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Invisible Men
- Mass Incarceration and the Myth of Black Progress
- Narrated by: Denise Washington Blomberg
- Length: 3 hrs and 54 mins
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Publisher's summary
For African American men without a high school diploma, being in prison or jail is more common than being employed - a sobering reality that calls into question post-Civil Rights era social gains. Nearly 70 percent of young Black men will be imprisoned at some point in their lives, and poor Black men with low levels of education make up a disproportionate share of incarcerated Americans. In Invisible Men, sociologist Becky Pettit demonstrates another vexing fact of mass incarceration: most national surveys do not account for prison inmates, a fact that results in a misrepresentation of U.S. political, economic, and social conditions in general and Black progress in particular. Invisible Men provides an eye-opening examination of how mass incarceration has concealed decades of racial inequality.
Pettit marshals a wealth of evidence correlating the explosion in prison growth with the disappearance of millions of Black men into the American penal system. She shows that, because prison inmates are not included in most survey data, statistics that seemed to indicate a narrowing Black-white racial gap - on educational attainment, workforce participation, and earnings - and fail to capture persistent racial, economic, and social disadvantage among African Americans. Federal statistical agencies, including the U.S. Census Bureau, collect surprisingly little information about the incarcerated, and inmates are not included in household samples in national surveys. As a result, these men are invisible to most mainstream social institutions, lawmakers, and nearly all social science research that isn't directly related to crime or criminal justice. Since merely being counted poses such a challenge, inmates' lives - including their family background, the communities they come from, or what happens to them after incarceration - are even more rarely examined. And since correctional budgets provide primarily for housing and monitoring inmates, with little left over for job training or rehabilitation, a large population of young men are not only invisible to society while in prison but also ill-equipped to participate upon release.
Invisible Men provides a vital reality check for social researchers, lawmakers, and anyone who cares about racial equality. The book shows that more than a half century after the first civil rights legislation, the dismal fact of mass incarceration inflicts widespread and enduring damage by undermining the fair allocation of public resources and political representation, by depriving the children of inmates of their parents' economic and emotional participation, and, ultimately, by concealing African American disadvantage from public view.
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Story
Latinos have long influenced everything from electoral politics to popular culture‚ yet many people instinctively regard them as recent immigrants rather than a longstanding racial group. In Inventing Latinos‚ Laura Gomez illuminates the fascinating race-making‚ unmaking‚ and remaking of Latino identity that has spanned centuries‚ leaving a permanent imprint on how race operates in the United States today.
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mixed reaction
- By david on 09-24-21
By: Laura E. Gómez
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Golden Gulag
- Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California
- By: Ruth Wilson Gilmore
- Narrated by: Machelle Williams
- Length: 7 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Since 1980, the number of people in US prisons has increased more than 450 percent. Despite a crime rate that has been falling steadily for decades, California has led the way in this explosion, with what a state analyst called "the biggest prison building project in the history of the world". Golden Gulag provides the first detailed explanation for that buildup by looking at how political and economic forces conjoined to produce the prison boom.
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Started off great but devolved into case study
- By normal person on 10-16-21
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Discrimination and Disparities
- By: Thomas Sowell
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean
- Length: 5 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Discrimination and Disparities challenges believers in such one-factor explanations of economic outcome differences as discrimination, exploitation, or genetics. It is listenable enough for people with no prior knowledge of economics. Yet the empirical evidence with which it backs up its analysis spans the globe and challenges beliefs across the ideological spectrum.
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Hard Pill To Swallow - I’m better for it
- By Charles on 01-14-19
By: Thomas Sowell
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The Spirit Level
- Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger
- By: Richard Wilkinson, Kate Pickett
- Narrated by: Clive Chafer
- Length: 8 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Renowned researchers Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett offer groundbreaking analysis showing that greater economic equality-not greater wealth-is the mark of the most successful societies, and offer new ways to achieve it.
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An Important Book
- By Stephen Schoenberg on 12-19-11
By: Richard Wilkinson, and others
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Fatal Invention
- How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century
- By: Dorothy Roberts
- Narrated by: Janina Edwards
- Length: 14 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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An incisive, groundbreaking book that examines how a biological concept of race is a myth that promotes inequality in a supposedly "post-racial" era. Though the Human Genome Project proved that human beings are not naturally divided by race, the emerging fields of personalized medicine, reproductive technologies, genetic genealogy, and DNA databanks are attempting to resuscitate race as a biological category written in our genes.
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everyone should read this book to understand
- By Kathleen Dickinson on 07-29-21
By: Dorothy Roberts
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The Way We Never Were
- American Families and the Nostalgia Trap
- By: Stephanie Coontz
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 17 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Leave It to Beaver was not a documentary, a man's home has never been his castle, the "male breadwinner marriage" is the least traditional family in history, and rape and sexual assault were far higher in the 1970s than they are today. In The Way We Never Were, acclaimed historian Stephanie Coontz examines two centuries of the American family, sweeping away misconceptions about the past that cloud current debates about domestic life. The 1950s do not present a workable model of how to conduct our personal lives today, Coontz argues.
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fantastic report on the dangers of nostalgia
- By Richard Stine on 06-29-21
By: Stephanie Coontz
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The Condemnation of Blackness
- Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America
- By: Khalil Gibran Muhammad
- Narrated by: Mirron Willis
- Length: 12 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Lynch mobs, chain gangs, and popular views of black Southern criminals that defined the Jim Crow South are well known. We know less about the role of the urban North in shaping views of race and crime in American society. Chronicling the emergence of deeply embedded notions of black people as a dangerous race of criminals by explicit contrast to working-class whites and European immigrants, this fascinating book reveals the influence such ideas have had on urban development and social policies.
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For a very select audience
- By Andrew on 12-28-17
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When Affirmative Action Was White
- An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America
- By: Ira Katznelson
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 8 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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In this "penetrating new analysis" ( New York Times Book Review), Ira Katznelson fundamentally recasts our understanding of 20th century American history and demonstrates that all the key programs passed during the New Deal and Fair Deal era of the 1930s and 1940s were created in a deeply discriminatory manner. Through mechanisms designed by southern democrats that specifically excluded maids and farm workers, the gap between blacks and whites actually widened despite postwar prosperity.
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Absolute Must Read
- By Andrew on 01-02-18
By: Ira Katznelson
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Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism
- By: Arthur C. Brooks
- Narrated by: Dennis Holland
- Length: 6 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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In his controversial study of America's giving habits, Arthur C. Brooks shatters stereotypes about charity in America - including the myth that the political Left is more compassionate than the Right. Brooks, a preeminent public policy expert, spent years researching giving trends in America, and even he was surprised by what he found. In Who Really Cares, he identifies the forces behind American charity.
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Let's talk truth!
- By Jeff on 09-02-12
By: Arthur C. Brooks
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The Upswing
- How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again
- By: Robert D. Putnam, Shaylyn Romney Garrett - contributor
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 12 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Deep and accelerating inequality; unprecedented political polarization; vitriolic public discourse; a fraying social fabric; public and private narcissism — Americans today seem to agree on only one thing: This is the worst of times. But we’ve been here before. During the Gilded Age of the late 1800s, America was highly individualistic, starkly unequal, fiercely polarized, and deeply fragmented, just as it is today.
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For Progressives only. Won't make sense otherwise
- By Dennis G. on 12-19-20
By: Robert D. Putnam, and others
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Coming Apart
- The State of White America, 1960–2010
- By: Charles Murray
- Narrated by: Traber Burns
- Length: 12 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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In Coming Apart, Charles Murray explores the formation of American classes that are different in kind from anything we have ever known, focusing on whites as a way of driving home the fact that the trends he describes do not break along lines of race or ethnicity.
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Brilliant & Flawed
- By Douglas C. Bates on 05-15-12
By: Charles Murray
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Our Political Nature
- The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us
- By: Avi Tuschman
- Narrated by: Jay Snyder
- Length: 17 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Our Political Nature is the first book to reveal the hidden roots of our most deeply held moral values. It shows how political orientations across space and time arise from three clusters of measurable personality traits. These clusters entail opposing attitudes toward tribalism, inequality, and differing perceptions of human nature. Together, these traits are by far the most powerful cause of left-right voting, even leading people to regularly vote against their economic interests.
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A Trivial Version of Haidt's "The Righteous Mind"
- By Curt Doolittle on 10-29-13
By: Avi Tuschman
What listeners say about Invisible Men
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- Paul Conboy
- 07-29-15
Okay, pretty dry
Could be structured in a more interesting manner, some areas seem redundant. Worth checking out.
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- James
- 03-16-14
A Lot of What We Already Know.... And so Much More
This book covers one of the "fastest growing industries in America", that being the penal system institution that continues to incarcerate more Americans (pro rata), and disproportionately, Americans of color, then any other penal system institution in the world.
The author, Becky Petit, does an okay job of sharing with us the statistics, that in this case, show a dis-proportionality towards African Americans in particular (and to a lesser degree, Hispanic Americans).
I've studied these kind of social dynamics for years, and am very familiar with most of the things that were covered in this book. I still enjoyed the overall information that I gathered, in particular, some of the things I took note of were, the exponential growth of the penal system in America since the 70's, and the incarceration rates of people of color that are filling these jails/prisons to the point where they are bursting at the seams.
The author "borrowed" the title of this book from famed author, Ralph Ellison, and his book "Invisible Man", in which he says "I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me" – Ralph Ellison.
The author shares with us that in January 2009, 1.8 million people stood on the Mall in Washington to celebrate the inauguration of Pres. Barack Obama. The irony was, at that very same moment in time, 2.3 million Americans sat in American prisons and jails cells. Over half of them being African-Americans.
The United States incarceration rate is at a higher percentage of its population than at any other time during its history. The United States also leads the world in the highest percentage of its population behind bars. If we include the numbers of people on probation, parole and supervision, over 5.8 million people are in such circumstances. Current reports show that if the trends continue, one out of every three black men will spend some portion of their adult life in prison.
The author does do a great job in sharing with us the "historical overview" that is necessary in framing the discussion. She takes us back to the time of the Declaration of Independence, where Thomas Jefferson says that "all men are created equal, with an inalienable rights for the pursuit of liberty, freedom and happiness as governed by the laws of the land" (not an exact quote, but pretty close). Yet, at the same time the hypocrisy was that slaves were counted as 3/5 of a man for demographic and political purposes. Therefore rendering 40% of the African-American population "invisible". Those dynamics persist to this day, as blacks are still underrepresented, and given a disproportionate share and allocations, especially when it comes from federal/state assistance.
It is estimated that as of 2009, fully up to 5% of African-American men were not accounted for in the national statistics. The reasons vary from the legacy of slavery, not wanting to be tracked and traced, homelessness, incarcerations, etc.
These are just a few of the items that were shared with us in this book, and anyone with a "social conscience" will find this book intriguing and helpful, especially along with the historical overviews, as to how/why American penal systems continue to be bursting at the seams, disproportionately so with prisoners of color.
Incarcerating people, be it for petty or felony crimes, is only "a very small part of the overall puzzle" and needs to be coupled with "reentry into society programs, education and mentoring programs, job skill set training programs, mental health assistance, family dynamics, and so much more. We all have a lot to do in "getting our oars into the water" and will just have to keep pushing on to better solutions.
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