Correction: Parole, Prison, and the Possibility of Change

by Ben Austen

Overview

NYT EDITOR'S CHOICE • WASHINGTON POST BEST NONFICTION OF 2023 • FROM THE CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED AUTHOR OF HIGH-RISERS comes a groundbreaking and honest investigation into the crisis of the American criminal justice system–through the lens of parole. Perfect for fans of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy

“Correction ranks among the very best books on life inside and outside of prison I have ever read." ―Matthew Desmond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Evicted

“Correction provides a revelatory lens for examining mass incarceration." –The Washington Post

A Most Anticipated Book of 2023: Chicago Review of Books, The Chicago Tribune, The Next Big Idea Club

The United States, alone, locks up a quarter of the world’s incarcerated people. And yet apart from clichés—paying a debt to society; you do the crime, you do the time—there is little sense collectively in America what constitutes retribution or atonement. We don’t actually know why we punish.

Ben Austen’s powerful exploration offers a behind-the-scenes look at the process of parole. Told through the portraits of two men imprisoned for murder, and the parole board that holds their freedom in the balance, Austen’s unflinching storytelling forces us to reckon with some of the most profound questions underlying the country’s values around crime and punishment. What must someone who commits a terrible act do to get a second chance? What does incarceration seek to accomplish?

An illuminating work of narrative nonfiction, Correction challenges us to consider for ourselves why and who we punish–and how we might find a way out of an era of mass imprisonment.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250758804
Publisher:	Flatiron Books
Publication date:	11/07/2023
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	91,420
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Ben Austen is a journalist from Chicago. He is the author of High-Risers: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing, which was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal of Excellence in Nonfiction and named one of the best books of 2018 by Booklist, Mother Jones and the public libraries of Chicago and St. Louis. A former editor at Harper's Magazine, Ben is the co-host of the podcast Some of My Best Friends Are. His feature writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, GQ, Wired and many other publications.

Editorial Reviews

PRAISE FOR HIGH-RISERS:

"Ben Austen's High-Risers is not merely the definitive history of the life and death of America's most iconic housing project, but a clear-eyed assessment of what happened to public housing as a national ideal and why it happened." —David Simon, creator of The Wire

“Austen writes with a lyrical, poetic affection for the four main characters. Here we see there are as many Cabrini-Green origin stories as there were people living in Cabrini-Green. To merely stereotype is to willfully ignore each resident’s humanity. Austen deftly tells the stories of Wilson, Fleming, Cannon and another woman, Annie Ricks, without distance, bringing readers intimately into their lives. It is compelling writing, sure to separate Austen’s work from other, more anthropological examinations of Cabrini-Green.” —Chicago Tribune

“Ben Austen has emerged over the last five years as one of the most serious and thoughtful new American reporters. He writes with a deceptively smooth and borderline conversational style that keeps pages turning, but he has something rarer, too: the patience to keep with a subject until it yields up unfamiliar questions. This book was years in the making and in some way Austen’s whole life in the making. In it a neighborhood becomes a character, a protagonist, but the character has inside it real human beings. Austen convinced me that my understanding of what goes on inside ‘the projects’ had been about as deep as a cop show. We need more books like this from him.” —John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Pulphead

“[Austen] ties the history of Cabrini-Green to broad economic, political, and social trends that played a pivotal role in the creation and undoing not only of Cabrini-Green, but also of much of America’s public housing… [presenting] the history of Cabrini-Green in such a way that invites subtle questions with no easy answers… The high-rises are gone and, in time, the high-risers will go with them. But the lessons of Cabrini-Green still weigh on us all.” —South Side Weekly

“Provides many powerful insights…A weighty and robust history of a people disappeared from their own community.” —Kirkus

“[High-Risers] is a finely crafted biography of an urban community.” —Library Journal Advance Review

“….a local history of profound national relevance… Austen’s fascinating narrative demands much consideration.” —Booklist (starred review)

“The passages about Cabrini-Green residents, interspersed among chapters about the history of the projects, take the reader into the drama of life in African-American communities…Austen combines archival work with empirical research. The hundreds of hours he spent interviewing the residents of Cabrini-Green often give his prose the depth of a novel.” —New York Review of Books

From the Publisher

2023-07-28
What the flawed parole system tells us about American (in)justice.

As Chicago journalist Austen clearly demonstrates, America’s commitment to mass incarceration over the last half century has exacted a staggering human and economic toll. Moreover, the logic of incarceration—what it is meant to achieve in relation to offenders, victims, and the public at large—has remained disastrously ill defined. In this follow-up to his acclaimed debut, High-Risers: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing, Austen explores the senselessness of the parole system. The experiences of Johnnie Veal and Michael Henderson, men convicted of serious crimes at young ages and held in prison for decades, provide illuminating case studies for how the system has gone wrong. Parole decisions have often hinged on irrelevant criteria or impossible standards, and the possibility of an early release from a long sentence often simply amounts to false hope. For those granted parole, other daunting obstacles remain in place: Adequate help in transitioning from prison life is routinely unavailable, and parole supervision often seems designed to catch parolees in infractions in order to send them back behind bars. Systemic racism in policing and discriminatory sentencing guidelines have also meant that nonwhite Americans have suffered disproportionately from these failings. The author’s contention that the recent history of the parole system represents an ethical catastrophe is compelling. “Imprisonment became the default response to crime,” he writes. “Imprisonment also became the de facto response to poverty, lack of social mobility, addiction, joblessness, housing insecurity, mental health issues, and segregation. A sense of justice in the United States was shaped by a profound lack of mutual responsibility and collective identity.” Despite a few clunky passages, Austen argues persuasively that improving the carceral system must involve shifting emphasis from “vengeance and permanent punishment” to genuine rehabilitation and the chance for the incarcerated to lead productive lives after serving their time.

A cleareyed, compassionate, urgent appeal for prison reform.

Kirkus Reviews