PositiveThe New York Journal of BooksYou can feel the authors’ outrage inked into every page. Yet Prison by Any Other Name might have been more effective if it were written with a measure of dispassion, and an eye toward enlightening the skeptical. It feels instead like a text for the converted ... The most revelatory moment comes when Schenwar and Law point out that our so-called alternatives to incarceration reflect a paucity of imagination. What else besides a police state could our society be? ... This is an abolitionist text, thus the authors’ aim is not to answer that question with any new form of social control. Instead, Prison By Any Other Name shows that much of what’s called crime is nothing of the sort, and makes a case for how investing in the resources people crave—quality housing, education, and jobs, as well as healthful foods, sports, and the arts—will go a long way toward reducing misbehavior, which is so often born of poverty.
Steven Brill
MixedNY Journal of BooksHere you’ll find explanations for, among other things, how elected officials came to spend 20 or more hours a week calling rich people for money; why it’s now mandatory for workers and customers to sign away their rights to corporations by agreeing to non negotiable \'terms and conditions;\' why pretty much no financier was punished for the global financial crisis; and why our most basic infrastructure is in such abysmal shape that crossing a bridge is a click of Russian roulette ... A key moment of the book comes when Brill asserts that \'Americans need to get better at democracy\'...by way of encouragement Brill offers the Arab Spring as an example of modern revolution...it’s clear that Brill aimed to strike a hopeful tone wherever possible, and in some places that feels hollow...yet perhaps there is cause for optimism. On the day that I finished reading Tailspin, teachers in North Carolina were striking for better funding for their schools and fair pay for themselves, and a dynamite activist called me up to say she’s running for state senate. As Brill makes clear, America has been on a 50-year tailspin—but maybe there’s an upswing ahead.
