Decarcerating America: From Mass Punishment to Public Health

by Ernest Drucker (Editor)

Overview

“A powerful call for reform.”
—NPR

An all-star team of criminal justice experts present timely, innovative, and humane ways to end mass incarceration

Mass incarceration will end—there is an emerging consensus that we’ve been locking up too many people for too long. But with more than 2.2 million Americans behind bars right now, how do we go about bringing people home? Decarcerating America collects some of the leading thinkers in the criminal justice reform movement to strategize about how to cure America of its epidemic of mass punishment.

With sections on front-end approaches, as well as improving prison conditions and re-entry, the book includes pieces by leaders across the criminal justice reform movement: Danielle Sered of Common Justice describes successful programs for youth with violent offenses; Robin Steinberg of the Bronx Defenders argues for more resources for defense attorneys to diminish plea bargains; Kathy Boudin suggests changes to the parole model; Jeannie Little offers an alternative for mental health and drug addiction issues; and Eric Lotke offers models of new industries to replace the prison economy. Editor Ernest Drucker applies the tools of epidemiology to help us cure what he calls "a plague of prisons."

Decarcerating America will be an indispensable roadmap as the movement to challenge incarceration in America gains critical mass—it shows us how to get people out of prisons, and the more appropriate responses to crime. The ideas presented in this volume are what we are fighting for when we fight against the New Jim Crow.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781620972786
Publisher:	New Press, The
Publication date:	02/20/2018
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Ernest Drucker is professor of Global Public Health at New York University's College of Global Public Health; adjunct professor of epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University; professor emeritus in the department of family and social medicine at Montefiore Medical Center, Albert Einstein College of Medicine; and visiting scholar at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. He is the author of A Plague of Prisons: The Epidemiology of Mass Incarceration in America and editor of Decarcerating America: From Mass Punishment to Public Health (both published by The New Press). Drucker is a founder of the International Harm Reduction Association, founding editor of Harm Reduction Journal, former chairman of Doctors of the World/USA, and a Soros Justice Fellow of the Open Society Foundation. He lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

Contributors:
Natasha Frost and Todd Clear: Community Safety
Michael Romano: Lessons from California
Gabriel Sayegh: Future of Drug Policy
Daniele Sered: Youth with Violent Offenses
Justice Robert Sweet: Role of Judges
Ellen Lagemann: Higher Education in Prison
Homer Venters and Ross MacDonald: Correctional Health Services
Robin Steinberg: Public Defense
Elizabeth Gaynes and Tanya Krupat: Parental Incarceration
Mika Dashman: Restorative Justice
Daliah Heller: Healthcare Reform for Decarceration
Eric Lotke: New Economies for Prison Towns
Deborah Small: Healing
Jeannie Little: Harm Reduction in Drug Policy

Editorial Reviews

2018-01-08
An urgent anthology suggesting progressive approaches to ending the era of overimprisonment."Mass incarceration is destroying hundreds of communities and millions of families across America," writes editor Drucker (Global Public Health/New York Univ.; A Plague of Prisons: The Epidemiology of Mass Incarceration in America, 2011, etc.), who views this tangled situation as a matter of public health. That discipline, he writes, "has a well-developed model of prevention that breaks interventions into primary, secondary, and tertiary stages….I have drawn on these concepts and organized the book in three parts that mirror these three categories." Essays in the first section thus focus on reducing the number of people entering prisons and jails, the "front door" approach. The contributors discuss the counterintuitive narratives of New York City and California. Previously focused on tough-on-crime approaches, their "unprecedented reduction in reliance on incarceration has been a bottom-up, advocacy-driven, community-focused strategy." Other perspectives come from public defenders, who testify to the corrosive nature of the process by observing, "an arrest is never just an arrest," and a judge who ponders how he "can and should act to minimize the blight of mass incarceration." The discussions of secondary-level interventions focus on improving prison conditions, examining the complex issue of children of imprisoned parents, and looking at controversial reconsiderations of responses to violence. Finally, the tertiary discussion focuses on facilitating harm reduction as former prisoners re-enter their communities, in terms of reconciliation with survivors of violence, preventing recidivism and drug relapses, and even refashioning the economies of "prison towns." The strengths of the anthology are the evidence-based clarity of each chapter's discussion and their thoroughness in examining distinct aspects of mass incarceration. Still, as Drucker and some contributors acknowledge, their initiatives are unlikely to move forward beyond the local level during the Trump presidency and its call for "long mandatory sentences and a resumption of the failed war on drugs."A unified and hopeful collection that should interest attorneys, activists, and open-minded law enforcement professionals.

Kirkus Reviews