By Bill Littlefield

In Their Names argues that the best way to help victims of crime is to create circumstances that will diminish the chance that they will become victims again.

In Their Names: The Untold Story of Victims’ Rights, Mass Incarceration, and the Future of Public Safety by Lenore Anderson. The New Press, 339 pages, paper, $19.99

It’s natural to assume the best about efforts to secure for victims of crime reasonable compensation and an opportunity to heal. Who wouldn’t be for that?

But in her clear and convincing examination of most of these efforts, Lenore Anderson demonstrates that they have not only failed the victims, they have made more crime more likely. Far too often, campaigns initially designed to assist victims with money, counseling, and various other kinds of aid have been hijacked by politicians running on tough-on-crime platforms. Good intentions have been bent into efforts to build more prisons, provide police departments and border agents with more weapons, decrease privileges for incarcerated men and women, increase the length of sentences, decrease the flexibility of judges when they consider options, and further burden men and women on probation and parole. None of these developments do much to address victims’ needs and, by decreasing the likelihood that those who committed the crimes will experience rehabilitation, they create the potential for more crime.

Anderson, founder and president of the Alliance for Safety and Justice, presents her case for reform via compelling stories. She demonstrates that the line between victim and victimizer is often impossible to draw. She cites research showing that men and women convicted of most crimes have been victims themselves. She puts serious meat on the bones of the cliché: “Hurt people hurt people.” One especially compelling example involves a young man named Aswad, who was shot when he entered a convenience store while a robbery was in progress. Late in Aswad’s long recovery from the wound that dramatically changed his life, the surgeon treating him mentions another man he’d treated for a gunshot wound. The man had lost an eye. Aswad recalls that the man who shot him had a patch over one eye and eventually finds out that, yes, the man who shot him had been a victim himself. After learning this, Aswad became determined to help others who might fall into the same terrible cycle of violence.

Anderson’s more general point is that the best way to help victims is create circumstances that will diminish the chance that they will become victims again. Instead of longer sentences, more prisons, and harsher penalties, she proposes that society focus on rehabilitation and restorative justice, concentrating on providing safe, nurturing places and opportunities for young men and women who are living in circumstances where crime seems to them the only viable choice.

Lenore Anderson — her voice and research have never been more crucial. Praise Santos McKenna/The New Press

Much of In Their Names is devoted to the history of the way the justice system in this country has dealt with crime and punishment. Anderson points out that a system built by and for white men who owned property failed for many years to acknowledge that a woman, a person without means, or somebody who wasn’t white, had any claim to the designation of “victim.” According to the law, enslaved people were property. That designation deprived them of even the most fundamental rights to escape harm. Women were dependent on men to the extent that “the system” often refused to see that the physical abuse of women was criminal, especially if the victim was the wife of the abuser.

When they were the victims of crime, the poor were often blamed for the circumstances that made the crimes likely, if not inevitable. In each case “fighting back,” whether physically or in whatever insufficient ways the law provided, was generally not only pointless but exhausting. It frequently led to punishment and suffering beyond what the victims had already endured. Even in some recent cases, victims have been incarcerated if they were reluctant to cooperate with the police because they feared for their safety. The aim of the system has been achieving convictions rather than achieving justice or comforting victims.

The pendulum has always swung between policies that emphasize punishment and retribution and those that are more nuanced. But some of the most obviously counterproductive methods of addressing crime and ensuring victims of their rights have become crystal clear over the past several decades. Anderson points out that during the Clinton years and beyond, politicians who would no doubt characterize themselves as relatively progressive cynically embraced the notion of the “super predator” as an authentic danger. They demanded “solutions,” such as life sentences for people convicted three times, never mind that one or more of the crimes might have been stealing food or, in one especially sad case, diapers. Anderson points out the obvious: a healthy, compassionate, rational society would address the causes and circumstances that have led to widespread poverty, blatant and corrosive racism, and the ongoing victimization of various people because of their color. She refers to “a hierarchy of harm” to describe the ways in which the justice system, at all levels, discriminates against the disadvantaged. Her book suggests rational, sometimes modest ways in which these circumstances could be addressed and remedied — if the will to do it were there.

In Their Names was initially published in 2022. This paperback edition could not be more timely or more necessary. Donald Trump’s career has been supercharged by his ritual demonizing of people of color, people from other countries, people without means, and women. It should surprise no one that his administration has caged immigrants without affording them due process, deported brown and Black people despite the objections of various courts, relied on thuggish masked agents to carry out mass arrests, and endorsed other violent, lawless practices that threaten public safety. Anderson’s voice and her well-established research have never been more crucial.

Bill Littlefield volunteers with the Emerson Prison Initiative. His most recent novel is Mercy (Black Rose Writing).