Going Up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation

If crime rates are dropping, why is the number of prisons growing rapidly? What are the cause and implications of the ""prison boom""? Hallinan, winner of a Pulitzer Prize and Harvard's prestigious Nieman Fellowship, delivers a clear-eyed, sleekly written and deeply disturbing tour of the privatized prison landscape of America circa 2000, with a welcome (if unnerving) focus on the human aspect of maximum incarceration. ""The merger of punishment and profit [is] reshaping this country,"" he argues. Beginning with Texas (""Texas is to the prison culture of the 1990s what California was to the youth culture in the 1960s""), Hallinan details the cold calculation that fosters anticrime hysteria and the competition among postindustrial, ""job-hungry"" regions for a piece of the boom or ""prison-industrial complex"" by offering perks like tax abatements and job training. While he draws sympathetic portraits of mild-mannered wardens and ordinary folks attracted to the high pay of corrections work, he also shows how some have been transformed-not for the better-by this work. Hallinan proposes that punitive mandatory minimum sentencing and federal prosecutorial zeal inflate penal and police spending and that the post-Reagan privatization of prisons by a small group of powerful corporations has led to harsh ""unintended circumstances"" ranging from escapes, to the brutalization of nonviolent offenders, to inmate deaths resulting from medical negligence. Hallinan's documentation of malfeasance exposes the persistent erosion of important aspects of the country's social contract. This essential portrait of the current state of American justice continues a line of analyses pursued by other authors such as Christian Parenti in Lockdown America. Agent, Jane Dystel. (Mar. 20) Forecast: The National obsession with crime as well as Hallinan's sterling reputation will guarantee review coverage for this title, and a five-city author tour will further draw attention to this controversial argument.