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Customer Reviews of Corrections: A Critical Approach

I wish I'd known.
Professor Welch's book has allowed me to recognize that it is not being human that is the problem so much as being human amongst humans. This book offers broad perspective on criminal justice system that is both realistic and very direct. Professor Welch's presentation of our criminal justice system 'the way it really is' challenged my range of beliefs that came to exist from channels of expectations that did not belong to me at all, but belonged to the continent of what the field of being human has decided we must all feel, think, and share. The book is straightforwardly read and intriguing, and I recommend it to any individual who is ready to be challenged. I just wish I'd known sooner what our criminal justice system does not tell. Despite CORRECTIONS: A CRITICAL APPROACH, I also recommend Michael Welch's PUNISHMENT IN AMERICA.

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Against the compartmentalization of Justice
Since criminal justice only makes sense within the wider context of social justice, why do we insist on yoking law enforcement and the penal system with the fatal impasse of socioeconomic inequality and exploitation? As Professor Welch powerfully demonstrates, a large criminal justice system is a social failure -- much like dentistry, the criminal justice system's primary goal should be to put itself out of business, to defy the conservative propaganda-artists who evangelize $$$ for the prison-industrial complex. As a sociologist (and former prison psychologist), Welch was displeased with the descriptive or "objective" nature of most corrections textbooks; he required a text that would do justice to the byzantine entanglement of ironies which foreordain the social construction of the prisoner. A critical approach to corrections will schematize the wider precincts and differential vectors of social control, the penal system presented as a stirring palimpsest of our society as a whole. For example, if white-collar crime is infinitely more destructive to (read: expensive for) the socius, why don't we have a Uniform Crime Report tuned to the interstices of corporate criminality? If a stable capitalist economy relies upon a Surplus Labor Pool of bored, frustrated, disillusioned citizenry, how can we expect the underclass to universally reject the temptations of narcotics trafficking and other esteem-granting shortcuts? If we truly live in the richest and most enlightened nation on earth, why do we also have the largest statistical ratio of citizens festering away in lock-down? Prisoners, of course, are more valuable as penal *commodities* than they would be on the welfare take. By raking in every new generation of the underclass in to the prison system, conservative administrations justify their perverse spending via election-motivated tough-on-crime propaganda, reinforcing the very injustices which overdetermine criminality and social deviance.... It goes without saying that most criminal justice departments are staffed by former attornies and retired law enforcement personnel, enticing the student with a reactionary Us Against Them mentality which tends to downplay the crucial problems of our persecutory and unredemptive prison system. Michael Welch is a rare exception in this morass of dreary cop rhetoric, shaking us awake to the schizophrenia of that rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem, that most daemonic of American juggernauts, the hamstrung broken-backed criminal justice system. Of course, to get the full effect of this text, one would have to take Prof. Welch's course at Rutgers, but for those professors and adjuncts who want to shock their students awake with the *real* issues of contemporary corrections, this book should be back-ordered for their courses ASAP.