Lenore Anderson Livres

The book challenges the prevailing belief that mass incarceration aids crime victims, presenting a new vision for public safety that addresses the actual needs of victims. Lenore Anderson critiques how the victims' rights movement has led to policies that exacerbate trauma rather than alleviate it. With a well-researched approach, she calls for a transformative shift in crime policy, emphasizing healing and justice for all. This urgent message is relevant for both policymakers and the general public, aiming to bridge the gap between public safety systems and victims' true safety needs.

"When twenty-six-year-old recent college graduate Aswad Thomas was days away from starting a professional basketball career in 2009, he was shot twice while buying juice at a convenience store. The trauma left him in excruciating pain, with mounting medical debt, and struggling to cope with deep anxiety and fear. That was the same year the national incarceration rate peaked. Yet, despite thousands of new tough-on-crime policies and billions of new dollars pumped into "justice," Aswad never received victim compensation, support, or even basic levels of concern. In the name of victims, justice bureaucracies ballooned while most victims remained on their own. In In Their Names, Lenore Anderson, president of one of the nation's largest reform advocacy organizations, offers a close look at how the political call to help victims in the 1980s morphed into a demand for bigger bureaucracies and more incarceration, and cemented the long- standing chasm that exists between most victims and the justice system. She argues that the powerful myth that mass incarceration benefits victims obscures recognition of what most victims actually need, including addressing their trauma, which is a leading cause of subsequent violent crime. A solutions-oriented, paradigm-shifting book, In Their Names argues persuasively for closing the gap between our public safety systems and crime survivors"-- Provided by publisher