Book Review: America’s jails: The search for human dignity in an age of mass incarceration

• DOI: 10.1177/0734016819844300
• Published date: 01 June 2022
• Author: Salvatore Cerrato
• Date: 01 June 2022
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Jeffreys, J. D. (2018).

America’s jails: The search for human dignity in an age of mass incarceration. New York: New YorkUniversity Press.

225 pp. $28, ISBN 978-1-4798-1482-4.

Reviewed by: Salvatore Cerrato, Independent Scholar, Sarasota, FL, USA

DOI: 10.1177/0734016819844300

The search for correctional reform is ubiquitous. One particularly timely and necessary approach put

forth by J. D. Jeffreys focuses on the mistreatment of jail inmates. Jeffreys’s book, America’s Jails:

The Search for Human Dignity in an Age of Mass Incarceration draws readers into the reality of

many American jails by providing unique insight into an essentially ingrained feature of them—

man’s inhumanity. Jeffreys analyzes how jail personnel engage in microaggressions by verbally

and physically abusing inmates confined within them. Jeffreys builds his case recognizing the

absence of human dignity in American jails through a methodological framework that describes

the negative affective responses correctional personnel develop toward socially marginalized

inmates. These negative affective responses are conditioned by the concepts of disgust, contempt,

and fear, which in turn contribute to “value blindness.”These negative emotions stigmatize and

devalue inmates as flawed individuals, robbing them of their imputed dignity, thereby adding to

inmate violence, indignation, dehumanization, and degrading conditions that flourish within

America’s jails. Jeffreys reveals how correctional personnel, operating under the color of law,

through free will can embrace a level of consciousness to disavow negative affective responses,

thus overcoming a moral blindness that pervades our jails and prisons, and impedes effective inter-

personal relationships between staff and the inmates.

Jails are violent and demeaning places not designed to adequately deal with the comorbid prob-

lems exhibited by the sheer volume of predominately involuntary pretrial detainees. Jails hav e

failed to address the needs of this challenging inmate population, particularly in areas related to

drug issues, to mental and medical treatment services, and to other peripheral health services.

Jeffreys further argues that far too many jail inmates are constrained within an inhumane correc-

tional system and are unable to post bail requirements while awaiting adjudication. Jail detainees

disproportionately represent the homeless, the poor, the mentally ill, and other undesirable social

outcasts. These marginalized and financially impoverished jail detainees are forced into abysmal

living conditions, where they are subjected to constant threats by jail personnel or

inmate-on-inmate violence, are prone to sexual exploitation, and receive little needed services.

This indifference to the overall well-being of inmates can lead to long-term psychological and

medical complications or even death. Jeffreys provides a descriptive narrative of horrificevents

that occurred at Orleans Parish Prison (identified by Jeffreys as a jail, not a prison) where aban-

doned inmates were locked up and traumatized in their flooded jail cells without proper sanitation,

food, and water for days during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. This draconian aberration, belonging to

a distant past, is egregious and indefensible and is far beyond the contours of acceptable inmate

control.

Book Reviews

Criminal Justice Review

2022, Vol. 47(2) 269-277

© 2019 Georgia State University

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