Do we know what to do about people who scare and harm?

Bill Keller was the executive editor of the New York Times from July 2003 until September 2011. For those of us who thought the GW Bush administration's Iraq invasion was an immoral disaster, Keller, an establishment war hawk with the power to define the public narrative, was a major public enemy.  It didn't seem to bode well when Keller landed in 2014 at The Marshall Project:

The Marshall Project is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization that seeks to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the U.S. criminal justice system. We have an impact on the system through journalism, rendering it more fair, effective, transparent and humane.

That's a bit boosterish. But Marshall Project journalism does a good job of professionally raising up what America does in the prisons to a wide public. Their output gets read, which is saying something in an arena we usually would prefer not to gaze at.

Keller has shared what he learned in five years getting that project off the ground in a slim book, What's Prison For? Punishment and Rehabilitation in the Age of Mass Incarceration.
 
He's candid about his learning curve on the job.

My crash course in criminal justice taught me that this country imprisons people more copiously than almost any other place on earth. Some countries, including China and North Korea, do not fully disclose their prison populations, so America may not actually hold the dubious distinction of first place. But there is ample justification for calling what we do in America "mass incarceration." ...

This perfectly captures the tone of this book -- measured, careful, accurate to a fault, designed to lower the temperature about a topic that arouses passions.

As if writing a longform magazine article, Keller explores through close observation and gentle on-scene interviews the fraught realities of sentencing, race, drugs in prisons, violence -- and life after release, prison education, and what incarceration does to the jailers. He makes a diligent effort to study and apply what academic study of prisons has suggested. He describes Nordic systems of corrections, which center helping offenders learn to live normal civilian lives though practice while still inside. And he raises up US experiments on the same lines. There's even a short chapter on women's experiences in the system.

Maybe what conversation about the US prison system most needs is less yelling, more deliberate humanity. This is a useful little book if that's a right prescription for readers not struggling in the immediate horror. If, for good and tangible reasons, the prison system presents as a screaming injustice that destroys people, families and communities -- as it does to too many Americans -- Keller will seem bland, too comfortable, and too complacent.

What I'm sure Keller would agree on is that ending mass incarceration is going to require all of us. Keller's take is at least smart and kind. That's not nothing. This is a useful little introductory book.

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It feels apprriate that I'm writing up What's Prison For? the week that Donald J Trump received his federal felony indictments. Can the United States actually put away the old con man? The best discussion I've encountered of this came in a podcast discussion between former US Attorney Joyce Vance and former Republican operative Steve Schmidt. He asked the question that lurks for all of us: if Trump is convicted, "is he going to prison?" Vance said "no" with a clear explanation that I haven't met elsewhere. Whatever happens, by statute, Donald Trump will be accompanied by his Secret Service detail for the rest of his life -- it's just not happening that the system will lock up the whole entourage.  We'll have to see how it all plays out ...