Download or read book Are Prisons Obsolete written by Angela Y. Davis and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2011-01-04 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With her characteristic brilliance, grace and radical audacity, Angela Y. Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of the prison. As she quite correctly notes, American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. For generations of Americans, the abolition of slavery was sheerest illusion. Similarly,the entrenched system of racial segregation seemed to last forever, and generations lived in the midst of the practice, with few predicting its passage from custom. The brutal, exploitative (dare one say lucrative?) convict-lease system that succeeded formal slavery reaped millions to southern jurisdictions (and untold miseries for tens of thousands of men, and women). Few predicted its passing from the American penal landscape. Davis expertly argues how social movements transformed these social, political and cultural institutions, and made such practices untenable. In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Professor Davis seeks to illustrate that the time for the prison is approaching an end. She argues forthrightly for "decarceration", and argues for the transformation of the society as a whole.
Download or read book Are Prisons Obsolete written by Angela Y. Davis and published by . This book was released on 2010-10-08 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With her characteristic brilliance, grace and radical audacity, Angela Y. Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in American life; the abolition of the prison. As she quite correctly notes, American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. For generations of Americans, the abolition of slavery was sheerest illusion. Similarly, the entrenched system of racial segregation seemed to last forever, and generations lived in the midst of the practice, with few predicting its passage from custom. The brutal, exploitative (dare one say lucrative?) convict-lease system that succeeded formal slavery reaped millions to southern jurisdictions (and untold miseries for tens of thousands of men, and women). Few predicted its passing from the American penal landscape. Davis expertly argues how social movements transformed these social, political and cultural institutions, and made such practices untenable
Download or read book Abolition Democracy written by Angela Y. Davis and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2011-01-04 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revelations about U.S policies and practices of torture and abuse have captured headlines ever since the breaking of the Abu Ghraib prison story in April 2004. Since then, a debate has raged regarding what is and what is not acceptable behavior for the world’s leading democracy. It is within this context that Angela Davis, one of America’s most remarkable political figures, gave a series of interviews to discuss resistance and law, institutional sexual coercion, politics and prison. Davis talks about her own incarceration, as well as her experiences as "enemy of the state," and about having been put on the FBI’s "most wanted" list. She talks about the crucial role that international activism played in her case and the case of many other political prisoners. Throughout these interviews, Davis returns to her critique of a democracy that has been compromised by its racist origins and institutions. Discussing the most recent disclosures about the disavowed "chain of command," and the formal reports by the Red Cross and Human Rights Watch denouncing U.S. violation of human rights and the laws of war in Guantánamo, Afghanistan and Iraq, Davis focuses on the underpinnings of prison regimes in the United States.
Download or read book Instead of Prisons written by Prison Research Education Action Project and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published: Syracuse, N.Y.: Prison Research Education Action Project, 1976.
Download or read book Abolition Feminism Now written by Angela Y. Davis and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2022-01-18 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abolition. Feminism. Now. is a celebration of freedom work, a movement genealogy, a call to action, and a challenge to those who think of abolition and feminism as separate—even incompatible—political projects. In this remarkable collaborative work, leading scholar-activists Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie surface the often unrecognized genealogies of queer, anti-capitalist, internationalist, grassroots, and women-of-color-led feminist movements, struggles, and organizations that have helped to define abolition and feminism in the twenty-first century. This pathbreaking book also features illustrations documenting the work of grassroots organizers embodying abolitionist feminist practice. Amplifying the analysis and the theories of change generated out of vibrant community based organizing, Abolition. Feminism. Now. highlights necessary historical linkages, key internationalist learnings, and everyday practices to imagine a future where we can all thrive.
Download or read book If They Come in the Morning written by Angela Davis and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With race and the police once more burning issues, this classic work from one of America’s giants of black radicalism has lost none of its prescience or power The trial of Angela Davis is remembered as one of America’s most historic political trials, and no one can tell the story better than Davis herself. Opening with a letter from James Baldwin to Angela, and including contributions from numerous radicals and commentators such as Black Panthers George Jackson, Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale and Erica Huggins, this book is not only an account of Davis’s incarceration and the struggles surrounding it, but also perhaps the most comprehensive and thorough analysis of the prison system of the United States and the figure embodied in Davis’s arrest and imprisonment—the political prisoner. Since the book was written, the carceral system in the US has grown from strength to strength, with more of its black population behind bars than ever before. The scathing analysis of the role of prison and the policing of black populations offered by Davis and her comrades in this astonishing volume remains as relevant today as the day it was published.
Download or read book The Prison Industrial Complex written by Angela Davis and published by . This book was released on 2000-03-24 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ex Black Panther and now a leading academic dissident, Angela Davis has long been at the fore of the fight against the expansion of prisons. In this recent talk she reviews the background for the current prison building binge, the effects of mass incarceration on communities of colour, and particularly women of colour who are now one of the fastest growing segments of the US prison population. she also offers a personal view of her own time in prison and the imprisonment of others close to her. Double compact disc.
Download or read book The New Jim Crow written by Michelle Alexander and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the New York Times’s Best Books of the 21st Century Named one of the most important nonfiction books of the 21st century by Entertainment Weekly‚ Slate‚ Chronicle of Higher Education‚ Literary Hub, Book Riot‚ and Zora A tenth-anniversary edition of the iconic bestseller—"one of the most influential books of the past 20 years," according to the Chronicle of Higher Education—with a new preface by the author "It is in no small part thanks to Alexander's account that civil rights organizations such as Black Lives Matter have focused so much of their energy on the criminal justice system." —Adam Shatz, London Review of Books Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Most important of all, it has spawned a whole generation of criminal justice reform activists and organizations motivated by Michelle Alexander's unforgettable argument that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." As the Birmingham News proclaimed, it is "undoubtedly the most important book published in this century about the U.S." Now, ten years after it was first published, The New Press is proud to issue a tenth-anniversary edition with a new preface by Michelle Alexander that discusses the impact the book has had and the state of the criminal justice reform movement today.
Download or read book Golden Gulag written by Ruth Wilson Gilmore and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2007-01-08 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since 1980, the number of people in U.S. prisons has increased more than 450%. Despite a crime rate that has been falling steadily for decades, California has led the way in this explosion, with what a state analyst called "the biggest prison building project in the history of the world." Golden Gulag provides the first detailed explanation for that buildup by looking at how political and economic forces, ranging from global to local, conjoined to produce the prison boom. In an informed and impassioned account, Ruth Wilson Gilmore examines this issue through statewide, rural, and urban perspectives to explain how the expansion developed from surpluses of finance capital, labor, land, and state capacity. Detailing crises that hit California’s economy with particular ferocity, she argues that defeats of radical struggles, weakening of labor, and shifting patterns of capital investment have been key conditions for prison growth. The results—a vast and expensive prison system, a huge number of incarcerated young people of color, and the increase in punitive justice such as the "three strikes" law—pose profound and troubling questions for the future of California, the United States, and the world. Golden Gulag provides a rich context for this complex dilemma, and at the same time challenges many cherished assumptions about who benefits and who suffers from the state’s commitment to prison expansion.
Download or read book Prison by Any Other Name written by Maya Schenwar and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a new afterword from the authors, the critically praised indictment of widely embraced “alternatives to incarceration” Electronic monitoring. Locked-down drug treatment centers. House arrest. Mandated psychiatric treatment. Data driven surveillance. Extended probation. These are some of the key alternatives held up as cost effective substitutes for jails and prisons. But in a searing, “cogent critique” (Library Journal), Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law reveal that many of these so-called reforms actually weave in new strands of punishment and control, bringing new populations who would not otherwise have been subject to imprisonment under physical control by the state. Whether readers are seasoned abolitionists or are newly interested in sensible alternatives to retrograde policing and criminal justice policies and approaches, this highly praised book offers “a wealth of critical insights” that will help readers “tread carefully through the dizzying terrain of a world turned upside down” and “make sense of what should take the place of mass incarceration” (The Brooklyn Rail). With a foreword by Michelle Alexander, Prison by Any Other Name exposes how a kinder narrative of reform is effectively obscuring an agenda of social control, challenging us to question the ways we replicate the status quo when pursuing change, and offering a bolder vision for truly alternative justice practices.
Download or read book Freedom Is a Constant Struggle written by Angela Y. Davis and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2016-01-25 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this collection of essays, interviews, and speeches, the renowned activist examines today’s issues—from Black Lives Matter to prison abolition and more. Activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis has been a tireless fighter against oppression for decades. Now, the iconic author of Women, Race, and Class offers her latest insights into the struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world. Reflecting on the importance of black feminism, intersectionality, and prison abolitionism, Davis discusses the legacies of previous liberation struggles, from the Black Freedom Movement to the South African anti-Apartheid movement. She highlights connections and analyzes today’s struggles against state terror, from Ferguson to Palestine. Facing a world of outrageous injustice, Davis challenges us to imagine and build a movement for human liberation. And in doing so, she reminds us that “freedom is a constant struggle.” This edition of Freedom Is a Constant Struggle includes a foreword by Dr. Cornel West and an introduction by Frank Barat.
Download or read book Do Prisons Make Us Safer written by Steven Raphael and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 2009-01-22 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The number of people incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails more than quadrupled between 1975 and 2005, reaching the unprecedented level of over two million inmates today. Annual corrections spending now exceeds 64 billion dollars, and many of the social and economic burdens resulting from mass incarceration fall disproportionately on minority communities. Yet crime rates across the country have also dropped considerably during this time period. In Do Prisons Make Us Safer? leading experts systematically examine the complex repercussions of the massive surge in our nation's prison system. Do Prisons Make Us Safer? asks whether it makes sense to maintain such a large and costly prison system. The contributors expand the scope of previous analyses to include a number of underexplored dimensions, such as the fiscal impact on states, effects on children, and employment prospects for former inmates. Steven Raphael and Michael Stoll assess the reasons behind the explosion in incarceration rates and find that criminal behavior itself accounts for only a small fraction of the prison boom. Eighty-five percent of the trend can be attributed to "get tough on crime" policies that have increased both the likelihood of a prison sentence and the length of time served. Shawn Bushway shows that while prison time effectively deters and incapacitates criminals in the short term, long-term benefits such as overall crime reduction or individual rehabilitation are less clear cut. Amy Lerman conducts a novel investigation into the effects of imprisonment on criminal psychology and uncovers striking evidence that placement in a high security penitentiary leads to increased rates of violence and anger—particularly in the case of first time or minor offenders. Rucker Johnson documents the spill-over effects of parental incarceration—children who have had a parent serve prison time exhibit more behavioral problems than their peers. Policies to enhance the well-being of these children are essential to breaking a devastating cycle of poverty, unemployment, and crime. John Donohue's economic calculations suggest that alternative social welfare policies such as education and employment programs for at-risk youth may lower crime just as effectively as prisons, but at a much lower human cost. The cost of hiring a new teacher is roughly equal to the cost of incarcerating an additional inmate. The United States currently imprisons a greater proportion of its citizens than any other nation in the world. Until now, however, we've lacked systematic and comprehensive data on how this prison boom has affected families, communities, and our nation as a whole. Do Prisons Make Us Safer? provides a highly nuanced and deeply engaging account of one of the most dramatic policy developments in recent U.S. history.
Download or read book American Prison written by Shane Bauer and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-06-11 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An enraging, necessary look at the private prison system, and a convincing clarion call for prison reform.” —NPR.org New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2018 * One of President Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2018 * Winner of the 2019 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize * Winner of the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism * Winner of the 2019 RFK Book and Journalism Award * A New York Times Notable Book A ground-breaking and brave inside reckoning with the nexus of prison and profit in America: in one Louisiana prison and over the course of our country's history. In 2014, Shane Bauer was hired for $9 an hour to work as an entry-level prison guard at a private prison in Winnfield, Louisiana. An award-winning investigative journalist, he used his real name; there was no meaningful background check. Four months later, his employment came to an abrupt end. But he had seen enough, and in short order he wrote an exposé about his experiences that won a National Magazine Award and became the most-read feature in the history of the magazine Mother Jones. Still, there was much more that he needed to say. In American Prison, Bauer weaves a much deeper reckoning with his experiences together with a thoroughly researched history of for-profit prisons in America from their origins in the decades before the Civil War. For, as he soon realized, we can't understand the cruelty of our current system and its place in the larger story of mass incarceration without understanding where it came from. Private prisons became entrenched in the South as part of a systemic effort to keep the African-American labor force in place in the aftermath of slavery, and the echoes of these shameful origins are with us still. The private prison system is deliberately unaccountable to public scrutiny. Private prisons are not incentivized to tend to the health of their inmates, or to feed them well, or to attract and retain a highly-trained prison staff. Though Bauer befriends some of his colleagues and sympathizes with their plight, the chronic dysfunction of their lives only adds to the prison's sense of chaos. To his horror, Bauer finds himself becoming crueler and more aggressive the longer he works in the prison, and he is far from alone. A blistering indictment of the private prison system, and the powerful forces that drive it, American Prison is a necessary human document about the true face of justice in America.
Download or read book Dead Cities written by Mike Davis and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2024-10-01 with total page 593 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the late great Mike Davis, the ravaging of the climate by capital—and his prescient analysis of its consequences for those of us left to deal with the resulting crises—was always a central part of his urban geography. In these wide ranging, incisive, and hauntingly relevant essays, Davis asks us to consider what we would find if we put a microscope to the ruins of Metropolis, and provides a riveting account of the disasters—natural, man-made, and those (as in the case of climate calamity) where the distinction is impossible to make—that he finds on the other end. He begins his examination by sifting through the rubble of the twin towers in the wake of 9/11, presciently identifying the seeds of war already germinating in the scorched soil of ground zero, and closes by considering how little prepared our hollowed out urban infrastructure is to deal with shocks of any kind, be they from car bombs or ice storms. In between we are treated to tours of blasted wastelands where American generals built and destroyed replicas of Berlin, glimpses of Las Vegas’s penchant for annihilating its own best-known landmarks, and other riveting tales of the dialectic between nature and the city. Dead Cities, written over twenty years ago, abounds with prophecies fulfilled, contains echoes of our current moment where conspiracies abound and anxieties drown out official celebrations of prosperity, and offers dreams of alternative paths not taken.
Download or read book Prison Industrial Complex For Beginners written by James Braxton Peterson and published by For Beginners, LLC. This book was released on 2016-02-10 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prison Industrial Complex For Beginners is a graphic narrative project that attempts to distill the fundamental components of what scholars, activists, and artists have identified as the Mass Incarceration movement in the United States. Since the early 1990s, activist critics of the US prison system have marked its emergence as a "complex" in a manner comparable to how President Eisenhower described the Military Industrial Complex. Like its institutional "cousin," the Prison Industrial Complex features a critical combination of political ideology, far-reaching federal policy, and the neo-liberal directive to privatize institutions traditionally within the purview of the government. The result is that corporations have capital incentives to capture and contain human bodies. The Prison Industrial Complex relies on the "law and order" ideology fomented by President Nixon and developed at least partially in response to the unrest generated through the Civil Rights Movement. It is (and has been) enhanced and emboldened via the US "war on drugs," a slate of policies that by any account have failed to do anything except normalize the warehousing of nonviolent substance abusers in jails and prisons that serve more as criminal training centers then as redemptive spaces for citizens who might re-enter society successfully. Prison Industrial Complex For Beginners is a primer for how these issues emerged and how our awareness of the systems at work in mass incarceration might be the very first step in reforming an institution responsible for some of our most egregious contemporary civil rights violations.
Download or read book A World Without Police written by Geo Maher and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2022-11-08 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If police are the problem, what’s the solution? Tens of millions of people poured onto the streets for Black Lives Matter, bringing with them a wholly new idea of public safety, common security, and the delivery of justice, communicating that vision in the fiery vernacular of riot, rebellion, and protest. A World Without Police transcribes these new ideas—written in slogans and chants, over occupied bridges and hastily assembled barricades—into a compelling, must-read manifesto for police abolition. Compellingly argued and lyrically charged, A World Without Police offers concrete strategies for confronting and breaking police power, as a first step toward building community alternatives that make the police obsolete. Surveying the post-protest landscape in Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Oakland, as well as the people who have experimented with policing alternatives at a mass scale in Latin America, Maher details the institutions we can count on to deliver security without the disorganizing interventions of cops: neighborhood response networks, community-based restorative justice practices, democratically organized self-defense projects, and well-resourced social services. A World Without Police argues that abolition is not a distant dream or an unreachable horizon but an attainable reality. In communities around the world, we are beginning to glimpse a real, lasting justice in which we keep us safe.
Download or read book Prison A Survival Guide written by Carl Cattermole and published by Random House. This book was released on 2019-06-20 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The cult guide to UK prisons by Carl Cattermole – now fully updated and featuring contributions from female and LGBTQI prisoners, as well as from family on the outside. Contains: Blood – but not as much as you might imagine Sweat – and the prisons no longer provide soap Tears – because prison has created a mental health crisis Humanity – and how to stop the institution destroying it Featuring contributors Sarah Jake Baker, Jon Gulliver, Darcey Hartley, Julia Howard, Elliot Murawski and Lisa Selby. ‘Essential reading’ Will Self ‘We’re in the justice dark ages and Cattermole’s great book switches on the lights’ Dr Theo Kindynis, Lecturer in Criminology Goldsmiths, University of London ‘It has the potential to change a lot of people’s lives for the better’ Daniel Godden, Partner at Berkeley Square Solicitors’
