Malign Neglect: Race, Crime, and Punishment in America

by Michael Tonry

Despite the perennial claims of politicians that our courts are coddling hardened criminals, the fact is that America already sends a higher proportion of its citizens to prison--and for longer terms--than any other western nation. To quote the Canadian House of Commons's Committee on Justice, "If locking up those who violate the law contributed to safer societies, then the United States should be the safest country in the world." Yet despite well-documented and mounting evidence that increased penalties alone cannot reduce crime, the Reagan and Bush administrations repeatedly lobbied for tougher mandatory sentences and more prisons. Although black crime rates have been stable for twenty years, the number and percentages of blacks in jail and prison have skyrocketed since Ronald Reagan took office. The trend continues with President Clinton, who recently called for "three strikes you're out" legislation dictating mandatory life sentences for third felony convictions.
In Malign Neglect , Michael Tonry addresses these paradoxes with passion and lucidity. Drawing on a vast compendium of the latest statistical, legal and social science research, he takes on the explosive issues of race, crime and punishment. As unconventional as he is committed, Tonry confronts uncomfortable truths head-on. On the one hand, he is outraged by politicians' talk of Willy Horton and Welfare Queens. The texts may be crime and welfare, Tonry writes, but the subtext is race. While he recognizes that the disadvantaged have no license to attack, rape or steal, and that the absolution of disadvantaged offenders would require a cynical acceptance of the suffering of victims, he argues powerfully that crime control policies can be recast so that, without diminishing public safety, they do less harm to disadvantaged black Americans. Tonry presents devastating evidence that our current policies are decimating black communities, and impeding the movement of disadvantaged black
Americans into the social and economic mainstream of modern America.
A blistering attack on worn-out misconceptions about race, poverty, crime and punishment and a fearless prescription for change, Malign Neglect is an indispensable briefing paper on a topic which goes to the heart and soul of the nation.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 19, 1995

About the author

Professor Michael Tonry is the McKnight Presidential Professor of Criminal Law and Policy, director of the Institute on Crime and Public Policy of the University of Minnesota, and a Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute on Comparative and International Criminal Law in Freiburg, Germany. Previously he was professor of law and public policy and director of the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge University. Since 2001, he has been a visiting professor of law and criminology at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and since 2003, a senior fellow in the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement, Free University Amsterdam. He has been a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and has held visiting posts at the University of Leiden, The Netherlands, and the Max Planck Institute in Freiburg.

Professor Tonry is author or editor of a number of books including Between Prison and Probation (with Norval Morris; OUP 1991), Malign Neglect (OUP 1995), Sentencing Matters (OUP 1996), Thinking About Crime (OUP 2004), Punishment and Politics—Evidence and Emulation in the Making of English Penal Policy (Willan 2004), Punishing Race (OUP 2011), and, as editor, Prosecutors and Politics in Comparative Perspective (Chicago 2012) and Crime and Justice in America, 1975-2025 (Chicago 2013).

In earlier careers, Professor Tonry was a commercial lawyer with large law firms in Chicago and Philadelphia, practiced as a sole practitioner in Castine, Maine, and directed a private sector research firm. He founded and, from 1987 to 1990, directed the MacArthur Foundation-United States Department of Justice Program on Human Development and Criminal Behavior. From 1986 to 1990, he was editor and publisher of The Castine Patriot, a weekly small town newspaper; from 1990 to 1999, editor of Overcrowded Times—Solving the Prison Problem; and from 2000 to 2010, editor of Criminology in Europe. He founded and edits Crime and Justice - A Review of Research and three Oxford University Press book series: Studies in Crime and Public Policy, Oxford Handbooks on Criminology and Criminal Justice, and (with Antony Duff) Studies in Penal Theory and Philosophy.

Reviews

[matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tonry somehow gets away with making incendiary statements without worrying about those troublesome "facts" or "sources." His loaded language is too much at times although his heart is certainly in the right place. I'm glad I concurrently read this with Randal Kennedy, whose such a stickler for the facts that it made me realize that Tonry's POV seemed more like an inflamed editorial than a knowledgeable assessment. Opinions like Tonry's need to exist, if for no other reason, but to interject some immediacy into important issues about race and crime. If everyone was as legalistic and Spock-ian as Kennedy, we'd all be in trouble.