Synopses & Reviews
In this dramatic expose of U.S. penitentiaries and the communities around them, Sasha Abramsky finds that prisons have dumped their age-old goal of rehabilitation, often for political reasons. The new ideal, unknown to most Americans, is a punitive mandate marked by a drive toward vengeance.
Surveying this state of affairs-- life sentences for nonviolent crimes, appalling conditions, the growth of private prisons, the treatment of juveniles-- Abramsky asks: Does the vengeful impulse ennoble our culture or demean it? What can become of people who are quarantined for years in a violent subculture? California' s Three Strikes law typifies the politics that exploit the grief of victims' families and our fears of violent crime. Brilliantly researched and compellingly told, American Furies shows that the ethos of lock ' em up and throw away the key has enormous social costs.
The most urgent book of the season. Sasha Abramsky provides us with an
invaluable, if harrowing, audit of the cataclysmic damage inflicted upon
American values by American prisons. The lack of compassion in our
national life and the gangrened hearts of our politicians pose greater
threats to our childrens' futures than any overseas terrorist conspiracy.
-- Mike Davis, professor of history at University of California-Irvine
and author of seven books including Planet of Slums and The Monster At Our Door
A smart, compassionate and tough-minded look at the rise and impact of the tough-on-crime culture that has made America the world's foremost jailer. By showing us how we got into this mess, this revelatory bookalso holds out hope that we might find our way out.
-- Nell Bernstein, former Soros Justice Media Fellow and author of All Alone in the World: Children of the Incarcerated
This is by far the most intelligent and haunting indictment of the American prison system that I have ever read. Sasha Abramsky has shone an incandescent lamp on a shadowy underground universe that holds and in all too many cases brutalizes the lives of more than two million Americans. He should be commended for doing so, and his book made required reading for every legislator in the land, bar none.
-- Simon Winchester, author of A Crack in the Edge of the World and The Professor and the Madman
Praise for Conned:
Timely and important. Instead of preaching democracy to the world, the United States should start practicing it at home. -- Eric Schlosser
The war on drugs, the disenfranchisement of convicted felons, a series of dodgy electoral Republican victories . . . someone had to connect the dots, and Sasha Abramsky has done so with passion, precision, and artistry.
-- Barbara Ehrenreich
Sasha Abramsky has written for The Atlantic, The Nation, and Rolling Stone. The author of Conned: How Millions Went to Prison, Lost the Vote, and Helped Send George W. Bush to the White House and Hard Time Blues: How Politics Built a Prison Nation, he has also reported on U.S. prisons for Human Rights Watch. He lives in Sacramento, California.