What Can Replace Prison?

If you have the capacity to read one book on prisons this month, which should you choose?

For many people I would say without hesitation: Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press, 2012). It is a stunning book. Or it was for me. Call me naïve, but it had never occurred to me that the cancerous growth of the prison system since the 1970s might have been a response to the success of the Civil Rights movement in the ’60s.

I knew many pieces of Alexander’s thesis — the way Republicans since Nixon have won elections with covert appeals to racism (the infamous “Southern strategy”), or the way the “war on drugs” set penalties for drugs used by blacks as much as a hundredfold higher than for those used by whites. But I hadn’t seen the picture the way Alexander — reluctantly, one should point out, as she is no conspiracy theorist — came to see it. It’s not just that I have been as clueless as most white people on the topic of race in America (though I have). Alexander, an African American lawyer, argues that the entire African American civil rights establishment for decades misunderstood the centrality of incarceration in the counterattack of white supremacists on their movement. Her book has changed that. It’s a must-read.

A few weeks back I heard another opinion about The New Jim Crow. I had recommended it to a bright young man who was recently out of prison. He has transformed his life and is eager to help others. He is hungry for books on prisons, how to stay out of them, how to recover from trauma, and how to build a radically different justice system. He found The New Jim Crow interesting but depressing, even hopeless. As he told me this, his face lost its usual shine.

I get it. The other “best book” in my prison library — Angela Davis’s cogently argued call for prison abolition, Are Prisons Obsolete? (Seven Stories Press, 2003) — could be received the same way. So can most radical analyses of America, capitalism, global warming, etc. Radical movement-building in America is not languishing for lack of analysis, nor even for lack of revulsion in millions of people at the failings of the present system. It’s quiescent for lack of vision, hope, and belief in plausible transfor mation. And for lack of inspiring stories.

Stories of Hope

Fortunately, two new books in the prison-abolition genre do include sections on hopeful alternatives. If that’s what you crave, one of these may be the best to start with.

In Burning Down the House: The End of Juvenile Prison, Nell Bernstein convincingly demolishes the notion that the U.S. juvenile detention system either improves public safety or rehabilitates youth. Then she asks, what does transform the lives of violent, reactive youngsters? Her answer is deep and undeniable: rehabilitation happens in the context of relationship.

Bernstein argues strongly against “therapeutic prison,” asserting that compulsory trauma recovery programs in prison are doomed by their compulsory aspect. She praises the results of therapy that involves a youth’s entire family, when it is employed as an alternative to lockup. At base, what matters most is the ongoing presence of someone who cares and who connects.

Burning is worth reading for its description of the “Missouri Model” alone. I was as astonished as Bernstein to learn that over almost forty years the state of Missouri has managed to create a system in which young, incarcerated people tell her time and again, “Here, they care about you.” Her skepticism is largely overcome. The stories she tells of young people she has known anchor the book.

Meanwhile, the story around which Maya Schenwar constructs her new book, Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn’t Work and How We Can Do Better, is even...