Sensible Justice: Alternatives to Prison.

• Author: McNamara, Joseph D.

Reader beware: Sensible Justice: Alternative to Prison is not what it appears at first glance. The subtitle of the book suggests, and the bookjacket promises, that the author will explore "creative solutions some states and cities nationwide have devised to tackle America's expensive and controversial prison problem" Instead, David Anderson, a journalist and former member of the New York Times board, provides a more or less conventional journalistic road map of how we made prisons a growth industry.

Granted, there is much to examine concerning the vast increase in the number of Americans incarcerated over the past two decades. It is remarkable that we now have roughly 1.5 million people behind bars and 45 million under some form of penal control -- most of whom have been sentenced for nonviolent crimes. But even in exploring this phenomenon, Anderson oversimplifies, claiming that Republicans, the prison-building industry, and the National Rifle Association were the prime movers in the enactment of more punitive policies. The NRA did call for increased penalties for the use of firearms during a crime as a way of obstructing gun-control legislation, but those sentenced under so-called firearm enhancements make up a minor percentage of those incarcerated. The prison-building lobby came along after the political rhetoric denouncing crime. And although many Republicans like to rage about law and order, the harshest mandatory sentences in history were passed by a Democratically controlled Congress. Likewise, severe sentences-including the death penalty for some 50-odd federal crimes-increasingly have been championed by President Clinton, who has boasted that he must be doing something right because there were more than a million Americans in prison. Anderson also fails to mention that it was Barry Goldwater and Lyndon Johnson who first raised crime as a national issue in presidential campaigns (until then, it was viewed as a local matter), leading to increased publicity and alarm, and producing the present "crisis" atmosphere legislation on federal and local levels.

Moreover, although Anderson does allow that journalists helped create the public fear by sensationalizing crime, he barely scratches the surface of the media's culpability. A media study showed that from 1993 through 1996, while the nation's homicide rate was decreasing by 20 percent, television news coverage of murders rose 721 percent. The present corrupt, racist, violent, and...