Disorderly Conduct

ISBN: 0252019059

Author: Bruce Jackson

Condition: New

From Library Journal This is a collection of essays published over the last 25 years by a distinguished professor and the director of the Center for Studies in American Culture at SUNY-Buffalo. The essays "are about life on the ground in America and the gritty side of public policy" and deal "with things Jackson saw and people he knew." Jackson's topics include the white-collar drug scene, the war on drugs, the growth of the prison population, everyday violence, and the persecution of Leslie Fiedler by a two-bit Buffalo cop. Interesting introductions update each essay and try to show that persistent social problems such as drugs and crime have gone largely unresolved since the 1960s. Jackson thinks that the war on drugs is a costly sham and supports their legalization. An optional purchase for academic libraries supporting programs in criminology and other social sciences.-Jeffrey R. Herold, Bucyrus P.L., OhioCopyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. Product Description                 This gathering of essays by the maverick social observer Bruce Jackson         will stir memories, give insights, and provoke strong reactions. Selections         range freely over a wide spectrum of American social conditions, public         policy, and crime and punishment issues from the mid-1960s to the present.         The essays remain remarkably fresh and crucially central to issues in         contemporary American society. They will appeal to the general reader         as well as to readers with more specialized interests in the criminal         justice system and social policy.         From Publishers Weekly When he stops trying to sound like Sam Spade or Jack Kerouac and sticks to analysis, Jackson, director of the Center for Studies in American Culture at the State University of New York, illuminates the contradictions of America in vignettes from across the landscape. Written over a span of 25 years, they depict such subjects as red-baiting in a Kentucky coal town, life in a Texas prison, antiwar demonstrators at the Pentagon in 1967 and the witch-hunt against literary critic Leslie Fiedler. But when Jackson chronicles his own adventures, he goes off the mark with displays of the overdramatic: "The stripper was a pretty blonde with a sad piquant mouth that didn't go very well with the rest of her face which wasn't very sad or very much of anything." Civil rights attorney Kunstler's foreword is slight. Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. From the Back Cover This gathering of essays by the maverick social observer Bruce Jackson will stir memories, give insights, and provoke strong reactions. Selections range freely over a wide spectrum of American social conditions, public policy, and crime and punishment issues from the mid-1960s to the present: the pulse of America as felt through a row of bayonet-carrying troops on the Pentagon porch; how prisoners get through the toughest days in the toughest prison in Texas, and how narcotics cops do the same on their beats in Harlem; miners and mine owners trying to get a piece of the dream in eastern Kentucky; an upper-middle-class party in Chicago where, instead of alcohol, the host served some of the best pharmaceutical dope available in the Midwest. Jackson cares deeply about the causes and ideas he explores. A master of economical and sharp expression, he appproaches(sic) the American social scene with a rare independence and vision. Readers will learn, for example, why he believes that "most of the people who commit crimes which could send them to prison do not go", and why the prison population "reflects only that part of the criminal world that isn't smart, rich, dishonest, or lucky enough to stay out of jail". The essays in this book remain remarkably fresh and crucially central to issues in contemporary American society. They will appeal to the general reader as well as to readers with more specialized interests in the criminal justice