The Steel-Bar Motel Book

I read the 12th edition. I usually don't give two-star reviews, so I wanted to explain. (I typically don't finish any book that is feeling like one or two stars after 3-4 chapters, and it doesn't seem fair to rate a book I don't finish -- but I'm doing the 52 book challenge this year so I decided to push through this time).

This seemed like a decent primer on the correctional system in America, with a decent Eurocentric history of corrections. But the authors' own agenda was pretty evident at times, which seemed odd whether I agreed with them (e.g. more resources should be devoted to rehabilitation as opposed to punishment and control) or disagreed with them (e.g. private, for-profit prisons are a "promising" venture).

The authors also made strange decisions about which terms they would highlight and define in the sidebar. For example, I didn't need them to tell me what "appeal" or "expunge" means, but they felt no need to explain "certiorari" so I had to Google it. :)

Another thing that irritated me was their list of typical traits of female offenders, which included "deficient parenting skills." This obviously was not present on the list of typical traits of male offenders.

And finally, there were lots of typos considering this was the 12th edition. (I mean, excuse any typos in this post ' but it's a Goodreads review, not the 12th edition of an educational text.)

So overall... two stars.