Tuesday, February 14, 2006

War and the Family and the Cost of Prisons: A Librarian at Every Table. No. 319.

Review of Renny Golden, War on the Family: Mothers in Prison and the Families They Leave Behind (Routledge: 1/1/2005).
War on the Family is a searing indictment of the booming prison industry and the hell it has unleashed on the victims of its “success”—primarily African Americans, Latinos, and Arabs. “We can’t build prisons fast enough to hold this world’s cargo of dark-skinned prisoners,” Golden writes. “The U.S. incarceration rate rose almost 300 percent between 1980 and 1998, eclipsing both South Africa and Russia’s all-time international imprisonment record.”
From this wide angle, Golden zooms in on the subject of her book—incarcerated mothers and their children—and the immense social costs of the severed bonds between them.
--from review by Tom Montgomery in Sojourners

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