Smart Decarceration: Achieving Criminal Justice Transformation in the 21st Century, by Matthew W. Epperson and Carrie Pettus-Davis (Eds.)

Abstract

The public perception of the American criminal justice system is informed mostly by the media, with scant understanding of the realities of policing, prosecution, adjudication, and imprisonment. A business major constructing a Gantt chart following an individual from being the subject of a 911 call, to the laying on of hands by an officer of the law, to being shuffled from holding cells to courts would probably end the chart at the penitentiary. Plotting the rest of the chart through the so-called corrections end of the system might crash any software trying to illustrate how prisons and parole bring the accused to the desired end:rehabilitated and restored to society. Smart Decarceration offers a welcome reality check regarding prisons and the failure of the “encarceral state” to reform those convicted of serious crimes. This anthology presents a brief history of prisons in the United States, with many forgotten facts (e.g., prisons were a tourist destination in the 18th century) and catalogs the efforts of a growing number of criminal justice reformers to reduce the likelihood that the accused serves prison time or to reduce the time actually spent behind bars. Voices of the formerly incarcerated inform this anthology and amplify the findings of researchers. Public safety executives and managers would do well to read the book’s wide-ranging conversations about strategies to reduce incarceration and consider parallel tracks toward reform in their own agencies. Smart Decarceration comes very close to illustrating the above-mentioned Gantt chart, with accounts of problems in the criminal justice systems before, during, and after incarceration. Taken as a whole, the book discusses six needed reforms.