BuzzFlash Reviews

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS

If you want a scathing, impassioned indictment of the American prison industry, this is the book for you. Not a pleasant topic and one that has receded as a flashpoint of public policy due to the endless Bushevik wars, it is a national disgrace that we have turned incarceration into another business. This includes the growing trend toward privatizing prisons and implementing mandatory sentencing.

What's important to remember is that a high number of prisoners have become of economic importance to companies, government bureaucracies, and rural communities that depend on the jails for jobs.

In short, there is no incentive to decrease crime or look to alternatives to putting individuals in prisons where they become even more hardened criminals.

"American Furies" is infuriating to read, because it describes through a knowledgeable first person voice a journalist's voyage through the American penal system -- or should we say business.


From Publishers Weekly:

There's no doubt about where journalist Abramsky's fury is directed: at the contemporary U.S. penal system, which he criticizes for jettisoning any thoughts of rehabilitation in favor of increasingly harsh punishment, and which he sees as a reflection of America's violent culture. Few would find much to argue with as Abramsky depicts the recent growth of, and violence in, American prisons; he presents alarming statistics on the rise in government spending on punishment in the past 25 years, even as a "less government is more" ethos has ruled.

He's also highly critical of mandatory sentencing laws. As he and others have pointed out, law and order wins political races, and jails provide jobs in places where industry has dried up. Abramsky (Hard Time Blues: How Politics Built a Prison Nation) has long written about this issue, and the book displays a lot of on-the-ground reportage with prisoners, corrections officials and scholars. His suggestions for returning to rehabilitation could be more specific, but this remains a well-researched book on a significant American problem that's often locked away behind bars.


An online reviewer:

I was motivated to read this book after author Abramsky read a searing description of women on an Arizona chain gang. In some ways, I wish he hadn't. It's hard to forget the image: women chained together, forced to carry out body functions in humiliating circumstances, burying paupers while a clergyman blesses them for doing good work.

Abramsky presents images like these throughout the book, based on a series of visits to American prisons. In clear but understated prose, he describes the trends that led to our present condition: somewhere between 1% and 2% of Americans are behind bars. Many are juveniles who are housed in adult prisons. These prisoners are subject to many of the same abuse that led to convictions among 11 enlisted soldiers. I believe Charles Graner had worked in prisons before going on active duty.

On page 175, Abramsky writes, "Can a country's democratic institutions survive when the primary emotion underlying so much of its social policy, and determining the allocation of a sizable proportion of its annual revenues, is revenge?...We will in short become a community in name only, an increasingly atomized continent in which the primary role of government is to instill fear of the law rather than respect for its integrity."


Another online reviewer:

When the annals of our era are written, the United States will... come to be defined as a prison state." Not to spoil the ending, but this is the last, haunting sentence of American Furies, Sasha Abramsky's scathing indictment of the U.S. prison system. If you still believe that America is a just democracy where everyone is treated equal, then you really have to read this book. I found myself laughing aloud in sour irony recently as President Bush commuted Scooter Libby's prison term because he felt that the thirty month sentence was "excessive." Tell that to Dan Johnson, an inmate that Abramsky profiles who is currently serving a twenty-eight years to life sentence for possession of a small amount of cocaine, his "third strike" drug offense in California.

I worked in womens' prisons and juvenile corrections institutions for six years and still found my jaw dropping at the absurdities and horrors described in this nightmare of a book. Whether describing female chain gangs in Arizona, the capitalistic rise of private prisons or the inhuman and torturous conditions in maximum security units, Abramsky conjures the human stories behind the headlines. He contextualizes the present prison crisis by outlining the history of incarceration in the U.S., beginning with the 18th century's silent prisons, through the rehabilitation movements of the 1960s and '70s and then the tough-on-crime backlash of the 1980s through today.

His statistics are damning: In some communities, more young men go to prison than go to college; the U.S. spends more money on criminal justice than on higher education; the U.S. incarcerates more people than any other industrialized nation; and on and on. He parallels political movements and social trends with the rise of the pro-prison "business," and tracks the "victim's rights" campaigns and their harsh effects on sentencing. Though a comprehensive whirlwind of stories, statistics and interviews, at under 200 pages, I felt that he left out some crucial feminist issues, such as the rise in female inmates, particularly girls, and the effects of parents' incarceration on children.

But don't dismiss this book as just another scathing rant about how screwed up the system is. Abramsky knows how to write a story and his imagery, intellect, passion and anger bleed through each chapter. I kept naively waiting, though, for that magic finale where he offers hope and solutions for our nation's violently oppressive present situation. Though it's no happy-ending fairy tale, American Furies serves as a fierce warning of the self-perpetuating cycle of violence we ascribe to if we continue to let prisons replace schools as the incubators for our future.


BUZZFLASH REVIEWS