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.
The author argues that “the only way to prevent the senseless acts of cruelty” that result from the “grinding gears” of the “machinery of death” is to “retire the machinery altogether.”
The fact that readers have dismissed Jim as a fool or have misunderstood Mark Twain’s intent in Huckleberry Finn reflects on our limitations.
Initially, Antonio Muñoz Molina’s resonant novel seems to be the study of the moods and challenges of a man waiting for the only person who gives his life meaning.
Some of “The Prison Industry”‘s most devastating material appears in the section of the book exposing the lack of acceptable health care in jails and prisons.
For those with an appetite for lyrical absurdity, this dark and demanding journey into a bedeviled night will repay the effort.
In “Justice Abandoned”, Rachel Elise Barkow argues that much of the blame for the blight of American mass incarceration lies with the Supreme Court.
Among this novel’s merits is its powerful celebration of the will to live, dovetailed with an evocation of the love members of a family have for one another, even under the most brutal and apparently hopeless circumstances.
The publication of “There Is a Deep Brooding in Arkansas” is especially welcome and necessary at this time.
Brittany Friedman’s hope is that awareness of the racism she describes — in particular the abuse and corruption that she found in the prisons of California — will encourage readers to “take a critical view of society and examine the dark side of the state.”
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