In Their Names, Lenore Anderson
In Their Names, Lenore Anderson
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In Their Names
The Untold Story of Victims' Rights, Mass Incarceration, and the Future of Public Safety

Author: Lenore Anderson

Narrator: Misty Monroe

Unabridged: 10 hr 50 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 08/29/2023

Synopsis

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 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.

About Lenore Anderson

A former punk drummer turned prosecutor, Lenore Anderson is the founder and president of the Alliance for Safety and Justice. She is a former chief of policy at the San Francisco District Attorney's Office, former director of public safety for the Oakland mayor, and the recipient of a James Irvine Foundation Leadership Award and a Frank Carrington Crime Victim Attorney Award. The author of In Their Names, she lives in Oakland, California.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Caitlin on October 20, 2022

This book, which focuses on the way the victims’ rights movements of the 90s expanded mass incarceration without helping the majority of victims, should be required reading. Anderson eloquently traces the rise of victims’ rights movements to increases in incarceration rates to the rethinking of the......more

Goodreads review by Jeff on October 02, 2022

Timely Conversation Needs Even Better Documentation. The timing of this book, releasing just a week before Election Day in the United States, could perhaps be *slightly* better - a month earlier would have allowed it and its ideas to be discussed more during the final days of the campaign. And to be......more

Goodreads review by Angelique on October 14, 2022

Lenore Anderson does an excellent job of advocating for criminal justice reform that prioritizes the needs of victims. Through the use of both peer-reviewed research and the inclusion of vignettes of actual victims' experiences, the reader can't help but be swayed by the overwhelming evidence that c......more

Goodreads review by Morgan on October 13, 2022

In Their Names shows how the victims’ rights movement has been used by the justice system to further a law and order approach that harms victims and continues mass incarceration. Anderson does a great job of showing how we fail victims, the progress made, and where we go in the future. Thank you to......more

Goodreads review by Melissa on November 29, 2022

The book is about highlighting and, hopefully, changing the relationship between victim and the criminal Justice system so that there is a better outcome for all. I raced through this book. Three strikes laws, mandatory minimums, more prisons, the history of how we decide who a “worthy” victim is an......more

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