Page 77 - The Economist20171214

The Economist December 16th 2017 Books and arts 77
2 two being hunting and plant foraging—has American prisons MrGodsey’ssixcentral chapterscentres on
remained vital to human civilisation. It a different systemic flaw: denial, ambition,
seems astonishing that a pursuit so funda- Lockup nation bias, memory, intuition and tunnel vision.
mentaltohumansocietyhaslackedacom- People in all fields, of course, commit
prehensive historian for so long. Brian Fa- these deeply human sins. Tunnel vision,
gan’s is the first general survey of its kind, conformity born of a desire to please
and it is packed with intriguingdetails (like bosses and not to rockthe boat, answering
the Chinese training cormorants to catch Blind Injustice: A Former Prosecutor difficult questions not by trying to work
fish for them) as well as with persuasive Exposes the Psychology and Politics of out the right answer but by determining
generalisation. Wrongful Convictions. By Mark Godsey. what is best for your team: such behaviour
One of the barriers has been the near- is not unique to America’s criminal-justice
invisibility of fishing’s past role. Fishers University of California Press; 264 pages; system. But for police and prosecutors, it
$29.95 and £24.95
have always been secretive by nature: can deprive people of their liberty and
“anonymous folk”, unlikely either to dis- Inside Private Prisons: An American lives. Last month, for instance, Wilbert
cuss profitable grounds or to leave much Dilemma in the Age of Mass Incarceration. Jones left a prison in Baton Rouge, Louisi-
trace in the historical record. The perish- By Lauren-Brooke Eisen. Columbia University ana, after almost 46 years. A judge threw
ability ofmost oftheir equipment has also Press; 336 pages; $32. To be published in out his conviction for rape because the
left only a small archaeological mark. Britain in January; £26.95 prosecution failed to turn over to the de-
Complex societies and massive projects— fence evidence that might have helped his
from the Pyramids in Egypt to Angkor Wat O COUNTRY imprisons a larger share case (the state is appealing). Mr Jones en-
in Cambodia—have depended upon a vast Nof its people than America. Its incar- tered prison at19; he is now 65.
“anonymous background” of mobile food ceration rate—693 of every 100,000—is Mr Godsey’s work is memorable be-
producers who foraged, hunted and nearly five times Britain’s, six times Cana- cause he is able to show precisely how
fished, depending on the season and on da’s and 15 times Japan’s. And that rate these flaws work in action. He describes
which edible organisms were available. masks huge variations: Washington, DC, prosecutors routinely denying requests to
Modern science has magnified the in- Louisiana and Georgia each lock up more give inmates DNA tests, even though these
formation obtainable from tiny clues, and than one in every100 residents. Why? could help free them. Prosecutors think of
it is often by focusing on these that Mr Fa- “Blind Injustice” tries to answer that themselves as the good guys and, there-
gan is able to paint a picture that is satisfy- complex question from an unusual per- fore, their opponents as bad. This leads to
ing, if necessarily at times impressionistic spective. The author, MarkGodsey, used to routine dehumanisation, such as when
and informed by guesswork. He describes, be a federal prosecutor in New York. He prosecutors in Chicago competed in a
for instance, how the isotopic signature of went on to co-found the Ohio Innocence “two-ton contest” to see who could be the
fish bonesrevealswhere the fish lived, and Project, which works to free the wrongly first to indict 4,000lb of human flesh
hence whetherornot the fishingwas local. convicted. His book is about how his ca- (which led prosecutors to be especially
Healsoexplainshowfishboneanalysis,by reer change also changed his outlook, by hard on overweight defendants).
divulging the approximate age of fish showingup “problemsin the system that I, He is particularly—and with good rea-
caught, has found signs of population de- as a prosecutor, should have seen, but son—tough on elected judges, who know
pletion and overfishing (as older fish died about which I had simply been in denial”. that being “tough on crime” will always
off and reliance on younger, smaller, less And it is about the police and prosecu- win more votes than promises of sober
fertile fish increased). And he shows how tors who uphold that system—the “nor- fairness and probity; and on forensic sci-
analysis of human bones reveals that fam- mal, regular people…who would help an ence, a contributing factor in nearly halfof
ily diets often differed; that ancient cul- old man cross the road, or who would all wrongful convictions (second only to
tures, in other words, were often quite shovel the snow from a sick neighbour’s false eyewitness accounts). He ends the
inegalitarian. driveway, [but who] go backto their offices book on a hopeful note, though. States
Throughout, discussion of past over- and commit acts of heartbreaking, callous acrossthe countryare implementingsome
fishing or earlier climate change—“palaeo- injustice…because they are operating un- of the changes he recommends. These in-
climatology”—hangs heavy with the ques- der a bureaucratic fog of denial.” Each of clude recording interrogations, standardis- 1
tion of the impact on human society both
of overfishing and of global warming.
Modern climate scientists face precisely
the same limited but influential denial as
did those who first argued in favour of
husbanding, and trying to preserve the
oceans’ fish stocks.
“Fishing” is a valuable book as well as
an interesting one. It shows vividly how
human civilisations have depended on
harvests from the sea, just as they did on
harvests from the fields. At times, it strays
beyond what might appeal to the general
reader: an abundance of references to
“macrozooplankton”, or to a “site known
as SCRI-109” made this non-specialist feel
that the water was occasionally too deep.
In general, though, Mr Fagan succeeds in
providing an admirable primer for the
enthusiast and a welcome tool for the his-
torian—as well as a salutary reminder of
the lessons ofinaction. 7 Layers of uniformity