Addicted to Incarceration
Corrections Policy and the Politics of Misinformation in the United States
- Travis C. Pratt - University of Cincinnati Corrections Institute, USA
The Second Edition demonstrates that the United States' addiction to incarceration has been fueled by American citizens' opinions about crime and punishment, the use of incarceration as a means of social control, and perhaps most important, by policies legitimized by faulty information. Analyzing crime policies as they relate to crime rates and society's ability to both lower the crime rate and address the role of incarceration in preventing future crime, this book shows students how ineffective the rush to incarcerate has been in the past and offers recommendations and insights to navigate this significant problem going forward.
“Few texts are willing to interrogate the phenomena of mass incarceration on such a personal scale.”
“This text is an excellent resource to any instructor that wants to engage the curiosity of their students on core correctional topics, while simultaneously not bogging them down with too much information. In particular, this text does a great job at providing the appropriate amount of information that will serve as a catalyst for engaging class discussions on key correctional topics that have and continue to face the United States. There is an appropriate balance of factual evidence with narrative.”
“The book develops an argument about society’s tendency to feed on mass incarceration.”
“It is a brief text, but provides good information for students and provides nice themes for debate. More books should be like this.”
“I strongly believe that this textbook represents an important and much needed critical discourse on the corrections system. This book is an intellectual and scholarly achievement for advancing the knowledge of both undergraduate and graduate students studying correctional theory, policy, and the legal processes reinforcing the corrections system. This is a user-friendly text that invites the reader to critically examine the controversial and often unmentioned aspects of correctional policy through an active review of the research and scholarly literature.”
“A great undergraduate criminal justice text that sheds light on the overuse of incarceration as a form of punishment in the United States, strongly supported by empirical evidence.”
“The text succinctly explains to readers how the United States has become the world’s leader in incarcerating its own people (particularly poor people and people of color) and the grave costs that doing this has and will continue to have on communities throughout this country. Far from being irreversible, the text details what needs to change and sketches out what progressive policymakers, scholars, and concerned people can do about it.”
