A Government Out Of Sight

A Government Out of Sight revises our understanding of the ways in which Americans turned to the national government throughout the nineteenth century.

A Government Out of Sight revises our understanding of the ways in which Americans turned to the national government throughout the nineteenth century.

Nigeria represents one of the United States’ most important relationships in Africa. Despite U.S. security sector and humanitarian assistance programs, ten years of violent insurgency in northeast Nigeria have led to massive humanitarian needs for more than seven million people, and the crisis shows no signs of abating. Ongoing restrictions by the government of Nigeria on humanitarian action threaten U.S. policy goals of improved humanitarian outcomes and a reduction in the presence of violent terrorist organizations. This report unpacks the challenges for humanitarian actors, the role of the United States and other donor institutions in meeting humanitarian needs, and the effectiveness of the Nigerian government’s response. Jacob D. Kurtzer provides concrete recommendations for mitigating the civilian impact of the conflict in northeast Nigeria.

At the heart of his book is his conclusion that prison simply does not work, failing on three fundamental levels. The view of the popular media is that when prisoners are locked up they cannot commit crime. This is not true. Podmore shows how crime actually proliferates in prison, how serious organised crime is allowed to flourish there through bad management, and how the UK's prisons are a multi-million pound investment bank for the black economy. The public sees prison as a deterrent. This book shows that whilst it may deter the white, middle classes, for the majority of those behind bars it is merely a social tax, or as Norman Stanley Fletcher was told in Porridge, 'an occupational hazard'. It shows that for many across the spectrum of social exclusion it is a place of safety and preferable to life on the streets. Also, whatever spin is put on the figures it is clear that the majority of those leaving prison will quickly reoffend. OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND is a remarkable book that seeks to ignite a debate across society about a vital subject we ignore at our peril.

If health policy truly seeks to improve population health and reduce health disparities, addressing homelessness must be a priority Homelessness is a public health problem. Nearly a decade after the great recession of 2008, homelessness rates are once again rising across the United States, with the number of persons experiencing homelessness surpassing the number of individuals suffering from opioid use disorders annually. Homelessness presents serious adverse consequences for physical and mental health, and ultimately worsens health disparities for already at-risk low-income and minority populations. While some state-level policies have been implemented to address homelessness, these services are often not designed to target chronic homelessness and subsequently fail in policy implementation by engendering barriers to local homeless policy solutions. In the face of this crisis, Ungoverned and Out of Sight seeks to understand the political processes influencing adoption of best-practice solutions to reduce chronic homelessness in US municipalities. Drawing on unique research from three exemplar municipal case studies in San Francisco, CA, Atlanta, GA, and Shreveport, LA, this volume explores conflicting policy solutions in the highly decentralized homeless policy space and provides recommendations to improve homeless governance systems and deliver policies that will successfully diminish chronic homelessness. Until issues of authority and fragmentation across competing or misaligned policy spaces are addressed through improved coordination and oversight, local and national policies intended to reduce homelessness may not succeed.

Youth crime is simultaneously a social problem and an intrinsic part of consumer culture: while images of gangs and gangsters are used to sell global commodities, young people not in work and education are labelled as antisocial and susceptible to crime. This book focuses on the lives of a group of young adults living in a deprived housing estate situated on the edge of a large city in the North of England. It investigates the importance of fashion, music and drugs in young people's lives, providing a richly detailed ethnographic account of the realities of exclusion, and explaining how young people become involved in crime and drug use. Young men and women describe their own personal experiences of exclusion in education, employment and the public sphere. They describe their history of exclusion as 'the life', and the term identifies how young people grew up as objects of suspicion in the eyes of an affluent majority. While social exclusion continues to be seen as a consequence of young people's behaviour, Out of Sight: crime, youth and exclusion in modern Britain examines how stigmatising poor communities has come to define Britain's consumer society. The book challenges the view underlying government policy that social exclusion is a product of crime, antisocial behaviour and drug use, and in focusing on one socially deprived neighbourhood it promotes a different way of seeing the problematic relationship between socially excluded young people, society and government.

A provocative analysis of labor, globalization, and environmental harm by the award-winning historian and author of A History of America in Ten Strikes. In the current state of our globalized economy, corporations have no incentive to protect their workers or the environment. Jobs moves seamlessly across national borders while the laws that protect us from rapacious behavior remain bound by them. As a result, labor exploitation and toxic pollution remain standard practice. In Out of Sight, Erik Loomis—a historian of both the labor and environmental movements—follows a narrative that runs from the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City to the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory outside of Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 2013. He demonstrates that our modern systems of industrial production are just as dirty and abusive as they were during the Industrial Revolution and the Gilded Age. The only difference is that the ugly side of manufacturing is now hidden in faraway places where workers are most vulnerable. In this Choice Outstanding Academic Title, Loomis shows that the great environmental victories of twentieth-century America—the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the EPA—were actually union victories. Using this history as a call to action, Out of Sight proposes a path toward regulations that follow corporations wherever they do business, putting the power back in workers’ hands. “The story told here is tragic and important.” —Bill McKibben “Erik Loomis prescribes how activists can take back our country—for workers and those who care about the health of our planet.” —Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH)