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Locked in. The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform. By John Pfaff. New York: Basic Books, 2017.
Breaking the Pendulum: The Long Struggle Over Criminal Justice. By Philip Goodman, Joshua Page, and Michelle Phelps. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Virtually every public conversation about American punishment begins with the quintessential chart: a timeline of incarceration rates, stable until the early 1970s, then alarmingly rising through the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, until a slight decline in the late 2000s. This striking visual aid goes hand in hand with a "standard story": after several decades of following a rehabilitative punishment model (albeit not without some serious discontents), the Nixon administration made crime a national issue and zealously pursued punitive policies-partly in response to the reality of rising violent crime rates, and partly in a top-down, politically motivated effort to target the civil rights movement and African Americans. The fed- eral government funneled funds into municipal police departments and kicked the war on drugs into high gear, resulting not only in skyrocketing incarceration rates and overcrowding prisons, but also in shameful racial disparities among those caught in the system's clutches. The standard story invariably also involves the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC), highlighting the role of the private prison industry and commercial interests in the growth of incarceration.
That this narrative has been so successfully disseminated out of academia and into the progressive conversation about incarceration was evident in the last U.S. elections, in which both Democratic can- didates addressed police violence, racial discrimination, and the fate of private prisons. But this story has been, in some ways, the victim of its own success, and in recent years several important works have highlighted its problems and inaccuracies. Naomi Murakawa (2014) and Elizabeth Hinton (2016) have highlighted the role played by liberal democrats in the rise of mass incarceration, looking at Nix- on's presidency as a continuation, rather than a shift, of policy pri- orities and practices. James Forman (2017) and Marie Gottschalk (2014) have complicated the simplistic story of racial disparities. The two new books reviewed here-Locked In by John Pfaffand Breaking the Pendulum by Philip Goodman, Joshua Page, and Michelle Phelps-go a step further, offering fundamental revisions of the very premise of...