maureenstantonwriter 's review for:

Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World by Baz Dreisinger

4.0

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I deeply admire this author, both for her life's work with the Prison-to-College Pipeline project, and the ambitious undertaking that is the subject of this book--a whirlwind tour of prisons in several country's prisons, from a horrific and inhumane supermax in Brazil to a more enlightened and truly rehabilitative prison in Norway. At first, I felt that the chapters for each prison visit, where Dreisinger sometimes taught writing workshops, or talked about education in prisons, were too quick. I wanted more depth, and to get to know more deeply the people she met. And that is a shortcoming of the book, but the cumulative effect of visiting so many prisons is, by the end of the book, an exhausstive testimony to the utter failure of prisons but also a more hopeful vision of what works far better than punishment--actual humane rehabilitation for most of those incarcerated. Ultimately, this is an important book in the global and national conversation of how we should treat people who have committed crimes, most of whom will rejoin society after their prison stays. Dreisinger's writing is fluid and at times eloquent and poetic, and she seamlessly weaves in relevant statistics and background that amplify the personal stories, and demonstrate her deep knowledge and experience in the fields of penology and education.