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Out of the frying pan into the fire; a law professor tracks policies that fail prisoners and their families.(BOOKS)
THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION is failing to address the needs of veterans from the Iraq war, but it's arguably doing even worse when it comes to reintegrating prisoners--casualties of the War on Drugs--into their communities. In his new book, Releasing Prisoners, Redeeming Communities: Reentry, Race, and Politics (NYU Press), Anthony C. Thompson describes the consequences of this failure and the effect of the "1ough-on-crime" policies on parolees.
Written in an accessible style for the broad audience it deserves, Thompson's book begins with a good synopsis of the stigma that past incarceration places on people of color. Although Thompson does not present much, if any, new or original research of his own, he highlights plenty of other interesting work, including Devah Pager's 2003 matched-pairs study, which found that not only did a criminal record have a greater impact on Black applicants than white ones, but also "white applicants with criminal records were more likely to receive callbacks from employers than Blacks with no criminal history."
The book gets going when Thompson makes the case that inmates and recently released parolees in need of educational training and other services are injured by the public's media-fed myths and stereotypes of incarceration. He then gives a much-needed spotlight to the explosive increase of women of color among prisoners and their special reentry concerns and needs, including visitation regulations that intensify feelings of separation for mothers and their children.
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Unsurprisingly, Thompson, a professor of Clinical Law at New York University Law School, is at his best when identifying the impacts of court decisions on reentry in housing, healthcare and employment. He does an excellent job, for example, discussing the Supreme Court's 2002 decision in Department of Housing & Urban Development v. Bucket. The Court gave public housing authorities the discretion to act with impunity to prescreen and even evict people with criminal records. This court decision has, of course, led to serious problems of homelessness among former prisoners.
But while Thompson should be applauded for contributing to our understanding of how racism and bad ...
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