Beyond These Walls: Rethinking Crime and Punishment in the United States

Platt (The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency), a justice studies professor, offers a well-sourced critique of American criminal justice institutions. He investigates why America’s practices of punishment and social exclusions persist, giving concrete examples of a “double system” of justice in America, one for poor people and people of color and another for well-off white people. The book traces through American history the impulses and ideas that characterize the “carceral state,” such as the confining of Native Americans on prisonlike reservations and post-Reconstruction racial terror. Platt argues that the carceral state today consists not only of courts and prisons but also of other institutions, including a punitive welfare system, a militaristic model of policing, powerful corporations (e.g., gun manufacturers) that profit from societal preoccupation with “insecurity,” and federal counterterrorism organizations that surveil the populace. Many readers may find too radical Platt’s assertions that numerous institutions are intentionally designed to maintain social control, but they will also find it difficult to discount his well-crafted, well-documented arguments. [em](Jan.) [/em]