Word: book
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...kids had plenty of reasons to love the books too. Percy hates school, has a lot of attitude and is given to back talk. His first supernatural act in the book is to make a toilet violently discharge its contents over an adversary--an episode that was, probably wisely, omitted from the film. Even the gods come off hipper, and enhanced by mnemonic imagery. Who could forget that Apollo is god of the sun after he turns up in a flying red convertible Maserati Spyder...
...Lockup Factor In his book Why Crime Rates Fell, Tufts University sociologist John Conklin concluded that up to half of the improvement was due to a single factor: more people in prison. The U.S. prison population grew by more than half a million during the 1990s and continued to grow, although more slowly, in the next decade. Go back half a century: as sentencing became more lenient in the 1960s and '70s, the crime rate started to rise. When lawmakers responded to the crime wave by building prisons and mandating tough sentences, the number of prisoners increased and the number...
...also showed signs of promise, having earned his high school diploma a year ahead of schedule. Betts gradually learned to navigate the violence and boredom of prison and emerged in 2006 ready to launch a respectable life, enrolling in college, getting married and writing a book called A Question of Freedom. He looks on those prison years as a costly void, "a waste of society's time and money in the sense that I didn't get any rehabilitation or any educational opportunities." Most inmates, Betts continues, can't do what he has done; they don't have the tools...
...social fabric. Ideally, they connect people to constructive projects and well-ordered institutions. They foster self-discipline and reward responsibility. Some optimists theorize that crime rates might continue to drop in coming years as police pit their strength against a dwindling army of criminals. In his recent book, When Brute Force Fails, UCLA's Kleiman argues that new strategies for targeting repeat offenders - including reforms to make probation an effective sanction rather than a feckless joke - could cut crime and reduce prison populations simultaneously. Safer communities, in turn, might produce more hopeful and well-disciplined kids. It's a sweet...
Historian Howard Zinn's remarkable work, including his most famous book, A People's History of the United States, is summarized best in his own words. His primary concern, he once explained, was "the countless small actions of unknown people" that lie at the roots of the great moments of history--a record that would be profoundly misleading, and seriously disempowering, if torn from such roots. Howard, who died Jan. 27 at 87, was devoted to the empowerment of these unknowns...