Book details

Hard Time Blues

How Politics Built a Prison Nation

Author: Sasha Abramsky

Hard Time Blues

Hard Time Blues

$11.99

e-Book

About This Book

In September 1996, fifty-three year old heroin addict Billy Ochoa was sentenced to 326 years in prison. His crime: committing $2100 worth of welfare fraud. Ochoa was sent to New Folsom supermax prison,...

Page Count
320
Genre
On Sale
04/01/2011

Book Details

In September 1996, fifty-three year old heroin addict Billy Ochoa was sentenced to 326 years in prison. His crime: committing $2100 worth of welfare fraud. Ochoa was sent to New Folsom supermax prison, joining thousands of other men who will spend the rest of their lives in California's teeming correctional facilities as a result of that state's tough Three Strikes law. His incarceration will cost over $20,000 a year until he dies.

Hard Time Blues weaves together the story of the growth of the American prison system over the past quarter century primarily through the story of Ochoa, a career criminal who grew up in the barrios of post-World War II L.A. Ochoa, who had a long history of non-violent crimes committed to fund his drug habit, who cycled in and out of prison since the late 1960's, is a perfect example of how perennial misfits, rather than blood-soaked violent criminals, make up the majority of America's prisoners. This is also the story of the burgeoning careers of politicians such as former California Governor Pete Wilson, who rose to power on the "crime issue." Wilson, whose grandfather was a cop murdered by drug-runners in early twentieth century Chicago, scored a stunning come-from-behind re-election victory in 1994. In so doing, he came to epitomize the 1990s tough-on-crime politician.

Award-winning journalist Sasha Abramsky uses immersion reportage to bring alive the political forces that have led America's prison and jail population to increase more than four fold in the past twenty years. Through the stories of Ochoa, Wilson, and others, he explores in devastating detail how the public has been manipulated into supporting mass incarceration during a period when crime rates have been steadily falling. Hard Time Blues deftly explores the War on Drugs, the Rockefeller Laws, the growth of the SuperMax Prisons, the climate of fear that led to laws such as Truth-in-Sentencing, and how the stunning repercussions of imprisoning two million citizens affect all of America.

In the tradition of J. Anthony Lukas's Common Ground and Melissa Fay Greene's The Temple Bombing, Abramsky explores this new and dangerous fault-line in American society in a dramatic and compelling manner. From the opening courtroom scene through the final images behind the electrified fences of the nation's toughest, meanest prisons, Abramsky paints a grimly intimate portrait of the players and personalities behind this societal earthquake. Hard Time Blues combines a sense of history with a powerful narrative, to tell a story about issues and people that leads us to understand how The Land of the Free has become the world's largest prison nation.

Imprint Publisher

Thomas Dunne Books

ISBN

9781429970044

In The News

“Here is a brave and accomplished book, one unwilling to accept the conventional wisdom about punishment and crime in America. Part social history, part character study, part muckraking manifesto, Hard Time Blues deserves to be discussed, debated, argued over.” —Samuel G. Freedman, author of The Inheritance: How Three Families and the American Political Majority moved from Left to Right

“An involving study of an important social issue . . . Abramsky traces the history of U.S. crime fighting and prison building, interviews the people most directly impacted--victims, prisoners, and the families of both--and illuminates the powerful but largely unacknowledged impact of race and class on whom we punish and how we punish them.” —Mary Carroll, Booklist

“The flip side of the American dream-jail--depicted in all its pathos, tragedy, and grim ironies . . . Able to incarcerate two million souls in the blink of an eye, the US prison system is grotesquely out of control, says freelance journalist Abramsky. Nearly one percent of the nation is now behind bars, half of them for nonviolent, victimless crimes, and the political system that spawned the jail explosion bears much of the blame . . . Abramsky's investigation ties together a wealth of strands that contributed to the burgeoning prison population and the current emphasis on punishment rather than treatment or rehabilitation. He examines the whole topic of crime and how it came to be manipulated for electoral gain by politicians from Nixon to Giuliani, who gathered votes as they rode a wave of fear generated as much by media spin-meisters as by criminals. Abramsky details the evolving national anti-crime, anti-welfare, anti-immigration sentiments, the ways in which the justice system maintains racial hierarchies, and the divorcing of the drug question from considerations of poverty and unemployment. He raises some simple, discomfiting questions: why, for example, if jailing is deemed so effective, is the crime rate the same now as it was when the move to incarcerate began? Bringing the critique home, Abramsky uses two individuals as examples of how the system works. The failure is Billy Ochoa, a doper and pathetic small-time career thief now doing 300-plus years for welfare fraud. The success is former California governor Pete Wilson, whose sleazy opportunism on the crime topic won him political office and a presidential bid . . . His striking portrayal of Ochoa and the kind of political zealotry that conceived the three-strike law provides valuable ammunition for reformers.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Sasha Abramsky's Hard Time Blues is a skillful and potent examination, by way of a microcosmic example, of the macrocosm of the lockdown state and the politics of prohibition. It could not be more timely.” —Christopher Hitchens, author of The Trial of Henry Kissinger

“A must-read for anyone who treasures their rights to freedom, justice, and democracy in America and abroad.” —Frank Serpico

“A vivid and intensely human assessment of what this 'war on drugs' has cost all Americans . . . this is a portrait of social inequality that is both painful to look at and impossible to turn away from.” —Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America

“Lucid, engrossing, Hard Time Blues is more than a tale of American crime and punishment, it is a stinging portrait of the many players on both sides of the law whose personal passions, obsessions, and aspirations help push the nation's society to lose its moral bearings, common sense, and commitment to human rights.” —Jamie Fellner, Associate Counsel for Human Rights Watch

“A hard-hitting, impeccably researched book . . . In muscular prose, Sasha Abramsky takes readers inside the mean-spirited political machinery driving America's massive prison buildup. An important book that should not be ignored.” —Jennifer Wynn, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, author of Inside Rikers: Stories From the World's Largest Penal Colony

“Journalist Abramsky delivers a carefully rendered, emotionally charged portrait of America's embrace of maximum imprisonment and punitive justice over the past two decades. Focusing on opponents of rehabilitative ideals and casualties of punitive practices, Abramsky zeroes in on two principal figures: former California governor Pete Wilson, who hitched his wagon to the 1990s war on crime, and Billy Ochoa, a hapless middle-aged heroin addict who, under Wilson's popular 'three strikes' paradigm, received a 300-year sentence for a $2,000 welfare fraud. Abramsky also looks at prosecutors, survivors of crime and victims' rights advocates, and corrections employees who energized the prison juggernaut, offering a poignant, disturbing view contrary to standard 'tough on crime' rhetoric. He situates these personal narratives within broader transformations in urban life, public safety and media coverage of crime between the Carter and Clinton eras, whereby many politicians (particularly Wilson, Reagan and Gingrich) fortified their careers with sweeping, draconian laws in response to such phenomena as crack-related violence. The sad case of Ochoa, a nonviolent career criminal who poses little threat to society relative to the expense and harshness of his punishment, reveals what Abramsky interprets as the decimation and electoral disenfranchisement of minority communities via imprisonment. Abramsky skillfully navigates a difficult proposition: that while particular crimes like Polly Klass's murder (and the crack epidemic generally) are horrifying and demand justice, the wholesale forfeit of civil liberties and race-related mass imprisonment generated by the drug war will threaten society in the long term. The vibrant personal accounts in Abramsky's jeremiad distinguish it in a crowded field.” —Publishers Weekly

About the Creators

Hard Time Blues

Hard Time Blues

$11.99

e-Book