Synopses & Reviews
Review
"The neoconservative response to rising crime rates has been to build more prisons and to impose harsher criminal sentences.
But, as the author notes, incarceration is expensive, both in economic and in human terms, and the prison building of the 1970"s has done little to quell crime. Currie calls for a new approach to the problem, one that stresses full employment, family stability, and community solidarity. Well and good, one might say, but isn't this what the War on Poverty of the 60"s was about? And wasn't that effort largely a failure? The author, a neoliberal, thinks not, chiefly because early efforts at eliminating economic inequality and racism—two conditions that he contends foster crime—were half-hearted. He calls for a massive infusion of goverment aid to attack these conditions. The obvious drawback to Currie's proposal is that it would be very expensive, but then so is the yearly cost of keeping a person behind bars, now conservatively estimated to be $15,000 to $20,000." Reviewed by Daniel Weiss, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)