Book Review: Too easy to keep: Life-sentenced prisoners and the future of mass incarceration

• Author: Chelsea van Dijk
• Date: 01 June 2022
• DOI: 10.1177/0734016819853016
• Published date: 01 June 2022
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

employment policies related to a felony conviction, how government policies affected them, and their

personal reentry experiences.

To solve the problemof failed reentry, Middlemass believesreform needs to happen at the back end

of the system where reentry occurs rather than with sentencing reform at the front end of the system.

Sentencing reformdoes not solve the challenges facedby individuals when they are reentering society.

Instead, she believes that the stigmatizing felon label needsto be removed, such as by creating a policy

that offers persons convicted ofa felony a way to expunge and remove thefelony conviction from their

public record. In the discussion on removing the felon label, I think she could have mentioned the

current movement toward using person-first language, which would also help destigmatize felons.

Additionally, I found it odd that she does not discuss the efforts of reentry programs/organizations

and how helpful they are in assisting previously incarcerated individuals reentering society. Her field-

work was in a reentry organization, but she did not mention any of the organizational hurdles they face

helping formerly incarcerated people deal with socially disabling policies.

Overall, Convicted and Condemned is well written, organized, and researched. This book is highly

relevant in today’ssociety as the United States grapples with its massincarceration problem. With hun-

dreds of individualsreentering society every yearand 67% of them being rearrested within 3 years,this

book is a must-read for corrections scholars, practitioners, and policy makers.

ORCID iD

Sydney Ingel https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5686-4436

Herbert, S. (2019).

Too easy to keep: Life-sentenced prisoners and the future of mass incarceration. Oakland: University of California

Press. 172 pp. $85.00, ISBN 9780520300514.

Reviewed by: Chelsea van Dijk ,George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

DOI: 10.1177/0734016819853016

Steve Herbert, department chair and professor of Law, Societies and Justice at the University of

Washington, delivered Too Easy to Keep with exceptional care and consideration. Even the title

itself is a direct link to the main argument of the book: People sentenced to life without parole

(LWOPs) have spent so much time in prison that their life has a daily routine, and th ey provide

no disruption to the facility. They are truly the “easy keepers.”This directly relates to the main ques-

tion. If they are truly so easy to keep, should we be keeping them? Herbert seeks to answer this ques-

tion by interviewing 21 inmates and 27 staff members in two Washington State facilities. The

semistructured interviews delve deeper into finding out what helps and hinders inmates sentenced

to life find meaning and purpose and how staff members perceive the benefits and challenges of

keeping these “lifers.”Herbert argues the retribution policies maintained in the United States are

implemented without consideration of the consequences of long-term imprisonment, and these pol-

icies warrant reconsideration. Retribution and mercy should not be mutually exclusive, especially

when crime trends are on the decline and the only incarceration rates increasing are the LWOPs.

Herbert’s work delivers an easy and captivating read. The book reads chronologically from the per-

spective of inmates’growth and increasing systemic issues. Itis divided into an introduction followed

by four chapters,each outlining a different aspectof inmate life. The setup of each chapter is clear; the

outline at the beginning of each chapter provides an insight into the chapter content, while the conclu-

sion in each chapter helps link the message back to the main arguments. Herbert’s work adeptly

272 Criminal Justice Review 47(2)