Kirjahaku

In Their Names busts open the public safety myth that uses victims’ rights to perpetuate mass incarceration, and offers a formula for what would actually make us safe, from the widely respected head of Alliance for Safety and Justice When twenty-six-year-old recent college graduate Aswad Thomas was days away from starting a professional basketball career in 2009, he was shot twice while buying juice at a convenience store. The trauma left him in excruciating pain, with mounting medical debt, and struggling to cope with deep anxiety and fear. That was the same year the national incarceration rate peaked. Yet, despite thousands of new tough-on-crime policies and billions of new dollars pumped into “justice,” Aswad never received victim compensation, support, or even basic levels of concern. In the name of victims, justice bureaucracies ballooned while most victims remained on their own.In In Their Names, Lenore Anderson, president of one of the nation’s largest reform advocacy organizations, offers a close look at how the political call to help victims in the 1980s morphed into a demand for bigger bureaucracies and more incarceration, and cemented the long- standing chasm that exists between most victims and the justice system. She argues that the powerful myth that mass incarceration benefits victims obscures recognition of what most victims actually need, including addressing trauma, which is a leading cause of subsequent violent crime. A solutions-oriented, paradigm-shifting book, In Their Names argues persuasively for closing the gap between our public safety systems and crime survivors.

In a book that Van Jones calls a “game changer” and Baz Dreisinger calls “a must-read,” the founder of Alliance for Safety and Justice dispels the myth that mass incarceration benefits crime victims and offers a transformative new vision for public safety Hailed as “a passionate and provocative indictment of how the victims’ rights movement has warped the American justice system” (Publishers Weekly), In Their Names dispels the myth that mass incarceration benefits victims, and proposes a new public safety paradigm that recognizes victims’ true safety needs. Lenore Anderson, whom the distinguished criminologist David Kennedy calls “one of the most effective criminal justice reformers America has ever had,” demonstrates how, in the 1980s, victims’ rights political activism morphed into a demand for more incarceration “in their names,” while bringing about policies that fuel more trauma than they heal. Called “well-researched, results-driven, and readable” by Booklist, In Their Names “deserves a wide audience, from policymakers to ordinary citizens alike,” according to James Forman Jr., Yale Law School professor and author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Locking Up Our Own. At a time when U.S. crime policy is increasingly debated in politics and media, the lessons and message of this book are current—and urgent. As renowned criminal justice author Nell Bernstein writes, Anderson “offers a vision of justice and healing that is generous enough to encompass all of us.” Now available in an accessible paperback format, this “startling wake-up call” (Susan Burton) argues persuasively for closing the gap between our public safety systems and victims, to heal cycles of violence and enhance public safety for all.