Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)The book is terrific! It is a must read for anyone who has an interest in the criminal justice system. The book is more than just an expose on what is wrong with this country's prisons. What makes this book special is the stories of individuals who have been unnecessarily abused while in prison or jail, sometimes resulting in death.
No one will be able to finish this book without being moved. The tales of the mentally ill (does everyone know that the 3 largest facilities for the mentally ill in this country are jails?) are particularly engaging.
In fact, I suspect Mr. Elsner has made himself some enemies. There are probably prison wardens and prison guard unions across the nation who will not be inviting him to dinner any time soon.
The book makes 2 compelling points: first, the problems in the prisons cannot be isolated to the prisons and
second, the solutions do not require additional spending but rather some long range thinking.
As a prosecutor in LA for the past 19 years, I don't agree with every point that the author makes and I don't consider myself soft on crime. Nonetheless, I will take the book to work and encourage all my colleagues to read it. The book is an important reminder of the negative consequences of a "lock em up and throw away the key" attitude. The author obviously did his homework. One can only hope that lawmakers read the book and make an effort to give the system more balance. Most prisoner will get out. Treating prisoners' illnesses and giving them a minimal amount of education and/or job training makes us all safer.
(Disclosure: I was interviewed for the book, as were several of my colleagues.)
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Gates of Injustice is an extraordinarily compelling expose of the American prison system now completely updated in this new paperback editon: how more than 2,000,000 Americans came to be incarcerated; what it's really like on the inside; what it's like for the families left on the outside; and how an enormous "prison-industrial complex" has grown to support and promote imprisonment in place of virtually every other alternative. Reuters journalist Alan Elsner shows how prisons really work, how race-based gangs are able to control institutions and prey on weaker inmates, and how an epidemic of abuse and brutality has exploded across American prisons. Readers will discover the plight of 300,000 mentally ill people in prisons, virtually abandoned with little medical treatment. They'll also meet the fastest growing segment of the prison population: women. Readers go inside "supermax" prisons that cut inmates off from all human contact, and uncover the official corruption and brutality that riddles jail systems in major cities like Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, and New York. Finally, they'll learn prisons accelerate the spread of infectious diseases throughout the broader society--just one of the many ways the prison epidemic touches everyone, even if they've never met anyone who's gone to jail.
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