Criminal Injustice: Confronting the prison crisis

South End Press, 1996; $18.00

Reviewed by Christian Parenti

Incarceration is becoming one of the defining institutions of American society. Even the half-way politically literate are familiar with the harrowing statistics: more black men in net of prison/jail/probation than in four year colleges; 80 percent of all new federal convictions are for non-violent drug crimes; the lock-up budget in California eclipsing state spending on education. Then there is the larger cultural buzz about law and order: the endless police shows, news as crime blotter, and the hysterical rantings of the Mark Klasses and Fred Goldmans. It’s been a rapid shift from the red bogeyman to the criminal enemy among us, and left intellectuals and activists are just beginning to catch up to the problem.

With the publication of Criminal Injustice: confronting the prison crisis, grassroots intellectual triage has begun. Editor Elihu Rosenblatt has stepped in the breach and gathered up a battery of new and previously published left articles on imprisonment. To borrow a favorite approbation from a slightly insane Cypriot comrade: "this book is a hand grenade in your hand." Indeed it is. Criminal Injustice is an essential piece of any activists intellectual arsenal. Rosenblatt’s anthology calls on voices from both sides of the prison wall and systematically covers every angle of American imprisonment, from political economy to HIV to political prisoners to the unique horrors of woman’s prisons.

Some of the strongest essays are in the beginning (Mike Davis’s Joel Olson’s, and Alex Lichtenstein’s among them) and in the end where control units are addressed. (Fans of Lichtenstein and Kroll’s American Friends Service pamphlet, reprinted in Criminal Injustice, should also check out the formers new book on convict leasing.) Nancy Kushman’s essay on the incarceration of women, pas and present, is also very good; a concise and powerful indictment of double tyranny that female inmates face—first for being criminals, second for threatening cultural notion of femininity and gender more generally.

Much to its credit Criminal Injustice gives the otherwise demoralizing question of the fin de siecle incarceration binge and empowering spin. First person account from inside and reports from the direct action trenches outside—most notably by the extremely dedicated Judy Greenspan—show that even in the most dire circumstances, such as on the slow-motion killing floors of Vacaville, Chowchilla, and Lexington, organizing is possible.

It’s important to point out that Criminal Injustice fills a gap that should be, and in the past was, also occupied by left academics. But the new criminology of the early 1970s was smashed. The radical center for Research on Criminal Justice at UC Berkeley was disbanded as soon as it became effective and the post-1970s generation of academics have, by and large, proven themselves to be a pack of craven and haughty careerists. Thus the discourse on law and order has been snatched up and quickly monopolized by the New Right. This history makes Rosenblatt’s book all the more refreshing and singularly important.

The book’s main weakness, which is more a function of spatial constraints than political oversight, is in not dealing with the extremely problematic question of crime. One essay, by Karlene Faith, does touch on the question but only in passing. The question still remains: what is crime in a late-capitalist society? After all most people think about incarceration only in relation to the very real horrors of street crime. Thus the reality of predatory crime must be addressed in left arguments and strategies.

In the last analysis this book is key. As Gil Scott Herron said: "Nobody’s fighting cause nobody knows what to say." If enough people read Criminal Injustice we will know what to say and we can get on with the fight much better.