Mary D Looman and John D Carl, A Country Called Prison: Mass Incarceration and the Making of a New Nation
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474516687971 |
| Published date | 01 October 2018 |
| Date | 01 October 2018 |
| Author | Anuradha Chakravarty |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
this unjust system city by city, state by state, and country by country’’ (p. 133). As
Price and many others stood outside the Georgia Prison in protest on 21 September
2011, they were given permits and permission by local authorities to challenge
Davis’s execution by literally standing in the street. Wondering what this form of
state permission meant for the meaning of justice and democracy when Davis’s life
was at stake, Price asks his readers to think critically about institutionalized violence
and the politics of a dehumanization that has no future beyond the prison.
Notes
1. Raymond Santana, Interview with Amy Goodman (2012).
2. Benjy Sarlin. Donald Trump says Central Park Five are guilty, despite DNA evi-
dence. Available at: http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/donald-trump-
says-central-park-five-are-guilty-despite-dna-n661941 (accessed 7 October 2016).
Sara M Benson
San Jose State University, USA
Mary D Looman and John D Carl, A Country Called Prison: Mass Incarceration and the Making of
a New Nation, Oxford University Press: New York, NY, 2015; 264 pp. (including index):
9780190211035, $29.95 (cloth)
This book is an important contribution to recent debates on the costs and conse-
quences of mass incarceration in the United States. It combines the expertise of
authors who have spent their careers traversing boundaries between the ivory tower
of academia and the corrections and social work industries. The book is both
theoretical and practical, combining a data-driven search for explanation with
accumulated personal insights, and proposes policy changes that are as reasonable
as they are substantive.
In plain prose, Looman and Carl place crime and incarceration rates in the US
in comparative perspective. A series of spare tables present the data in a non-
technical manner and reveal that the US prison population overshadows those
of heavily populated developing countries such as China, India, and Brazil. If
one looks only at wealthy industrialized countries, it becomes apparent that coun-
tries with similar overall crimes rates have significantly lower incarceration rates.
Thus, the common perception that the ‘‘‘US must incarcerate more people because
there are more criminals’ is not supported by the data’’ (xv). In fact, the rate of
drug offenses in the US (560 per 100,000 people) is far more than the rate of
homicides (5 per 100,000 people). Of more than 2.3 million individuals imprisoned
by 2008, almost 80% had committed petty or moderate crimes. Looman and Carl
do not dispute that violent offenders—less than 20% of prisoners—should be
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