The Atlanta Youth Murders and the Politics of Race.

• Date: 22 March 1999
• Author: Platt, Anthony M.
• Published date: 22 March 1999
• Author: Platt, Anthony M.

Bernard Headley, Southern Illinois University, 1998.

Criminal justice used to be a public spectacle, with ritualized executions in town centers and criminals on display in stocks. By the 19th century, when the first penitentiaries were built in the United States, punishment still had an important physical presence and the lives of the free and unfree were intertwined on a daily basis. As industrialization took hold and convict labor lost its value, however, American prisons increasingly became a world apart.

This changed, briefly, in the 1970s when, inspired by the civil rights and antiwar movements, serious books about criminal justice and prison life were popular best-sellers. George Jackson, Eldridge Cleaver, Piri Thomas, Bobby Seale, and Angela Davis, for example, reached literally millions of readers with their revolutionary critiques of life inside the walls. Their exposes fueled a penal reform movement that united community and prison activists, and convicted criminals and political prisoners, to make some significant changes in the American gulag: bringing a human face to anonymous convicts, revealing the prison's racial dynamics, and pressuring the federal courts to mandate minimum rights for prisoners.

By the 1990s, it is difficult even to remember that there was once a prison reform movement and that the media and politicians had some sympathy for people inside. During the last 20 years, left and liberal views about justice have largely disappeared from public discourse. More people are incarcerated than ever before - about two million including those in reformatories and military stockades - and between 1985 and 1997, the rate of imprisonment more than doubled. Prisoners are doing longer and harder time, with state legislatures in a frenzy to criminalize and punish, endorsed by legal policies of malign neglect. Except for occasional scandals, the media ignore life behind bars. Crime and punishment remain one of the most publicized topics, yet most people have no idea of the realities of prison life or how the machinery of justice is a deeply politicized process. These four, very different books - a literary anthology, an academic monograph, a historical study of a sensational murder case, and a first-person investigation - all share a commitment to revealing the complexities that lie beneath the surface of commercially mediated images of crime and punishment.

Anthologies are a dime a dozen, but really good ones are rare. An editor needs to know how to whittle without mercy; how to intervene when necessary, but without upstaging the contributors; and how to present old material in new ways. Bruce Franklin, professor of English and American Studies at Rutgers University, does all this and much more in Prison Writing in 20th-Century America. Building upon his...