I haven't read Sasha Abramsky's American Furies: Crime, Punishment, and Vengeance in the Age of Mass Imprisonment, but it's next on my list. This country's culture of imprisonment is a critical, and usually under-noticed, contributor to crime, inequality, poverty, the breakdown of the nuclear family in urban areas, depressed earnings among black men, intergenerational transmission of economic status, etc, etc, etc. It's hard to find good reporting and analysis on these issues, as the imprisoned are, by definition, out of sight, and deeply unsympathetic, so their lives and outcomes take on less urgency. But Silja Talvi's review suggests Abramsky's book is more than up the challenge.
Good as Abramsky's book may be on the informational issues, the "what can be done" part of this is tough, as rehabilitative, humane prison reforms are considered politically suicidal. But though I agree with that conventional wisdom, Rhode Island has restored the vote to felons, and in a more amazing shift, Florida's Republican governor did the same thing, so maybe the politics of the issue are changing.
