2022 Book Club: Ghettoside by Jill Leovy
Something for you to start reading over your Holiday Break
I know some of you have been wondering where this blog has gone! It has been a few months since I posted, primarily due to just general life busyness, but also due to a bit of good old-fashioned writer’s block keeping me from finishing a couple of pieces that are hopefully 80% done. I hope that I will return to some of these during the next few weeks, and you will get a few more pieces from me before the year ends (hopefully starting early next week!).
In the meantime, though, I wanted to announce the 2022 book club. Some of you are new here, so it is worth explaining a little backstory: my day job involves working for a faith-based non-profit that asks me to do my part in fundraising for my salary. Years ago, I started an annual tradition of giving everyone who gives a significant gift a book as a thank you for their donation over the calendar year. Last year, I realized this tradition should be formalized a little more into a proper book club, with some time where interested folks can join in a discussion to share their thoughts on the book. The book, Golden Gates by Conor Doughtery, was a hit for many of you, so I thought I would bring it back with a new book for 2022.
This year’s book is one I read in early 2021 but still resonated with me profoundly: Ghettoside by Jill Leovy.
Leovy wrote the book as an LA Times journalist embedded with an LAPD station in South Los Angeles for almost ten years. She used that time spent on the beat to paint a fascinating picture about the history and reality of interactions between the police and the community in South LA. Ghettoside is widely regarded as one of the essential contemporary books on American Criminal Justice and has been praised on both Left and Right. It also is very readable and not bogged down by academic theory or pretension. I am demoralized that, with all the national conversation on criminal justice recently, many people feel they cannot find nuanced discussions on the subject to learn from other perspectives and change their minds. This blog aims to be a source of nuance and perspective-taking, so I hope that however you lean politically, your thinking can change in productive ways by reading the book (mine certainly was!).and
For me, the most interesting part of Ghettoside is that way that its approach to detailing the reality of the criminal justice system does not really fall into either side of the political spectrum. On the Right, the focus tends to be ways that crime harms individuals and social trust, while on the Left, the focus tends to be on inequalities in the state’s response to crime, and the need for reforming the broader system. But Ghettoside takes a slightly different tact: it looks specifically at how the state’s failure to adequately respond to violent crime is itself a source of inequality, and she paints a picture of how it undermines the legitimacy of the criminal justice system in South LA. She argues that South LA, and Black communities throughout the US, are simultaneously both over-policed when it comes to quality of life crime and under-protected when it comes to violent crime. This nuance is one that I have been able to hear more clearly in my conversations with neighbors in East LA and other Angelinos through the years. Many simultaneously see the need for police reform to curb abuse and excess while also wanting the police to do more in their neighborhood.
I hope to discuss the book over zoom in late April, and more details will come closer to then. If you are not already a supporter, hopefully, the prospect of the book showing up on your doorstep can be a reason you consider giving this year. If you cannot donate but are interested in joining, you are welcome to find the book on your own and join in!
Thanks for your readership and support, and you can look forward to more content from me soon!