Download or read book Decarcerating America written by Ernest Drucker and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2018-02-20 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A powerful call for reform.” —NPR An all-star team of criminal justice experts present timely, innovative, and humane ways to end mass incarceration Mass incarceration will end—there is an emerging consensus that we’ve been locking up too many people for too long. But with more than 2.2 million Americans behind bars right now, how do we go about bringing people home? Decarcerating America collects some of the leading thinkers in the criminal justice reform movement to strategize about how to cure America of its epidemic of mass punishment. With sections on front-end approaches, as well as improving prison conditions and re-entry, the book includes pieces by leaders across the criminal justice reform movement: Danielle Sered of Common Justice describes successful programs for youth with violent offenses; Robin Steinberg of the Bronx Defenders argues for more resources for defense attorneys to diminish plea bargains; Kathy Boudin suggests changes to the parole model; Jeannie Little offers an alternative for mental health and drug addiction issues; and Eric Lotke offers models of new industries to replace the prison economy. Editor Ernest Drucker applies the tools of epidemiology to help us cure what he calls "a plague of prisons." Decarcerating America will be an indispensable roadmap as the movement to challenge incarceration in America gains critical mass—it shows us how to get people out of prisons, and the more appropriate responses to crime. The ideas presented in this volume are what we are fighting for when we fight against the New Jim Crow.
Download or read book A Plague of Prisons written by Ernest Drucker and published by New Press, The. This book was released on 2013-05-28 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The public health expert and prison reform activist offers “meticulous analysis” on our criminal justice system and the plague of American incarceration (The Washington Post). An internationally recognized public health scholar, Ernest Drucker uses the tools of epidemiology to demonstrate that incarceration in the United States has become an epidemic—a plague upon our body politic. He argues that imprisonment, originally conceived as a response to the crimes of individuals, has become “mass incarceration”: a destabilizing force that damages the very social structures that prevent crime. Drucker tracks the phenomenon of mass incarceration using basic public health concepts—“incidence and prevalence,” “outbreaks,” “contagion,” “transmission,” “potential years of life lost.” The resulting analysis demonstrates that our unprecedented rates of incarceration have the contagious and self-perpetuating features of the plagues of previous centuries. Sure to provoke debate and shift the paradigm of how we think about punishment, A Plague of Prisons offers a novel perspective on criminal justice in twenty-first-century America. “How did America’s addiction to prisons and mass incarceration get its start and how did it spread from state to state? Of the many attempts to answer this question, none make as much sense as the explanation found in [this] book.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer
Download or read book Decarcerating Disability written by Liat Ben-Moshe and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2020-05-19 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This vital addition to carceral, prison, and disability studies draws important new links between deinstitutionalization and decarceration Prison abolition and decarceration are increasingly debated, but it is often without taking into account the largest exodus of people from carceral facilities in the twentieth century: the closure of disability institutions and psychiatric hospitals. Decarcerating Disability provides a much-needed corrective, combining a genealogy of deinstitutionalization with critiques of the current prison system. Liat Ben-Moshe provides groundbreaking case studies that show how abolition is not an unattainable goal but rather a reality, and how it plays out in different arenas of incarceration—antipsychiatry, the field of intellectual disabilities, and the fight against the prison-industrial complex. Ben-Moshe discusses a range of topics, including why deinstitutionalization is often wrongly blamed for the rise in incarceration; who resists decarceration and deinstitutionalization, and the coalitions opposing such resistance; and how understanding deinstitutionalization as a form of residential integration makes visible intersections with racial desegregation. By connecting deinstitutionalization with prison abolition, Decarcerating Disability also illuminates some of the limitations of disability rights and inclusion discourses, as well as tactics such as litigation, in securing freedom. Decarcerating Disability’s rich analysis of lived experience, history, and culture helps to chart a way out of a failing system of incarceration.
Download or read book Smart Decarceration written by Matthew Epperson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Smart Decarceration is a forward-thinking, practical volume that provides concrete strategies for an era of decarceration. This timely work consists of chapters written from multiple perspectives and disciplines including scholars, practitioners, and persons with incarceration histories. The text grapples with tough questions and builds a foundation for the decarceration field.
Download or read book Freedom Never Rests written by James William Kilgore and published by Jacana Media. This book was released on 2011 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lying bare the political and personal intricacies of community struggles, this extraordinary story portrays the historical roots of the service delivery revolts that have swept South Africa in recent years. This novel centers around an engaging and tragic couple: an unemployed ex-shop steward and revolutionary, Monwabisi Radebe, and his wife, Constantia, a former nursery school aide turned local councilor in the fictional Eastern Cape township of Sivuyile. As the council implements an American-financed project of prepaid meters, water cut-offs are visited upon dozens of households. Idealistic Monwabisi faces the most difficult of choices: to remain loyal to the loving wife and mother of his children, who now represents an increasingly discredited council, or take to the streets with disenchanted residents. As Monwabisi and a host of other compelling characters face moral and economic dilemmas of street level organization, this narrative exposes the complexities of post-1994 politics in South Africa.
Download or read book The Executed God written by Mark Lewis Taylor and published by Fortress Press. This book was released on 2015-11-01 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The new edition of Mark Lewis Taylor’s award-winning The Executed God is both a searing indictment of the structures of “Lockdown America” and a visionary statement of hope. It is also a call for action to Jesus followers to resist US imperial projects and power. Outlining a “theatrics of state terror,” Taylor identifies and analyzes its instruments—mass incarceration, militarized police tactics, surveillance, torture, immigrant repression, and capital punishment—through which a racist and corporatized Lockdown America enforces in the US a global neoliberal economic and political imperialism. Against this, The Executed God proposes a “counter-theatrics to state terror,” a declamation of the way of the cross for Jesus followers that unmasks the powers of US state domination and enacts an adversarial politics of resistance, artful dramatic actions, and the building of peoples’ movements. These are all intrinsic to a Christian politics of remembrance of the Jesus executed by empire. Heralded in its first edition, this new edition is thoroughly revised, updated, and expanded, offering a demanding rethinking and recreating of what being a Christian is and of how Christianity should dream, hope, mobilize, and act to bring about what Taylor terms “a liberating material spirituality” to unseat the state that kills.
Download or read book Disability Incarcerated written by L. Ben-Moshe and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-05-29 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disability Incarcerated gathers thirteen contributions from an impressive array of fields. Taken together, these essays assert that a complex understanding of disability is crucial to an understanding of incarceration, and that we must expand what has come to be called 'incarceration.' The chapters in this book examine a host of sites, such as prisons, institutions for people with developmental disabilities, psychiatric hospitals, treatment centers, special education, detention centers, and group homes; explore why various sites should be understood as incarceration; and discuss the causes and effects of these sites historically and currently. This volume includes a preface by Professor Angela Y. Davis and an afterword by Professor Robert McRuer.
Download or read book Free All Along written by Stephen Drury Smith and published by New Press, The. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Featured in the New Yorker's "Page-Turner" One of Mashable's "17 books every activist should read in 2019" "This is an expression not of people who are suddenly freed of something, but people who have been free all along." —Ralph Ellison, speaking with Robert Penn Warren A stunning collection of previously unpublished interviews with key figures of the black freedom struggle by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author In 1964, in the height of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Pulitzer Prize–winning author and poet Robert Penn Warren set out with a tape recorder to interview leaders of the black freedom struggle. He spoke at length with luminaries such as James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, Ralph Ellison, and Roy Wilkins, eliciting reflections and frank assessments of race in America and the possibilities for meaningful change. In Harlem, a fifteen-minute appointment with Malcolm X unwound into several hours of vivid conversation. A year later, Penn Warren would publish Who Speaks for the Negro?, a probing narrative account of these conversations that blended his own reflections with brief excerpts and quotations from his interviews. Astonishingly, the full extent of the interviews remained in the background and were never published. The audiotapes stayed largely unknown until recent years. Free All Along brings to life the vital historic voices of America's civil rights generation, including writers, political activists, religious leaders, and intellectuals. A major contribution to our understanding of the struggle for justice and equality, these remarkable long-form interviews are presented here as original documents that have pressing relevance today.
Download or read book Framing Innocence written by Lynn Powell and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2010-09-27 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ten years ago, amateur photographer and school bus driver Cynthia Stewart dropped off eleven rolls of film at a drugstore near her home in Ohio. The rolls contained photographs of her eight-year-old daughter Nora, including two of the child in the shower - photos that would cause the county prosecutor to arrest Cynthia, take her away in handcuffs, threaten to remove her daughter from her home, and charge her with crimes that carried the possibility of sixteen years in prison. The disturbing case would ultimately attract national attention - including stories in USA Today and on NPR - and supporters including the famed photographer Sally Mann, Katha Pollitt, and the ACLU. Framing Innocence brilliantly probes the many questions raised; when does a photograph of a naked child ''cross the line'' from innocent snapshot to child porn? What makes a photograph dangerous - the situation in which it is shot or the uses to which it might be put? When does the parent, and when does the state, know best? Written by poet Lynn Powell, a neighbor of Cynthia Stewart's, this riveting and beautifully told story plumbs the perfect storm of events and people that threatened an ordinary family in a small American town. Framing Innocence features a determined prosecutor; a fundamentalist Christian anti-porn crusader who is appointed as Cynthia's daughter's guardian; the local attorneys for whom the case would become a crucible; and the many neighbors - friends and strangers, Republican and Democrat - who come together to fight for sanity and for justice for Cynthia and her family.
Download or read book Burning Down the House written by Nell Bernstein and published by New Press, The. This book was released on 2014-06-03 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When teenagers scuffle during a basketball game, they are typically benched. But when Will got into it on the court, he and his rival were sprayed in the face at close range by a chemical similar to Mace, denied a shower for twenty-four hours, and then locked in solitary confinement for a month. One in three American children will be arrested by the time they are twenty-three, and many will spend time locked inside horrific detention centers that defy everything we know about how to rehabilitate young offenders. In a clear-eyed indictment of the juvenile justice system run amok, award-winning journalist Nell Bernstein shows that there is no right way to lock up a child. The very act of isolation denies delinquent children the thing that is most essential to their growth and rehabilitation: positive relationships with caring adults. Bernstein introduces us to youth across the nation who have suffered violence and psychological torture at the hands of the state. She presents these youths all as fully realized people, not victims. As they describe in their own voices their fight to maintain their humanity and protect their individuality in environments that would deny both, these young people offer a hopeful alternative to the doomed effort to reform a system that should only be dismantled. Burning Down the House is a clarion call to shut down our nation’s brutal and counterproductive juvenile prisons and bring our children home.
Download or read book 1989 written by Krishan Kumar and published by Choice Publishing Co., Ltd.. This book was released on 2001 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1989, from East Berlin to Budapest and Bucharest to Moscow, communism was falling. The walls were coming down and the world was being changed in ways that seemed entirely new. The conflict of ideas and ideals that began with the French Revolution of 1789 culminated in these revolutions, which raised the prospects of the "return to Europe" of East and Central European nations, the "restarting of their history," even, for some, the "end of history." What such assertions and aspirations meant, and what the larger events that inspired them mean-not just for the world of history and politics, but for our very understanding of that world-are the questions Krishan Kumar explores in 1989. A well-known and widely respected scholar, Kumar places these revolutions of 1989 in the broadest framework of political and social thought, helping us see how certain ideas, traditions, and ideological developments influenced or accompanied these movements-and how they might continue to play out. Asking questions about some of the central dilemmas facing modern society in the new century, Kumar offers critical insight into how these questions might be answered and how political, social, and historical ideas and ideals can shape our destiny. Contradictions Series, volume 12
Download or read book Marking Time written by Nicole R. Fleetwood and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-28 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A powerful document of the inner lives and creative visions of men and women rendered invisible by America’s prison system. More than two million people are currently behind bars in the United States. Incarceration not only separates the imprisoned from their families and communities; it also exposes them to shocking levels of deprivation and abuse and subjects them to the arbitrary cruelties of the criminal justice system. Yet, as Nicole Fleetwood reveals, America’s prisons are filled with art. Despite the isolation and degradation they experience, the incarcerated are driven to assert their humanity in the face of a system that dehumanizes them. Based on interviews with currently and formerly incarcerated artists, prison visits, and the author’s own family experiences with the penal system, Marking Time shows how the imprisoned turn ordinary objects into elaborate works of art. Working with meager supplies and in the harshest conditions—including solitary confinement—these artists find ways to resist the brutality and depravity that prisons engender. The impact of their art, Fleetwood observes, can be felt far beyond prison walls. Their bold works, many of which are being published for the first time in this volume, have opened new possibilities in American art. As the movement to transform the country’s criminal justice system grows, art provides the imprisoned with a political voice. Their works testify to the economic and racial injustices that underpin American punishment and offer a new vision of freedom for the twenty-first century."
Download or read book The Routledge International Handbook of Penal Abolition written by Michael J. Coyle and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-03-30 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge International Handbook of Penal Abolition provides an authoritative and comprehensive look at the latest developments in the 21st-century penal abolitionism movement, both reflecting on key critical thought and setting the agenda for local and global abolitionist ideas and interventions over the coming decade. Penal abolitionists question the legitimacy of criminal law, policing, courts, prisons and more broadly the idea of punishment, to argue that rather than effectively handling or solving social problems, interpersonal disputes, conflicts and harms, they actually increase individual and societal problems. The Routledge International Handbook of Penal Abolition is organized around six key themes: Social movements and abolition organizing Critical resistance to the penal state Voices from imprisoned and marginalized communities Diversity of abolitionist thought International perspectives on abolitionism Building new justice practices as a response to social and individual wrongdoing. A global-centred and world-encompassing project, this book provides the reader with an alternative and critical perspective from which to reflect and raises the visibility of abolitionist ideas and strategies in a time when there is considerable discussion of how we will move forward in response to what has given rise to the criminalizing system: white supremacy, racial capitalism and human wrongdoing. It is essential reading for all those engaged with punishment and penology, criminology, sociology, corrections and critical prisons studies. It will appeal to any reader who seeks an innovative response to the calamitous failures of the modern criminalizing system.
Download or read book The Growth of Incarceration in the United States written by Committee on Causes and Consequences of High Rates of Incarceration and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2014-12-31 with total page 800 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After decades of stability from the 1920s to the early 1970s, the rate of imprisonment in the United States has increased fivefold during the last four decades. The U.S. penal population of 2.2 million adults is by far the largest in the world. Just under one-quarter of the world's prisoners are held in American prisons. The U.S. rate of incarceration, with nearly 1 out of every 100 adults in prison or jail, is 5 to 10 times higher than the rates in Western Europe and other democracies. The U.S. prison population is largely drawn from the most disadvantaged part of the nation's population: mostly men under age 40, disproportionately minority, and poorly educated. Prisoners often carry additional deficits of drug and alcohol addictions, mental and physical illnesses, and lack of work preparation or experience. The growth of incarceration in the United States during four decades has prompted numerous critiques and a growing body of scientific knowledge about what prompted the rise and what its consequences have been for the people imprisoned, their families and communities, and for U.S. society. The Growth of Incarceration in the United States examines research and analysis of the dramatic rise of incarceration rates and its affects. This study makes the case that the United States has gone far past the point where the numbers of people in prison can be justified by social benefits and has reached a level where these high rates of incarceration themselves constitute a source of injustice and social harm. The Growth of Incarceration in the United States examines policy changes that created an increasingly punitive political climate and offers specific policy advice in sentencing policy, prison policy, and social policy. The report also identifies important research questions that must be answered to provide a firmer basis for policy. This report is a call for change in the way society views criminals, punishment, and prison. This landmark study assesses the evidence and its implications for public policy to inform an extensive and thoughtful public debate about and reconsideration of policies.
Download or read book Routledge Handbook on American Prisons written by Laurie A. Gould and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-11-01 with total page 613 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook on American Prisons is an authoritative volume that provides an overview of the state of U.S. prisons and synthesizes the research on the many facets of the prison system. The United States is exceptional in its use of incarceration as punishment. It not only has the largest prison population in the world, but also the highest per-capita incarceration rate. Research and debate about mass incarceration continues to grow, with mounting bipartisan agreement on the need for criminal justice reform. Divided into four sections (Prisons: Security, Operations and Administration; Types of Offenders and Populations; Living and Dying in Prison; and Release, Reentry, and Reform), the volume explores the key issues fundamental to understanding the U.S. prison system, including the characteristics of facilities; inmate risk assessment and classification, prison administration and employment, for-profit prisons, special populations, overcrowding, prison health care, prison violence, the special circumstances of death row prisoners, collateral consequences of incarceration, prison programming, and parole. The final section examines reform efforts and ideas, and offers suggestions for future research and attention. With contributions from leading correctional scholars, this book is a valuable resource for scholars with an interest in U.S. prisons and the issues surrounding them. It is structured to serve scholars and graduate students studying corrections, penology, institutional corrections, and other related topics.
Download or read book Good Courts written by Greg Berman and published by Quid Pro Books. This book was released on 2015-12-03 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presented in a new digital edition, and adding a Foreword by Jonathan Lippman, Chief Judge of the state of New York, Good Courts is now available as an eBook to criminal justice workers, jurists, lawyers, political scientists, court officials, and others interested in the future of alternative justice and process in the United States. Public confidence in American criminal courts is at an all-time low. Victims, communities, and even offenders view courts as unable to respond adequately to complex social and legal problems including drugs, prostitution, domestic violence, and quality-of-life crime. Even many judges and attorneys think that the courts produce assembly-line justice. Increasingly embraced by even the most hard-on-crime jurists, problem-solving courts offer an effective alternative. As documented by Greg Berman and John Feinblatt—both of whom were instrumental in setting up New York’s Midtown Community Court and Red Hook Community Justice Center, two of the nation’s premier models for problem-solving justice—these alternative courts reengineer the way everyday crime is addressed by focusing on the underlying problems that bring people into the criminal justice system to begin with. The first book to describe this cutting-edge movement in detail, Good Courts features, in addition to the Midtown and Red Hook models, an in-depth look at Oregon’s Portland Community Court. And it reviews the growing body of evidence that the problem-solving approach to justice is indeed producing positive results around the country. Quality eBook features include linked Notes, active TOC, and proper formatting.
Download or read book We Keep Us Safe written by Zach Norris and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking new vision for public safety that overturns more than 200 years of fear-based discrimination, othering, and punishment As the effects of aggressive policing and mass incarceration harm historically marginalized communities and tear families apart, how do we define safety? In a time when the most powerful institutions in the United States are embracing the repressive and racist systems that keep many communities struggling and in fear, we need to reimagine what safety means. Community leader and lawyer Zach Norris lays out a radical way to shift the conversation about public safety away from fear and punishment and toward growth and support systems for our families and communities. In order to truly be safe, we are going to have to dismantle our mentality of Us vs. Them. By bridging the divides and building relationships with one another, we can dedicate ourselves to strategic, smart investments—meaning resources directed toward our stability and well-being, like healthcare and housing, education and living-wage jobs. This is where real safety begins. In this book Zach Norris provides a blueprint of how to hold people accountable while still holding them in community. The result reinstates full humanity and agency for everyone who has been dehumanized and traumatized, so they can participate fully in life, in society, and in the fabric of our democracy.
