PositiveThe New York Review of BooksFor those of us who decry today’s internationally unparalleled carceral crisis and wonder how we ended up here, Stern’s beautifully written account of the American Plan and the life of Nina McCall offers some needed but uncomfortable answers ... Stern is entirely right to concentrate on the underappreciated damage that the plan did to poor women across the country. The program, he shows, was never really about venereal disease—it was an effort to clean up the streets and police the behavior of women ... Stern’s book is not merely the story of one women’s fight against injustice. His research exposes both the insidious ways in which calls for \'public safety\' soon come to justify the curtailment of rights, and the extent to which today’s most destructive carceral apparatus has its basis in fear on the part of the powerful ... Perhaps Stern’s most important point is that the American Plan matters because it \'is not ancient history. [It] helped create the infrastructure and rationale for an explosion of the female prison population that continues to this day.\'
