Prisoners Of Politics: Breaking The Cycle Of Mass Incarceration – (The Politics of Criminal Justice Reform)
Author: Rachel BarkowPublisher: Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019. 304p.Reviewer: Jonathan Simon | February 2021 Jonathan Simon, in a review essay entitled “The Politics of Criminal Justice Reform,” uses Rachel Barkow’s book Prisoners of Politics: Breaking the Cycle of Mass Incarceration, as a stepping off point for a wide-ranging discussion of a host of criminal justice problems and issues. Professor Barkow’s reform posture, says Simon, “begins and remains within a commitment to [the] main presumptive goals of American crime policies, that is, to prevent crime (through deterrence, incapacitation and reform) and redress serious criminal acts that have occurred (retribution).” But if indeed these values are actually what is desired from our criminal justice system, then, Barkow writes, “we ought to be outraged by their failure to deliver,” because the public has been ill-served by our investments in police, prosecution, and prisons. Simon says that critics of criminal justice today “would pass by this [book’s] careful case for moderating the worst aspects of mass incarceration at their (and our) peril.”