What's Prison For?

August 15, 2022
Former New York Times executive editor Keller debuts with a brisk and impassioned indictment of the U.S. prison system. Drawing on his experience at the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that investigates “the causes and consequences of mass incarceration,” Keller argues that “the American way of incarceration is a shameful waste of lives and money, feeding a pathological cycle of poverty, community dysfunction, crime, and hopelessness.” He shows how rehabilitation has been neglected, especially in the South, where Black prisoners became a source of unpaid labor after the Civil War, and compares American prisons to their foreign counterparts, noting that in Germany, prison staff are considered “less as jailors and more as therapists or social workers.” Keller also explains how “mass incarceration flows along the lines of social and economic inequality,” concentrating its effects “on low-income communities of color,” and contends that the privatization of the prison industry has allowed it to metastasize “into a large, little regulated, and often predatory industry of corrections services.” Among a handful of model reentry programs, Keller cites the Prison Entrepreneurship Program in Texas, which trains inmates in “the skills and attitudes necessary to start a business, or at least to find a secure foothold in an existing business.” Detailed and empathetic, this is an airtight case for reform.

September 1, 2022
A compassionate argument about why any reckoning with mass incarceration should transform imprisonment itself. Keller, a founder of the nonprofit Marshall Project and former executive editor of the New York Times, acknowledges he came late to this thorny topic: "My crash course in criminal justice taught me that this country imprisons people more copiously than almost any other place on earth." While others have outlined the inequities fueling mass incarceration, imprisonment itself remains an invisible cultural archipelago. "Our prisons are not the most transparent institutions," writes the author, "and out of sight too often means out of mind. But the American way of incarceration is a shameful waste of lives and money." The author clearly reveals the contemporary prison experience, from intake following conviction to the surreal "afterlife" of parole. At each stage, he shows absurd injustice, brutality, and despair, countered by enlightened approaches in places like Norway and domestic desires for change, including "a political force few saw coming: a reform movement on the right." Keller initially reviews how American society became increasingly punitive in the early 1970s, as "punishment supplanted rehabilitation in the national discourse." Yet other factors, including acknowledgement of unjust policing and declining post-1990 violent crime rates, laid the groundwork for a "cultural and generational shift away from the punitive." We can see this shift in the restorative justice movement as well as "prosecutors questioning what crimes should be prosecuted and judges seeking non-court remedies." The author also explores less-discussed facets, including the systemic pressures faced by corrections officers, the insidious effect of for-profit incarceration, and the particular marginalization of women prisoners. He portrays education and mentorship as especially crucial. "Almost every conversation I had with prison veterans," writes Keller, "turned sooner or later to a plea for respect, for dignity." Though some of the author's observations have been documented before, the narrative is well researched and lucid. A strong single-volume response to a seemingly intractable national dilemma.

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