I was received a copy of "The War on Neighborhoods" by by Ryan Lugalia-Hollon and Daniel Cooper from LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer program in exchange for an honest review.

A phenomenal, if difficult read. This book was thoroughly researched, well-presented, and though-provoking. It did what "Freakanomics" promised but never provided for me-- caused me to think about a pervasive and complicated issue from a new perspective. I ended up leaving several bookmarks with so I can go back and read some of their sources. I highly recommend this book. ( )

Worth a read ( )

A challenging book to read - it took a while to get thru it. You could probably apply this to some of the other big cities in the country. Very detailed and well researched, it makes you think. ( )

Free LibraryThing Early Reviewer book. America’s racial sins through the lens of Chicago, in which the geography (and thus race) of one’s birth heavily determine one’s life chances. Some areas have good jobs, good schools and minimal police surveillance, while others are the opposite; life expectancy in Cook County varies by more than thirty years depending on geography. The authors emphasize the fact that the government is investing heavily in these poor blocks—but the money is going to keep their (former) residents in prison, not to improving their economic or other circumstances. “In essence, policymakers have been willing to pay to ensure absence and loss rather than economic revitalization.” This “concentrated punishment” harms communities, not just individuals. This also sets up a conflict between poor rural whites where prisons are now located and poor urban minorities, and the rural whites often win—jobs for guards justify keeping prisons open and needing to be filled.

Lots of individual policies are also counterproductive—seizing property used in drug sales, for example, led young black men to sell on the street to protect their parents and grandparents from loss, but that made public space more valuable as territory and thus increased the incentives for violent conflict over it. Also, young men adopted a uniform of white t-shirts and jeans to make themselves less identifiable to police if approached, but that helped police decide that every young man deserved the same risk. Focusing on disrupting gangs led the police to target older men who exercised a moderating influence on younger, more violent men, who now have even fewer authority figures in their lives counseling restraint. (I was also intrigued by the connections they drew between policies mandating lots of futile arrests and encouraging brutality and high police suicide rates; Chicago’s police suicide rate is significantly higher than the national average.)

Of course, blaming individuals for structural failures excuses those failures. The authors make that point and then also defend those individuals, citing evidence that, for example, black fathers (who are allowed to do so) spend as much or more time with their children than white fathers. But people who have to work two jobs to keep from being evicted have a hard time supervising their children, and then we blame them for inattention.

Women suffer uniquely—along with higher levels of violence, they fear reporting abuse to the police because of what the police might do, and sexual assaults are often lower on their lists of problems than other things like homelessness or a child’s hunger. This connects to the authors’ bedrock point: you can’t solve tough social problems with law enforcement and punishment. (And you also can’t shrink prison populations significantly only by releasing people who were convicted of nonviolent, nonserious, nonsexual crimes.) This is also why they argue that most current non-prison based programs are still too connected to the criminal justice system to avoid a punishment-oriented approach, especially since their operators often profit by putting people under surveillance and control. Unfortunately, we can’t fix these problems just by reinvesting in non-prison social services; the damage to family structures and individual psyches of generations of abuse is too great. But that would be a start. ( )

Excellent book taking a look at the background of the racial divide in Chicago, though I feel as though there are more than a few points left unexplored. And a few that felt like the authors were simply repeating themselves. (Not to mention the irony of two white men writing a book trying to point out why there's racial problems and suggestions of how to fix them.) But it also felt small in scope; yes, we're discussing Chicago's issues, but why not compare it to other cities? New York, for better or for worse, managed to "clean up" its act forcibly, going from a hellhole that inspired "Escape from New York" to the high end tourist attraction it is now, yet the authors claim it's impossible to do in Chicago. Why? Why not compare and contrast? And Chicago is by no means unique in the Midwest; Milwaukee, just two hours north, is hideously segregated as well, the interstate used as an excuse to "clean up the slums" on the north end, and is possibly even worse in its inability to deal with either black education or crime. Or even Detroit, which has become nearly a ghost city. ( )