David McCullough's The Great Bridge is an extraordinary book. It tells the tale of how the Brooklyn Bridge was conceived and built. As is the case with other McCullough works, it is superbly crafted and reads as well as any great work of fiction. The main focus of the...
It's true: the American criminal justice system is not broken āĀ it's doing exactly what it is designed to do. Far gone are the days when the only things that distinguished prisons from college campuses were the barbed-wired fences, gun towers, and . . . oh yeah, the...
Our hearts are saddened. I know this event just happened and you're trying to make sense of it. You can't. Crazy people have been doing senseless stuff like this since time began. Whether it was the Romans massacring Jewish people or terrorists flying planes in...
From www.rehabcenterforwomen.org: According to a report by the Treatment Advocacy Center, in 2012 the United States had 10 times more mentally ill individuals in its prisons than the amount who are treated in psychiatric hospitalsĀ (356,268 in prison, vs.Ā 35,000 being...
Station Eleven is one of those books that is so well-conceived and executed that you are sad when there's no more to read. After reading so many post-apocalyptic novels, many which barely bother to explain what caused society's collapse, I expected another contrived...
After a while, even the horrid conditions of prison become normal to its occupants. Waking up everyday in a concrete cell, being told when you can shower, use the phone, or even use the bathroom eventually fall into place as routine. No big deal ā it just is. I...
I cannot tell you how many times I've been on the phone while regrettably being forced to listen to another inmate on the phone next to me scold his girlfriend or mother for not doing something he had asked them to do. "Why haven't you sent the money? . . . you said...
Some mornings when I wake for breakfast chow at 3:00 or 3:30 here in the County Jail, I canāt help pondering the question of where they are able to find so many people with the same disposition; just dripping with contempt. Even though itās the same caliber...
We often hear of the exorbitant costs to operate prisons. State budgets are stretched thin and perpetually strained in order to incarcerate tens of thousands of people, for many years at a time. But other costs are absorbed by the casualties of incarceration that...
Fascinating. Riveting. Provocative. The list of superlatives to describe this book could go on for pages. Johanson - the famed archeologist who discovered the 3.2 million-year-old hominid (human ancestry) fossil - has written a book for the ages with this one. This...