Book Review: Christine Tartaro and David Lester Suicide and Self-Harm in Prisons and Jails. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009. $60.00. 227 pp. ISBN: 13:978-7391-2464-2

• Date: 01 June 2010
• Published date: 01 June 2010
• DOI: 10.1177/0734016809356308
• Subject Matter: Articles

Book Reviews
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regression discontinuity design, Lerman finds that placement in a higher security facility increases
criminogenic effects for offenders with a limited criminal history. The results support the common percep-
tion of prison as ‘‘crime college’’ and demonstrate that the trend toward increased punitiveness can have
adverse results.
Moving from the individual to intergenerational effects, Rucker C. Johnson presents a national
picture of the prevalence of parental incarceration and the effects on early childhood and adoles-
cence. While others have examined this topic before, Johnson uses the Panel Study of Income
Dynamics and its Child Development Supplement. Similar to past research, the author finds having
an incarcerated father negatively affects family income and child behavioral outcomes.
Moving further on the aggregate level, John W. Ellwood and Joshua Guetzkow provide a nuanced
examination of how much states spend on corrections, how much the budget has increased, and how
it varies across states. In doing so, they consider a number of variables, in addition to crime and
incarceration rates, including per capita income levels, percentage of Black residents, and even a
state’s referendum process. Ellwood and Guetzkow find that ‘‘while average levels of state spending
on prisons has grown, they mask a great deal of variation across the states’’ (p. 18). Despite wide-
spread thinking that the more spent on prisons, the less spent on other social issues, the authors find
that only welfare spending is negatively affected by increased corrections spending.
The final chapter in this section considers the collateral effects of incarceration on employment and
earnings among young workers. While commonsense thinking may be that of course going to prison is
not good for anyone’s employment future, Harry J. Holzer asks whether, perhaps, a period of incar-
ceration may provide a person with an otherwise unattainable opportunity to learn a trade or go to
school. Surprisingly, past ‘‘empirical evidence is quite mixed’’ (p. 242), but after Holzer’s review
of the extant literature, he finds the net impact of incarceration on future employability is negative.
Do Prisons Make Us Safer? ends by asking if the United States is at a socially optimal level of
imprisonment. John J....