excited about the transition to veganism, I lined up all my vegan cookbooks in a row. Lots of new ones, as well as some old favorites. Here are the ones I’ve been using recently:

Afro Vegan: Fabulous! Lots of work, but the authentic condiments and spices are exciting.
The Asian Vegan Kitchen: Ditto. Really great recipes, with no compromises as to the authentic ingredients and spices.
Pure Vegan: Fancy book with pretty pictures. Pretty unrealistic – lots of effort involved – but the things I’ve made from this, such as the pistachio cake, came out fantastic.
True Brews: terrific advice on kombucha brewing, which I follow to the letter and get fantastic results with every batch. I’ll post something about kombucha soon.
Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World: Funny and useful little book! The carrot cupcakes are fun.
The Vegan Slow Cooker: A bit of a disappointment: their recipes use canned beans, etc. I make my own stuff from scratch.

Which vegan cookbooks do you like?

Book Review: Mass Incarceration on Trial by Jonathan Simon

Hidden from sight and forgotten from mind, American prisons in the last forty years have been horrific Petri dishes for medical neglect, interpersonal cruelty, and unspeakable conditions. California, which incarcerates the largest number of inmates (albeit not the largest per-capita), has been particularly notable for its abysmal incarceration practices, so much that, when commenting about his first impression of supermax institutions, Judge Thelton Henderson said to criminologist Keramet Reiter, “what was surprising to me was the inhumanity of the thing.” Jonathan Simon’s new book offers the general public a sobering look into California prisons through the prism of federal court decisions, which encourages humanism and empathy and does not allow the reader to look away.

 The book tells the story of several federal court decisions that tackled, head-on, the crux between mass incarceration and prison conditions. It begins with Madrid v. Gomez (1995), which exposed the conditions at supermax institutions and critiqued their application to the mentally ill, and proceeds with Coleman v. Wilson (2009) and Plata v. Schwarzenegger (2009), which addressed, respectively, serious mental and physical health care neglects, culminating in the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Plata (2011), which affirmed the connection between the mass incarceration project and its outcome—extreme prison overcrowding—and the conditions behind bars. Simon’s account of the decisions, and the horrific abuse and dehumanization that brought them about, highlights two main themes. The first is the nature of American incarceration (and California incarceration in particular) as a veritable human rights crime of massive proportions, pulling it out of the American tendency to view things through an internal, exceptionalist lens. The second is the inherent connection between mass incarceration and prison conditions, which are frequently discussed separately in academia and public policy. To Simon, both are manifestations of an overall correctional mentality of “total incapacitation”: a systemic fear of crime and blanket assumption of dangerousness, coupled with insecurity about the ability to correctly gauge risk, which leads to indiscriminating incarceration of high-risk and low-risk individuals for lengthy periods of time without consideration of the conditions of their incarceration, or of the logistics necessary for their humane confinement. The court decisions reviewed in the book, argues Simon, signal a departure from this ideology, which he defines as a “dignity cascade”: a willingness to relate to the inmates as human beings who are entitled to more than “bare life”, but to personal safety, health, and human company.
Indeed, Simon’s book itself can be seen as an important contributor to a “dignity cascade”. Written in an engaging, accessible style, and providing the personal stories of plaintiffs in prison condition cases, Simon humanizes the individuals involves and evokes empathy and care for their preventable, horrible plight, while still making the bigger point that the violations are a systematic problem rather than isolated occurrences. While the book does not clarify the extent to which Simon attributes intent, or design, to the correctional officials, it certainly drives home the point that cruelty is the rule, rather than the exception, and the need to change that through a deeper commitment to treating humans with dignity and respect regardless of their transgressions.

There are a few places, however, in which Simon and I part ways. One of them is in his historical account of the path to total incapacitation, which paints the rehabilitative period in California corrections in what I think are overly rosy hues—especially when he ties the medical approach to incarceration to the eugenics movement. I also think that Simon gives the court decisions, which are undoubtedly important, too much significance in the overall scheme of California corrections. I wish I could be persuaded that these few decisions, the most recent of which and the focal point of the book was decided 5:4, were powerful enough to create a veritable “dignity cascade”. The book cites extensively dignity-promoting language from Justice Kennedy’s opinion in Plata, but does not include the parts in Justice Scalia’s dissent in which he referred to the inmates as “specimens”—a shameful opinion that I find hard to ignore with four Supreme Court Justices behind it. Even federal judges who are hailed as champions of inmate rights don’t always make decisions that promote dignity; in the fall of 2013, Judge Henderson (of Madrid v. Gomez fame) cleared the path to force-feeding inmates in solitary confinement who were protesting against indefinite segregation. Moreover, attributing the change in California—namely, the Criminal Justice Realignment—solely to the decision in Plata ignores the lengthy political machinations behind the Criminal Justice Realignment, which were driven by budgetary concerns and by other pressures as well as by the court’s decision. This is particularly problematic given the state’s acrobatic wiggling out of responsibility and its inability, and unwillingness, to follow up on the decision, almost to the point of contempt of court. While the language of the opinions themselves is important and meaningful, I wish we were offered more political and legal backstage access to the litigation, as well as more credit to the grassroots activism of inmates themselves, included but not limited to the hunger strike.
While I am less optimistic than Simon about a veritable transformation of public opinion about the mass incarceration project through federal court decisions, I find his call for dignity and for acknowledgment of the vast human rights violations incredibly inspiring, and like him, and anyone invested in the promotion of human dignity, I hope to see the spirit of John Howard’s progressive prison reform, and of the 1960s Warren Court decisions, channeled into this new era of prison litigation. After reading Mass Incarceration on Trial, no one can remain in a state of denial or indifference to the plight of fellow human beings, and this book is an important contribution not only to their dignity, but also to our own.

Book Review: Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

For ten years, between 1993 and 2003, Adrian LeBlanc followed the lives of four young people living in the Bronx, their trials and tribulations, their families, love affairs, and friendships, their struggles and moments of happiness and despair. Random Family is a remarkable work of nonfiction, of special interest to those who see prison as part and parcel of the American social fabric.

The book follows Jessica, a beautiful and charismatic young woman who becomes a love interest of “Boy” George Rivera, a successful heroin dealer, from her early teenage years, through her tumultuous relationship with George, through the fall of his heroin empire and the eventual incarceration of both of them. Jessica, who worked in George’s heroin mill, was sentenced to ten years in prison when George was sentenced to life without parole. A life of high excitement, sex, and three children, whom Jessica was too young and distracted to mother by herself, gave way to years of incarceration, away from her children and her familial support system. Jessica navigates the complex experience of out-of-state incarceration; becomes romantically involved with a guard, bears his children, and eventually sues the prison system for sexual abuse; and finally, in her early thirties, is released from prison and starts putting her life together and mending her relationship with her teenage daughter.

The other couple at the focus of the narrative are Cesar, Jessica’s young brother, and Coco, his girlfriend and mother of two of his children. Coco’s love for Cesar endures throughout his nine years in prison for offenses related to the death of a friend, and she struggles hard to maintain her optimism through several apartment moves, immense poverty, and the need to provide for five children from four largely-absent fathers. Cesar’s time in prison, including stints in solitary, efforts to improve his education and visits from family members and the four mothers of his children, sees him grow and develop wisdom and some understanding of the bigger set of circumstances faced by his family.

An array of mothers, absent fathers, aunties and uncles, friends of the family, and kin-of-choice surround the characters in their adventures and misventures. Thirtysomething year-old grandmothers Foxy (Coco’s mother) and Lourdes (Jessica and Cesar’s mothers) confront the choices made by their children replicating the choices they made, under similar circumstances. I found Milagros–a neighborhood friend who volunteers to raise a small army of children born by her friends, and whose possibly-queer sexuality is never explored in depth–particularly engaging and intriguing.

The narrative itself is as engrossing as a soap opera or a good thriller, but it is extremely valuable because of the overarching themes. The first one that struck me as immensely important is the ubiquity of sexual abuse in the lives of girls and young women. Virtually all protagonists of the book experienced sexual abuse, most of them as victims of family members and acquaintances parading through perennially unstable households. Men are held on to and fantasized upon, but cannot be fully trusted even when they are fathers, brothers and lovers. This shared experience makes the illusion of sexual freedom and agency that Jessica, Coco, and their family members seek problematic and somber.

A large number of children are born in the ten years spanned by the book, and virtually all women become mothers in their teenage years. Children are a source of pride and love, but also of anguish; their needs are impossible to address in overwhelming poverty, and they are consistently used–as symbols of love, as reminders of former love, as weapons to wield against sexual rivals, as instruments of hope for parents behind bars. The incarcerated parents–Serena, Stephanie and Brittany’s mother; Mercedes and Nautica’s father–leave gaping holes in their children’s hearts, and the letter exchanges and visits gain immense importance. The inability to count on any man–in prison or outside–for paternal stability saddles the mothers in the book with responsibilities that tax their young age and lack of experience. And the intricacies of love and family relationships are fascinating; nonmonogamies of various kinds are built and broken; protagonists alternate between tolerance, friendship, and hatred of their sexual and romantic rivals, acknowledging the fragility of the family unit; and the double standard, allowing for men’s multiple partnerships and families while begrudgingly accepting (and condemning) women’s, is present throughout the narrative.

The deep involvement in drugs, as users and sellers, permeates the lives of everyone in the book. They approach the world of narcotics as the only one available; in the words of David Simon in The House I Live In, it’s like working for the company in a company town. Incarceration is an inevitable way of life; many characters cycle in and out of prison, for crimes they committed and did not commit. They continue living, in their own experiences, and for their family outside; the weight of visits to distance prisons and expensive collect phone calls lies on the shoulders of twenty-year-old mothers and their multiple children. The struggles within prison are mirrored by the struggles of the family outside; economic difficulties, rivalries, the price of misplaced trust and generosity, all need to be handled in a reality that is oppressive outside as well as in.

We also see the protagonists constantly battling their crippling poverty and navigating the institutional world. Changes in welfare and educational policy (food stamps, HeadStart) transform the everyday lives of Coco and her family. New living situations, supervised and paternalized, require compliance to different forms of discipline. Every time a character seems to get ahead a bit, a new institutional issue pops up and needs to be urgently addressed.

One of the wonderful things about the book is that it doesn’t attempt to reduce the realities it describes to one of two frameworks: self-agency, which blames its subjects for their fate, or environmental factors, which absolve them of responsibility for their choices. LeBlanc herself, reflecting on her book ten years after its publication, speaks to some of this complexity in the context of female sexuality and its construction in the lives of her subjects:

From the distance of a decade, one thing that was operative—and it’s an ongoing interest—is the ways in which gender inequality, and the stigma of women’s sexual agency, narrows the road for female development. Teen-agers rightly fight the assumptions we place on them—many due to the fears in the adults around them, or the unlived lives of those adults, or the lies the culture tells. But, too often, consequences of attempts to explore freedom are attributed solely to sexual agency, or painted solely as victimization, and it’s much more complicated than that. Serena was keenly aware of how little all of it had to do with her, and that was something I felt was important to note.

This is something that is important to note not only with regard to the women’s sexual agency in the book. It’s true about criminal career paths, opportunities for financial development, and other issues. There are conscious choices being made by people who weigh the options in front of them to the best of their abilities. But the menu of choices is severely circumscribed by culture, class, locale, ethnicity, and gender.

This book, in its remarkable objectivity, in the narrator’s removal of herself from the narrative, in its perceptive insights into the lives of the people that inhabit its pages, is a must-read for anyone, regardless of political beliefs or interest in the prison system.