RUTHFULLY YOURS

Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform, by John F. Pfaff (Basic Books, 272 pp., $27.99)

John F. Pfaff’s Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform is probably the best book on so-called mass incarceration to date. A professor of law at Fordham, Pfaff doesn’t cherry-pick data to support some a priori theory; staying empirically grounded, he grapples directly with the data—an approach that makes his argument for reducing imprisonment a very tough sell. If, as Pfaff’s own figures demonstrate, violent crime and other serious offenses are the primary reasons for incarceration, then why should we reduce imprisonment?

The author’s main point is that the usual explanations for the rise in imprisonment—the “standard story,” as he calls it—are not only wrong but also counterproductive to de-incarceration efforts. The standard story has three components: the war on drugs, long prison sentences, and the growth of private prisons. Each of the three, Pfaff demonstrates, is a secondary contributor at best.

Pfaff quickly dismisses the contribution of the “prison industrial complex” to mass incarceration, noting that privately managed prisons house only about 7 percent of U.S. inmates, and that their management policies are no worse than those of the public sector. The drug war is a more serious contributing factor to rising imprisonment rates: drug convictions put thousands behind bars, especially during the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s. Michelle Alexander, in her much-ballyhooed 2012 book The New Jim Crow, writes that the “impact of the drug war has been astounding. In less than thirty years, the U.S penal population exploded from around 300,000 to more than 2 million, with drug convictions accounting for the majority of the increase.” But as Pfaff demonstrates, at the peak of the great crackdown in 1990, inmates serving time in state prisons for drug crimes accounted for 22 percent of the state-prison population, whereas violent inmates made up 47 percent—more than twice as many. When prison populations increased dramatically, from 1980 to 1990, drugs accounted for only a third of the increase. Even in that lock-’em-up decade, crimes of violence put a greater number, 36 percent, behind bars.

In the decades before and after the more punitive 1980s, the case for emphasizing drug imprisonments is even weaker. A 1974 survey of state prisoners found that only 10 percent were in for drug offenses, while 52 percent were incarcerated for violent crimes. From 1990 to 2009, Pfaff found, drugs contributed only 14 percent to state confinement; violence, a whopping 60 percent.

Pfaff thinks that false claims about drug imprisonment actually hurt the case for disincarceration, because reducing drug imprisonment leaves the main culprit—violent crime—unaffected. If all drug-law violators were freed tomorrow (and most of those in prison are traffickers, not simple users, so this won’t happen), then the number of inmates in our state prisons would drop by only 16 percent, leaving 1.1 million people behind bars. And, as Pfaff notes, the structural basis for another period of increased imprisonment in response to the next crime wave remains intact.

When imprisonment rates rise, it must mean either that more people are being incarcerated or that they are being confined for longer periods—or some combination of the two. Pfaff denies that longer terms of imprisonment are to blame for mass incarceration. Indeed, he says that time served in the United States is “surprisingly short, and there’s no real evidence that it grew much as prison populations soared.” In 2010, armed robbers, to take a particularly scary sector of the criminal population, were released in a median 2.3 years. Moreover, actual prison time has decreased in the last few years (few prisoners serve their maximum sentences).

One of the reasons for my fascination with books about World War 11, is the fact that was the last war America fought for unconditional surrender. Shinto imperialism and barbarity, and Nazi aspirations and genocide ended with total surrender and the world changed forever. Wars since then- even the Korean War with so many casualties and fatalities ended with a parallel leaving the Kim thugs in charge- and the various Middle East wars have been incursions changing nothing……rsk

In April 1945, as German troops surrendered en masse to American forces wheeling through the Ruhr Valley, news from the western Pacific seemed equally hopeful: Landings on the island of Okinawa had been largely unopposed. It was a high-water mark for public optimism regarding the prospects for the unconditional surrender of Japan and the return, at last, of peace.

That month, a U.S. government bureau forecast that an economy shackled by the restrictions of war production would make a smooth transition to normalcy. Although unpopular controls such as the curfew on nightclubs and bans on horse racing would soon be lifted, industrialists and labor unions alike were pushing back against the Army’s voracious needs and the government’s far-reaching management of the economy. President Harry Truman dared hope that Japan could be forced to quit before the home front finally turned on him, imperiling the yearslong struggle to defeat Japan on terms set long ago by Franklin D. Roosevelt and his Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Then Germany surrendered, and the Japanese emperor’s Okinawa garrison showed its teeth. Those two developments threatened to change everything.

This startling, nearly forgotten story is well documented in “Implacable Foes,” a valuable and revealing study by Waldo Heinrichs and Marc Gallicchio, historians at San Diego State and Villanova, respectively. The authors remind us how public weariness with the war and the difficulty of redeploying armies world-wide for a reckoning with Tokyo imperiled Truman’s plan to defeat Japan and avoid the type of economic disruptions that tested the nation after World War I.

Though the military campaigns carried out by the forces under Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Adm. Chester Nimitz from February 1944 forward are covered in this book, those oft-told tales are not the main event. The authors’ major contribution lies in bringing to life the turmoil of a home front “going sour,” as Secretary of War Henry Stimson put it, which pushed the finale of the Pacific campaign toward the precipice of possible failure or abandonment. Though that outcome was never in actual view, war planners did fear, as casualties mounted, what the authors call “a public psychology of complacency, slackening effort, and a drift of labor away from war work.” The special military advisor to the president, Adm. William D. Leahy, believed that at some point the clamor to bring the boys home could become irresistible.

From day one, Iwo Jima was a meat grinder. In late 1944 the volcanic isle had been so lightly defended that it could have been taken by a regiment. But by D-Day, Feb. 19, 1945, it had become a hive of stone. The Marines suffered more than 25,000 casualties in taking it. Though MacArthur used his well-cultivated relationships in the press to lobby otherwise, his own campaigns were equally costly.

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Another great addition to the Cyrus Skeen series.

Product Details

Celebrity News: A Detective Novel of 1930 (The Cyrus Skeen Mysteries Book 26)
Mar 23, 2017
by Edward Cline

Sparrowhawk, Book Six: War
byEdward Cline
Brilliant, maybe provocative to some, this series of 6 books is a major achievement in historical fiction. With vivid, believable characters Cline envelopes the story of the American Revolution in an enlightening aura of intellectualism, fierce love and loyalty, and ultimate sacrifice for a cause even deeper than the birth of a country. And, yes, there are also despicable, hateful characters and plenty of others that are mere fodder for disdain. We all know that America prevailed in the end, but those that read this amazing book will also finally know the deeper roles and natures of Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson and the far greater intrigue of the Revolution that a mere dumping of tea. Long live Lady Liberty! Bravo, Mr. Cline!

The suicide bombing which slaughtered nearly two dozen concertgoers in Manchester last week demonstrates yet again that terrorism is indeed becoming “part and parcel,” as London’s Muslim mayor Sadiq Khan declared, of European life. And yet the continent’s elites continue to live in denial of the religious roots of that terrorism. Few are willing to tell the truth about Islam and its impact on Europe; even fewer have dared to tell that truth in the gripping way that only fiction can. Controversial French novelist Michel Houllebecq’s bestselling Submission, for example, recently struck a chord among readers with its chilling tale of Europe’s embrace of sharia. And then there is Bruce Bawer’s new novel The Alhambra.

Critic, essayist, and political journalist Bruce Bawer is the author of over a dozen books, most notably While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within (2006), Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom (2009), and The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind (2012). He is a native New Yorker who has lived in Europe since 1998, and who continues to report on the continent’s decline and fall from the front lines. Full disclosure: I am honored to say that Bawer is a friend of mine.

FrontPage Mag readers are surely familiar with regular contributor Bawer’s incisive work. But some may not know that Bawer has just released a self-published international thriller that takes on the verboten topic of Islam’s infiltration and subversion of Europe. The Alhambra is set in early 2001, while America and Europe still slept, as Bawer put it in another book, prior to the September 11 attacks. It is the story of an American living in Amsterdam who overhears jihadists planning an act of terrorism, and finds himself caught up in the deadly intrigue.

Why did he decide to self-publish? As Bawer told me in an email, “My agent liked the book but thought the combination of gay characters and vile Islamophobia made it hopeless to try to place it [with a publisher].” The “vile Islamophobia” alone, of course, is enough to scuttle a novel’s chances with any traditional publisher, and of course Hollywood is far from likely to touch it either. But Bawer didn’t let that deter him from telling a story that needs to be told.

The novel’s protagonist is Steve Disch, a gay filmmaker pushing forty who moves impulsively to Amsterdam after his once-promising Hollywood career stalls out. He immerses himself in the city’s Old World charm but increasingly finds himself crossing paths with the city’s dark, threatening subculture of Muslim immigrants:

Block by block, the neighborhood grew shabbier. There was graffiti, garbage on the street. There were storefronts with signs in Arabic… He passed a group of men who looked like Arabs or Turks or Persians and who were standing on the sidewalk holding a loud, angry-sounding conversation in some Middle Eastern tongue. As he walked by, they all turned, every one of them, and gave him unfriendly, suspicious looks. One of them said something to him. He didn’t understand the words, but he could guess at the sentiment. Further down the street, he passed a woman in an Islamic head covering who was pushing a baby carriage and was flanked by two toddlers. Half a block later, he passed another woman, also covered; this one was pregnant and pushing a child in a stroller.

“America I find is not the America I wished to find. It is racist, it is hateful and its citizens are bound to destroy themselves.” This is Tuvia Tenenbom’s cringe-worthy conclusion in The Lies They Tell, a chronicle of his wanderings through America to find out what makes it tick. But Tenenbom doesn’t appear to know a thing about America—despite living in New York for 15 years—and seems unable to learn.

What makes this more astonishing is that Tenenbom’s Catch the Jew!, his previous book, was as insightful as his latest is muddled. That book, a gutsy exposé of European funding of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Israel, with the complicity of some Jewish groups, was the first hands-on, direct-contact revelation of what these NGOs were up to, i.e. undermining Israel’s legitimacy. Israel’s government seems to have awoken to the danger. Recently, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refused to meet with Germany’s foreign minister after he conferred with anti-Israel NGOs.

Tenenbom understood what he was talking about in part thanks to his unusual background. Groomed to be a rabbi in Bnei Brak, an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in Israel, he broke away to pursue secular studies, formed the Jewish Theater in New York, wrote numerous plays, and became a columnist for the Jewish daily The Forward. Fluent in German, he also writes for the German paper Die Zeit. Unfortunately, none of this gives him special insight into America. Tenenbom admits that the rest of the country is to him a blank. “Like many New Yorkers, I don’t know much about the other forty-nine states that make up America,” he writes.

Catch the Jew! had the added benefit of being Tenenbom’s idea, something that can’t be said of his latest effort. As he notes in his introduction, “Following the success of the two books, [I Sleep in Hitler’s Room, on Germany, and Catch the Jew!] my devoted editor, Winfried Horning, asked me to add another book to the series. . . . Winfried thought that the time had come to have a book about America as well.”

Tenenbom decided the best way to “portray the character of the country and its people” was to go out and meet people. He tours the states, but without a reason (apart from a book contract) or theme his wanderings appear aimless, even to himself. While in Cleveland, he writes, “I ate. I walked. Time to rest. Tomorrow I drive. Where to? Detroit. Why? Because there’s nothing more American than Detroit. How do I know? I just made it up.” The book is filled with this sort of empty trivia.

Tenenbom travels for six months, chatting with a racially diverse cast of Americans. He pesters them with questions about politics, religion, and race. Not surprisingly, they’re reluctant to answer. Maybe in Germany and Israel strangers love arguing about politics with strangers, but in this country, starting in on politics with someone you’ve just met is considered rude. Author Robert D. Kaplan, who made a similar trip, writes in his Earning the Rockies, “If you ask people straight out about such things as politics and foreign policy, they will often as not adopt a pose: after all, they don’t know you, and they may be uncomfortable about being quoted in public.” Tenenbom doesn’t entertain the possibility that the people he buttonholes don’t want to open up to him; instead, he decides they’re frightened. Americans, he concludes, are “afraid to share their political and religious views with strangers. In the Land of the Free, the Brave are quiet.” This peculiar idea becomes a major pillar of his book.

Nonie Darwish’s 2017 Regnery Faith book, Wholly Different: Why I Chose Biblical Values over Islamic Values, is a wide-ranging, reader-friendly view into the thinking of an Egyptian, Muslim woman who immigrated to America at age 30 and began to compare and contrast the values she was steeped in to those found in Judeo-Christian-influenced, Western culture.

Darwish was born in 1949 in Cairo, Egypt. She grew up in Egypt and Gaza. Her father, Mustafa Hafez, created and oversaw an anti-Israel terror group. When Darwish was eight, her father was assassinated by Israel. Egyptian President Nasser praised Darwish’s father as a shahid, or martyr. Darwish immigrated to the US in 1978, and she has lived here ever since. She converted to Christianity.

Wholly Different is part memoir, part sociological observation, and part prophetic clarion. Darwish’s style is cozy and conversational. Her sentences are short and easy to read. Darwish paints a vast, impressionistic landscape comparing the Muslim world to the West. She makes a series of thought-provoking points in a rapid style. She quotes relevant passages from Islamic scripture and shows how that scripture plays out in modern societies. In contrast, she quotes important Biblical passages and demonstrates how those have influenced the West.

Darwish combines the maternal love one might find in a wise grandmother, the kind who bakes cookies and contains a storehouse of folkloric wisdom, with the stripped-to-the-bone truth-telling and no-time-to-waste urgency of an Old Testament prophet. With every sentence, Darwish conveys the deep care she feels for every reader with an insistence on being heard, and heard for every last syllable.

As is often the case, this book by a former Muslim is more fearlessly blunt than many a counter-jihad statement by someone who has never been a Muslim. “Islamic values versus Biblical values is a bloody collision waiting to happen. The West must be warned,” she writes. Darwish has seen jihad up close and personal. She knows what is at stake, she has taken the measure of the wolf at the door, and her call bursts forth like a trumpet. Just one example of the kind of unique insights she can offer: in thirty years of living as a Muslim in the most populous Arab state, she never heard anyone question why Mohammed, at over fifty years old, took a six-year-old as his wife.

“A fish doesn’t know it is in water,” goes the old saying. Perhaps nothing dramatizes this point so vividly as Western women who marry Muslim men, travel with those men to their natal countries, and are shocked to discover that rights they took for granted as universal ceased to exist once they stepped across a border and put their Western homeland at their back. One can see one such woman, Stephanie, sobbing in a 2016 EXMNA video. “I was certain that I was going to find a way to bring my daughters back, so I bought them a bunch of clothes, but they haven’t had a chance to wear them yet,” Stephanie says, with unbearable poignancy. The camera shows Stephanie’s slender fingers fondling princess dresses she had purchased for her daughters, dresses that her daughters will never wear.

Stephanie was born in Canada and married a Muslim man. She had two children by him. She convinced herself that she and her Libyan husband could create a Canadian version of Islam. She could prevent her husband from forcing hijab on her daughters, allow the girls to listen to music, and take gymnastics. “We can mix both and be happy,” she thought. Islam, though, she said, demanded that her husband “protect” his children from Stephanie; indeed, to protect Stephanie from herself. Her husband, over the course of eighteen months, hatched a plot to convince Stephanie to put her daughters on a plane so that he could attend grad school in Europe. This was a lie. He had no plans for a European PhD. He lured Stephanie into Libya, at which point she had no rights whatsoever. Stephanie says that in Islamic terms, her husband was kind – because he had the right to kill her, and he did not. It’s five years later, and Stephanie has not seen her children since. She may never see them again.