Cuz: An American Tragedy

I hated this book. Don't get me wrong, it is well written and catches your interest from the first. That's not why I hated it. It was so real, so raw. I know prisons and what they do to a person. I have known and worked with people who have been incarcerated. Several of them are back in prison; several of them are dead. I know visits and the pain of leaving a loved one when the visit is over. Allen captures the emotions well. I would recommend this book for the simple reason that so many people in this country don't know or care about prisons even though we have over 2 million prisoners in this country and they are all broken when they come out. Some manage to live in society but many are overwhelmed and wind up going back to what they know. It is way past time to rethink our criminal "justice" system and the prison industry.

I decided to read CUZ after I heard an interview with the author on NPR and I am glad that I read it. I taught students who lived in situations like Michael's and some of them did escape the gangs, drugs and poverty. Based upon my work experience and the observations I made and the experiences I had, I know that the average person has NO understanding of how poverty effects children emotionally, physically and intellectually. The author's description of the legal system's minorities and drugs is sickening.

Danielle Allen’s previous book, Talking to Strangers was a revelation of deep scholarship applied where it really matters toward healing the massive ills of today’s society. Now she courageously follows the trail of a personal and family’s shattering pain and investigates the question WHY to tie it into a deeper understanding of what it reveals about the choices we have made as a society that have brought us to the tragedy of a “criminal justice system” that is unprecedented in the world. She helps us feel the pain of this national tragedy on the deeply personal level. And she offers a significant change in direction to begin to reverse it.

I honestly had no idea how difficult our prison system makes it for those it releases after they served time to reintegrate into society. Even in a case where a realistic plan was made by a loving relative of the inmate, it was destined to fail because the inmate was forced to stay after his release in the same neighborhood where he had committed his crime decades earlier. This is a must read about an arbitrary decision by a judge to treat a teenager as an adult, a supportive family and a cousin who tried hard to help the young man to start his life over in a better setting.his release same town wcrime was committed so many years earlier. in the same

Highly intelligent and moving account of author's attempt to redirect her struggling cousin. Refuses to oversimplify but also exposes the brokenness of our criminal "justice" system. Tragic, but not depressing. I wish we could have a nationwide discussion on this book, but I'll settle for discusing with my university colleagues. Perhaps we can make some difference.

Excellent book. Mass incarceration is a well trodden area, but the writer has a personal connection which makes for an incredibly engaging read. I felt unbelievable frustration for Ms Allen. Her and her family did all they could. But like she says in the book, can you blame someone who is blindfolded for falling into a pit?

What a touching and powerful story. I listened to her interview on NPR about the book and I started crying. I had to read it. It will not disappoint. I couldn't put my tablet down. I knew our Justice system was flawed, but after reading this, I just didn't realize just how badly flawed and one sided it really is.

No one has a perfect life. The life Michael was given however, was doomed from the start. Another time, another place, this man

This is an extremely interesting book. This review contains spoilers, but in my opinion they will not spoil the book, because the book as well as being a biography of a charming and gifted young man, is a meditation on the ‘War on Drugs,’ gang culture, and the politics that gave birth to them, is an attempt to put one man’s life in context, a man that had great gifts and excellent family support and still couldn’t survive his environment. The facts are not unpredictable.It details how a thoughtful intelligent young black man, apparently because of the privations his mother as a victim of domestic abuse was privy to, become involved in the pervasive gang culture, what Danielle Allen calls the ‘parastate,’ at the age of fifteen, and after being convicted of armed robbery at that age served a twelve year jail sentence, and a few years after his release was shot dead by his transgender lover, whom he had met in prison.Danielle was his cousin, an academic, and was close to her ‘Cuz’ all his life, and so the book is also a personal testament.The book is also a decent piece of sociology on the US prison system, and court system, showing how lack of money in the justice system because of the policy of locking up so many people corrupts and renders inefficient that same system, so that only a fraction of the homicides that were once solved now result in convictions.You might want to connect up the story in this book with the recent TV series, ‘Snowfall,’ which details the drugs for arms deals promoted by President Reagan which laid the foundations of the present problems.

A good read with lots of useful context. Very moving

Love this book so far! Really insightful and touching.