river hallinan j t 2003 heading book record
Excerpt from Book Report:
For example , he notes the particular one out of 11 men can be estimated to endure the correctional system through his your life but the figures for non-whites are even bigger. Forty-nine percent of inmates are African-American and eighteen percent are Latino. What happens is that several of these black inmates are extracted from cities and locked in prisons integrated rural areas. Residents of these communities are white males and females who have limited, if any, experience of managing people of color and are also of working-class background. Some of them are teenagers right away of high school. Not surprisingly, this encounter typically leads to physical violence and ethnic tension. Hallinan writes that “it is hard to disregard that those receiving rich are often white and others in penitentiary are usually not” (p. xiii). In other words, the profitability of the prison-industrial complex is not only corrupting the system by turning inmates in assets, nevertheless also adding to the racial tension which still has not been erased from American society.
A few of his statements are controversial. He highlights the pestilent influence from the private penitentiary industry but that sector began in 1983 and the number of non-public prisons today is around a hundred and fifty. Most of the prisons are still federally funded though Hallinan remarks that the relatively small number of non-public prisons have developed a culture that has inspired other prisons – particularly, an emphasis “not about producing an improved inmate, person who will devote fewer criminal activity when introduced, but upon producing a less costly inmate” (p. 145). And given that the amount of private prisons is growing and the concept has been viewed as appropriate and powerful by ever before greater range of corrections officers, criminologists, politicians, and ordinary Americans, the influence is usually likely to expand.
Another controversial point Hallinan makes is definitely the idea that there is an identical logic behind military-industrial complex as well as the prison-industrial complicated. He argues that the U. S. government exaggerated the threat of Communism in the year 1950s to significantly increase the protection budget and similarly the correctional program in the 1980s and ’90s exaggerated the threat of crime to justify prison boom. You can a risk of downplaying the actual danger in such quarrels, as there were indeed Communism bloc armed with nuclear weaponry during 1955s and there was criminal bande increasing the amount of street shootings in eighties. Hallinan, however , has a stage because the criminal offenses rate will not justify the titanic jail boom that America features witnessed within the last thirty years. And there is a ground for backlinks prison-industrial sophisticated to the military-industrial complex. Consider, for instance, the $77. 5 million penitentiary in Wallens Ridge, Va, which is “identical to the complex sixteen-foot-high wall used by the Israeli authorities on the Golan Heights, according to the warden” (p. 204).
Growing the River’s only significant weakness is Hallinan’s overemphasis on the position of organizations as the driving force in back of prison growth. He will not, for example , talk about the fact that paroles have already been decreased or even eliminated in certain states, which might have accounted for the greater penitentiary population. This individual does not as well entertain the idea that tougher and longer sentences may be one of the reason why
