In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Annihilating Public Policies of the Prison-Industrial Complex; or, Crime, Violence, and Punishment in an Age of Neoliberalism
  • Stephen John Hartnett (bio)
Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture. By Angela Davis (interviews with Eduardo Mendieta). New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005; pp. 134. $12.95.
Criminalizing the Classroom: The Over-Policing of New York City Schools. By The New York Civil Liberties Union. New York: NYCLU, 2007; pp. 37 + five images. Access at www.nyclu.org.
Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. By Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007; pp. xxii + 388. $21.95.
Liberty’s Captives: Narratives of Confinement in the Print Culture of the Early Republic. Edited by Daniel Williams. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006; pp. 322 + 28 images. $24.95.
Live from Death Row. By Mumia Abu-Jamal. New York: Perennial, 2002 rpt; pp. xxxiv + 188. $12.50.
Punishing Schools: Fear and Citizenship in American Public Education. By William Lyons and Julie Drew. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006; pp. 255. $24.95.
Right to Be Hostile: Schools, Prisons, and The Making of Public Enemies. By Erica Meiners. New York: Routledge, 2007; pp. 214. $32.95.
White Victims, Black Villains: Gender, Race, and Crime News in U.S. Culture. By Carol Stabile. New York: Routledge, 2006; pp. 235 + 10 images. $30.95. [End Page 491]

Stacked atop one another in a grim pile, juxtaposed clues to a catastrophe, two recent New York Times articles illustrate some of America’s obsessions and blind spots regarding crime, violence, and punishment. The top story tells the tale of Gilberta Estrada, a 25-year-old Mexican immigrant who hanged herself and her four children. Recently separated from her long-time partner, working the morning shift at a Wendy’s, living in a trailer park outside Dallas, and raising four children by herself, Estrada’s days were difficult; she was described in the Times as “struggling with depression.” Something snapped one night, and Estrada took her eight-month-old baby and her two-, three-, and five-year-old daughters and strung them and herself up by their necks in a closet. The infant survived, but Estrada and her three older daughters died, leaving Sheriff Larry Fowler stunned. “It’s horrendous,” he said, casting the event in the genre of the gothic, wherein human actions are inexplicable, monstrous, bizarre, and macabre.1

From one perspective, Fowler is right, for this group-murder and suicide is “horrendous” and beyond explanation. Estrada’s actions are the stuff of dark and mysterious forces, gesturing toward the worst capacities of humans to inflict violence upon themselves and others. From another perspective, however, Fowler is wrong, for the circumstances leading to Estrada’s violence are too typical to be called horrendous. Consider the alignment of Estrada’s all-too-familiar tribulations. She was trying to hold together a broken family, escape a life of poverty, survive a dead-end job, raise four children in a state with infamously bad family support services, prosper in a state rife with racism, and live with a debilitating yet untreated health condition. No partner, no money, no prospects, no support, no justice, no health care. We cannot reduce these circumstances to some crude formula that produces violence, for of course most poor and even desperate people do not commit crimes, let alone hang themselves and their children. But we also cannot settle for the slack-jawed quip that Estrada’s actions are “horrendous,” for they are more than that. They are indicative of the near-total breakdown of what Americans once called community. They illustrate the consequences of two decades of annihilating public policy, and they demonstrate how the vicious intersection of neoliberal economics, racism, gender inequity, and just plain bad luck leaves millions of our neighbors in grueling positions, struggling on the fringes of a society that only notices them when they either commit a crime or fight for the kinds of political rights and human services that most of us take for granted.

Indeed, the second New York Times article chronicles the aftermath of the 2007 May Day riot in Los Angeles, where between 500 and 600 police officers...

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