JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

Here’s a very striking (and please not “arresting”) pamphlet cover:

The appearance and tenor of this pamphlet is very deceptive–my initial reaction was an eyebrow-raising surprise, followed by a humorous deception, all aroused by the incredible, screaming cover design and the somewhat bizarre stories and headlines in the text.  How can one refuse an article like this (seen below)? The “funny” part of the pamphlet was stopped dead cold when I started to actually read  the  stories accompanying  the  sub-title malaprops.

The point underlying all of these design elements which seem so much sugar to my eyes was that the prisons in Chicago were horrific–especially for African Americans, a point which is not explicitly made but alluded to.  (Integration of jails and prisons was still a long way off–the Supreme Court would hear a case involving Alabama prisons and rule against their explicit segregation in March 1968.)  None of this seemed particularly surprising to me, except that there were just so many reports–the shear numbers of bad prison conditions was just staggering.