Flog It

Neil Steinberg wrote a good review of In Defense of Flogging in my old home-town Chicago Sun-Times.

I’m particularly impressed that caught what I thought was obvious:

Moskos has brilliantly used the old PR trick of marrying a complex, off-putting topic to a fascinating one. If you want to trick people into reading about penal reform, brandish a whip. And be brief.

Steinberg goes on:

In Defense of Flogging is 154 pages long. I read it in less than a day, and it is an eloquent cry to address a problem that we spend billions of dollars trying to ignore. “We’ve run out of options,” Moskos writes. “What we have in America is a massive, terrifying and out-of-control experiment in incarceration.”

There’s no arguing about that.