Description
The U.S. incarcerates more people than any other industrial democracy in the world. We have more ex-prisoners than the entire population of Ireland, and more people with a felony record than the populations of Denmark, Norway, New Zealand and Liberia combined. Why did the United States become the world's biggest jailer? And, just as importantly, what has it done to us? What are the costs--socially, economically, and politically--of having the world's largest population of ex-prisoners? And what can we do about it?
In this landmark book, Kevin B. Smith explains that the United States became the world's biggest jailer because politicians wanted to do something about a very real problem with violent crime. That effort was accelerated by a variety of partisan and socio-demographic trends that started to significantly reshape the political environment in the 1980s and 1990s. The force of those trends varied from state to state, but ultimately led to not just historically unprecedented levels of incarceration, but equally unprecedented numbers of ex-prisoners. Serving time behind bars is now a normalized social experience--it affects a majority of Americans directly or indirectly. There is a clear price, the jailer's reckoning, to be paid for this. As Smith shows, it is a society with declining levels of civic cohesion, reduced economic prospects, and less political engagement. Mass incarceration turns out to be something of a hidden bomb, a social explosion that inflicts enormous civic collateral damage on the entire country, and we must all do something about it.
Product Details
| Publisher | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers |
| Publish Date | November 05, 2024 |
| Pages | 192 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Hardback |
| EAN/UPC | 9781538192382 |
| Dimensions | 8.7 X 5.7 X 1.0 inches | 0.9 pounds |
About the Author
Reviews
How the hell did we get here? Americans under 50 could be forgiven for accepting mass incarceration as an inescapable fact of American life, seeing as it is all they have ever known, but they could not be more wrong. With the flair of a storyteller and the brain of social scientist, Kevin B. Smith exposes the rise of mass incarceration as an unprecedented and surely unsustainable historical aberration. Only by understanding this history can we reimagine a different future.--Shadd Maruna, Chair of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology, University of Liverpool; author of Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives
Kevin B. Smith#39;s A Jailer#39;s Reckoning should be inserted into the canon of carceral studies immediately! It is a deeply scholarly yet compellingly readable analysis of the #39;world#39;s greatest jailer#39; written with journalistic, sociological, statistical, and persuasive rigor. Using theorists and thinkers ranging from Charles Dickens and Emile Durkheim to Marie Gottschalk and Patrick Sharkey, Smith makes a compelling case that #39;mass incarceration is feeding social dislocation and disassociation on a huge scale, and itrsquo;s costing individual states billions in lost economic output...the stakesmdash;for all of usmdash;are huge.#39; This is necessary reading for anyone interested in the history, disparities, socioeconomic cost, and human effects of American prisons.--Dr. Ravi Shankar, Pushcart-prize winning author of Correctional
Kevin Smith deftly navigates numerous explanations for incarceration, avoiding heavy jargon to appeal to a broad audience. He employs robust empirical methods and evidence to make complex concepts accessible and engaging. It is rare to find such academic rigor fused with engaging and even entertaining prose. It is a must-read.--Daniel Hawes, Kent State University
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