Scott
2024 marked the 50th anniversary of mass incarceration. Throughout those fifty years a great deal has been published on the system, the players, the victims, and the wrongs perpetuated in the interest of “justice.” There has been relatively too little, however, written on wrongful conviction, and even less that goes as deeply into the institutions, processes, and biases that shape bad outcomes in the criminal justice system as Dan Slepian's The Sing Sing Files: One Journalist, Six Innocent Men, and a Twenty-Year Fight for Justice. This is a riveting and provocative contribution that points up the extraordinary harms caused by false imprisonment and wrongful convictions.
Slepian's journey to these insights is a sort of coming-of-age narrative, of the opening of the author's (and others') eyes to the dark side of justice. After his twenty-year experience helping to investigate cases and exonerate six men, he is still searching for a “genuine safeguard against injustice.” While the substance of the narrative is truly compelling and infuriating, Slepian's conclusion, that “the safeguard...is us” (196) is slightly unsatisfying and feels more pat than expected from the full sweep of the story he's told.
Much of the book is a procedural: police, prosecutors, media. But the procedural narratives are often inverted to focus on how the innocent are brought to extreme injustice, and Slepian explores several important themes. For example, he draws clear portraits of the ways that evidentiary issues go awry, including for example, the extraordinary problems with eyewitness reliability. He points to eyewitness misidentification as the leading cause of wrongful convictions (104), and describes multiple factors that feed into unreliability, such as bias, police pressures (during interrogations, at mugshot reviews, and lineups), and general issues with memory. He also addresses the cycle of incarceration, in which kids with parents in prison have a higher likelihood of going to prison themselves, and asks how we can bear – let along justify – such a consequence for kids of wrongfully incarcerated individuals. Slepian is careful to clarify that the problem is a systemic one; it is “more than just incompetent or malevolent police and prosecutors; it's a failure of our collective will to hold people in power accountable.”
Throughout, Slepian pairs expected practices with actual practices, as recorded in notes, documents, video and audio recordings, trial transcripts, and other sources. These juxtapositions are an effective tool for driving thoughtful engagement, and his characters (and their arcs) add not just believability, but gravitas and authenticity to the process stories and the shared sense of discovering the deep, intractable reality of injustice in the criminal justice system. Among these characters are police, such as Bobby Addolorato, lawyers, including Steven Cohen, and family members of the men wrongfully convicted and imprisoned. The coming-of-age revelations of the truth of injustice are a linchpin that unites everyone in a kind of state of disbelief. Even after twenty years, Slepian seems to still feel that disbelief. Perhaps this undergirds his hope in the collective us and the possibility of righting the ship.
The Sing Sing Files is a timely and serious analysis of the failures and consequences of the American criminal justice system and the tragic legacy of mass incarceration. The waste of time, money, and lives shows the inhuman side of the system but leaves the way forward unresolved. This is a needed addition to the literature and helps with necessary awareness raising (as Slepian's related Dateline broadcasts have done), but the paradigm shift is still in the wings.
Watson's racial politics aside, and taking into account that Watson did not give any credit to Rosalind Franklin, who was at least as important to the “discovery “ process as either Watson himself or his (male) colleague Francis Crick, this is a useful - if partial - book for understanding one aspect of 20th century genetic science. Subsequent developments and writing about these development in the realm of genetics and genomics help to frame this work and point up Watson's limitations and his misdirected race and gender biases. It's a relatively quick read, although given Watsons' recent ill-conceived statements about race-based intelligence and other wrongheaded ideas, you may want to hold your nose while digesting.
Incidentally, the stars-based rating system is totally unhelpful for a book like this. I hate the racist vitriol Watson spews and his blatant sexism, but the book itself is helpful as a starting point for learning about DNA. 3 stars seems like a difficult thing to sign in the circumstances, and I understand the objections for those who disagree. I think reading this as a companion to Brenda Maddox's “Rosalind Franklin: Dark Lady of DNA,” and/or Rachel Ignotofsky's “Women in Science: 50 Pioneers who Changed the World” can help to ease the strain and broaden one's understanding of what discover actually looks like in science, and who is involved.
This is an inspiring book. Czapski's memory and ability to recall A la recherché du temps perdu without the books and under the duress of confinement in a Soviet gulag is impressive and humbling. Well worth reading both for the interpretation of Proust and for the sense of life the undergirds Czapski's narrative. Human being may be able to adapt to any difficulties, and Czapski demonstrates how literature and imagination can help to survive extremely difficult circumstances.
Karpeles' translation is remarkable and vivifies the book for readers of English.
This was the first time I've read Ishiguro, and I was impressed with the way a surface simplicity belied a profoundly deep and moving story and meditation on memory and the embodied place of memory in our personal and collective lives. Ishiguro creates an evocative and believable landscape and i could fairly see the mist on the page - an Avalon for today: not romanticised, yet not a hard-nosed de-mystified historical place, either. Something in-between with enough magic to bring the reader in and allow the reader to play a role in the narrative and plot development. He has a beautiful way with language and how language is the key to human relationships. Powerful reading, and one i look forward to returning to in future.