Cuz

This is an extremely interesting book. This review contains spoilers, but in my opinion they will not spoil the book, because the book as well as being a biography of a charming and gifted young man, is a meditation on the ‘War on Drugs,’ gang culture, and the politics that gave birth to them, is an attempt to put one man’s life in context, a man that had great gifts and excellent family support and still couldn’t survive his environment. The facts are not unpredictable.It details how a thoughtful intelligent young black man, apparently because of the privations his mother as a victim of domestic abuse was privy to, become involved in the pervasive gang culture, what Danielle Allen calls the ‘parastate,’ at the age of fifteen, and after being convicted of armed robbery at that age served a twelve year jail sentence, and a few years after his release was shot dead by his transgender lover, whom he had met in prison.Danielle was his cousin, an academic, and was close to her ‘Cuz’ all his life, and so the book is also a personal testament.The book is also a decent piece of sociology on the US prison system, and court system, showing how lack of money in the justice system because of the policy of locking up so many people corrupts and renders inefficient that same system, so that only a fraction of the homicides that were once solved now result in convictions.You might want to connect up the story in this book with the recent TV series, ‘Snowfall,’ which details the drugs for arms deals promoted by President Reagan which laid the foundations of the present problems.

A good read with lots of useful context. Very moving

Love this book so far! Really insightful and touching.

Part memoir of her cousin, Michael, part devastating analysis of the US justice and penal system, I found Danielle Allen’s book, Cuz, utterly fascinating and thought-provoking. I don’t read a lot of non-fiction (although I think perhaps I should) but this book jumped out at me on NetGalley because of the intriguing story and the author’s personal connection with its subject. (A note on the book’s title – Michael was Danielle’s cousin, of course, but we also learn that ‘cuz’ was a term used by a particular gang in Los Angeles.)In the first section of the book, one quickly recognises the author’s feeling of regret that her attempts to help Michael make a new life for himself on his release from prison in 2006 ultimately ended in failure. She questions whether she could have done more but perhaps Michael’s rehabilitation could never have been managed in the manner of a task list. What the author and the family didn’t know at the time was that there were always people and connections pulling Michael back in the direction of the criminal subculture.The author’s academic rigour is evident in her assembling of the available evidence and her analysis of the systemic issues raised by Michael’s life and death. Allen examines the complex web of factors that led to Michael’s involvement in the original carjacking for which he was convicted, his sentencing and his imprisonment. Her descriptions of the soulless and depressing experience of visiting him in prison are especially powerful. There are also particularly interesting sections on the concept of the ‘parastate.’I’ll be honest and say that, at first, I found the structure of the book, with its frequent changes of timeline, a little distracting. The author has chosen not to tell Michael’s story in a linear, chronological fashion but to start with his murder interspersed with his release from prison, only addressing his childhood and upbringing towards the end of the book. However, in a way, I can now see this structure mirrors the author’s own journey of discovery about Michael. He was perhaps never the person he seemed from the outside; instead he was troubled, lacking in direction, open to being manipulated by others and tempted by easy options.The book contains wonderful photographs of Michael and his family, including many from his childhood. I found the contrast between the happy, smiling child in the photographs and the troubled adult described in the book very sad and quite moving. Sadly, one gets a sense of someone always on a trajectory to the untimely death that eventually awaited him.Reading Cuz gave me a fascinating, if troubling, insight into many of the social issues facing the Western world today: gang culture, drugs, racial inequality, the effectiveness (or rather, ineffectiveness) of the justice and penal system. The author proposes a particular solution to the problems she outlines but I was left wondering if there will ever be the political will to pursue such a course. I somehow doubt it in the current political environment.

I hated this book. Don't get me wrong, it is well written and catches your interest from the first. That's not why I hated it. It was so real, so raw. I know prisons and what they do to a person. I have known and worked with people who have been incarcerated. Several of them are back in prison; several of them are dead. I know visits and the pain of leaving a loved one when the visit is over. Allen captures the emotions well. I would recommend this book for the simple reason that so many people in this country don't know or care about prisons even though we have over 2 million prisoners in this country and they are all broken when they come out. Some manage to live in society but many are overwhelmed and wind up going back to what they know. It is way past time to rethink our criminal "justice" system and the prison industry.

I decided to read CUZ after I heard an interview with the author on NPR and I am glad that I read it. I taught students who lived in situations like Michael's and some of them did escape the gangs, drugs and poverty. Based upon my work experience and the observations I made and the experiences I had, I know that the average person has NO understanding of how poverty effects children emotionally, physically and intellectually. The author's description of the legal system's minorities and drugs is sickening.

Danielle Allen’s previous book, Talking to Strangers was a revelation of deep scholarship applied where it really matters toward healing the massive ills of today’s society. Now she courageously follows the trail of a personal and family’s shattering pain and investigates the question WHY to tie it into a deeper understanding of what it reveals about the choices we have made as a society that have brought us to the tragedy of a “criminal justice system” that is unprecedented in the world. She helps us feel the pain of this national tragedy on the deeply personal level. And she offers a significant change in direction to begin to reverse it.

I honestly had no idea how difficult our prison system makes it for those it releases after they served time to reintegrate into society. Even in a case where a realistic plan was made by a loving relative of the inmate, it was destined to fail because the inmate was forced to stay after his release in the same neighborhood where he had committed his crime decades earlier. This is a must read about an arbitrary decision by a judge to treat a teenager as an adult, a supportive family and a cousin who tried hard to help the young man to start his life over in a better setting.his release same town wcrime was committed so many years earlier. in the same

Excellent book. Mass incarceration is a well trodden area, but the writer has a personal connection which makes for an incredibly engaging read. I felt unbelievable frustration for Ms Allen. Her and her family did all they could. But like she says in the book, can you blame someone who is blindfolded for falling into a pit?