"With academic rigor and literary verve, in this excellent and timely book, Dagan and Teles insightfully describe, analyze, and assess the conservative trek from a consensus on get-tough crime policies to a coalition favoring expansive justice system reforms."
--John J. DiIulio, Jr., Frederic Fox Leadership Professor, University of Pennsylvania, former Director, White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives
"With clarity, concision, and an astute understanding of what makes politics tick, David Dagan and Steven Teles peer inside the black box of social change and show how a handful of strange bedfellows catalyzed seemingly impossible reforms-and how it might happen again. Cynics, beware: Prison Break will restore your faith that, with a lot of smarts and a little luck, American politics can still deliver."
--Jonathan Rauch, Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution
"Prison Break offers a fluid and interesting account of how the right moved 'left' on policies to reduce the size of U.S. prison populations. Whether this burgeoning movement has legs is the real question. Dagan and Teles offer important insights here, as well."
--Tracey L. Meares, Walton Hale Hamilton Professor of Law, Yale Law School
"Can gridlock be unlocked? David Dagan and Steven Teles say it can, and explain how. The key is allowing people to change their minds without leaving their political tribes. Using the conservative movement opposing mass incarceration as a case study, Prison Break provides a dazzling analysis of the possibility, and the difficulty, of reform in the face of polarization."
--Mark A. R. Kleiman, Professor Emeritus of Public Policy, UCLA
"In Prison Break, David Dagan and Steven Teles tell the remarkable story of how the politics of crime has shifted-in particular, how a growing movement on the political right has sought to redefine conservatives as 'smart on crime' rather than simply 'tough on crime.' In so doing, they add significantly to our understanding of a vital public issue and the surprising constellation of reform forces that has emerged."
-- Brink Lindsey, Cato Institute
"Dagan and Teles have written a thoughtful book that traces the decline in favor of so-called "tough-on-crime" positions among conservatives. They convincingly argue that right-wingers have turned against mass incarceration for reasons beyond the exorbitant costs of locking up and monitoring people in record numbers. Instead, a number of factors, including shifting demographics, lower crime rates, and religious convictions, have combined to persuade conservatives that there are simply too many Americans in prisons."
--
Pacific Standard"Highly recommended." --
CHOICE
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