Download or read book In This Place Called Prison written by Rachel Ellis and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-04-04 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In This Place Called Prison offers a vivid and unique examination of religion within prison and argues for its key role among some of society's most vulnerable. Although prison is defined by control--from rules and routines to mandatory labor and monitored visits--for many, religion offers a way out. Religion challenges what it means to be punished and affords community and connection in the face of fear and isolation. Rachel Ellis spent twelve months conducting ethnographic research inside the guarded gates of Mapleside Prison, a US state women's correctional facility, talking with hundreds of incarcerated women, staff, and religious volunteers. Through their stories, Ellis sets the scene of mass incarceration today, detailing how contemporary prisons both reflect and worsen the systemic racial, social, and gender inequalities characteristic of the American landscape of profound stratification. She also offers insight into how religion relates to the carceral system, tracing the role of religious institutions throughout the history of prison punishment. Offering a trenchant account of how religion collides and colludes with the state in an enduring tension between freedom and control, In This Place Called Prison speaks to the human quest for dignity and light in even the darkest of places"--

Download or read book In This Place Called Prison written by Rachel Ellis and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In This Place Called Prison offers a vivid and unique examination of religion within prison and argues for its key role among some of society's most vulnerable. Although prison is defined by control--from rules and routines to mandatory labor and monitored visits--for many, religion offers a way out. Religion challenges what it means to be punished and affords community and connection in the face of fear and isolation. Rachel Ellis spent twelve months conducting ethnographic research inside the guarded gates of Mapleside Prison, a US state women's correctional facility, talking with hundreds of incarcerated women, staff, and religious volunteers. Through their stories, Ellis sets the scene of mass incarceration today, detailing how contemporary prisons both reflect and worsen the systemic racial, social, and gender inequalities characteristic of the American landscape of profound stratification. She also offers insight into how religion relates to the carceral system, tracing the role of religious institutions throughout the history of prison punishment. Offering a trenchant account of how religion collides and colludes with the state in an enduring tension between freedom and control, In This Place Called Prison speaks to the human quest for dignity and light in even the darkest of places"--

Download or read book A Prison Called School written by Maure Ann Metzger and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-10-08 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why are our educational institutions and practices such a poor fit for so many students? A Prison Called School addresses the complex issues that place many students at a disadvantage as they try to survive yet another hurdle in life—school. Although some students are able to navigate and succeed in the current system, other students struggle to survive a system that is unable to meet their needs. For those students, school can feel like a twelve-year prison sentence. Students who cannot fit the outdated, one-size-fits-all model, are further penalized by a system that blames the struggling student rather than holding the institution accountable. For students to thrive in school, the system, not the students, must change in deep and substantial ways. A Prison Called School is a powerful catalyst for creating the empowering, engaging, and effective learning environments that all students need to succeed in school and life.

Download or read book Down in the Chapel written by Joshua Dubler and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2013-08-13 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bold and provocative interpretation of one of the most religiously vibrant places in America—a state penitentiary Baraka, Al, Teddy, and Sayyid—four black men from South Philadelphia, two Christian and two Muslim—are serving life sentences at Pennsylvania's maximum-security Graterford Prison. All of them work in Graterford's chapel, a place that is at once a sanctuary for religious contemplation and an arena for disputing the workings of God and man. Day in, day out, everything is, in its twisted way, rather ordinary. And then one of them disappears. Down in the Chapel tells the story of one week at Graterford Prison. We learn how the men at Graterford pass their time, care for themselves, and commune with their makers. We observe a variety of Muslims, Protestants, Catholics, and others, at prayer and in study and song. And we listen in as an interloping scholar of religion tries to make sense of it all. When prisoners turn to God, they are often scorned as con artists who fake their piety, or pitied as wretches who cling to faith because faith is all they have left. Joshua Dubler goes beyond these stereotypes to show the religious life of a prison in all its complexity. One part prison procedural, one part philosophical investigation, Down in the Chapel explores the many uses prisoners make of their religions and weighs the circumstances that make these uses possible. Gritty and visceral, meditative and searching, it is an essential study of American religion in the age of mass incarceration.

Download or read book Children of the Prison Boom written by Sara Wakefield and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Children of the Prison Boom describes the devastating effects of America's experiment in mass incarceration for a generation of vulnerable children. Wakefield and Wildeman find that parental imprisonment leads to increased mental health and behavioral problems, infant mortality, and child homelessness which translate into large-scale increases in racial inequality.

Download or read book In This Place Called Prison written by Rachel Ellis and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-04-04 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In This Place Called Prison offers a vivid account of religious life within an institution designed to punish. Rachel Ellis conducted a year of ethnographic fieldwork inside a U.S. state women’s prison, talking with hundreds of incarcerated women, staff, and volunteers. Through their stories, Ellis shows how women draw on religion to navigate lived experiences of carceral control. A trenchant study of religion colliding and colluding with the state in an enduring tension between freedom and constraint, this book speaks to the quest for dignity and light against the backdrop of mass incarceration, state surveillance, and American inequality.

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 A Country Called Prison written by Mary D. Looman and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The United States is the world leader in incarceration. We imprison 716 people out of every 100,000 - compare that to Canada (118), France (101), Mexico (210), Japan (51)... even Russia can only manage a prison population rate of 472. The total US prison population is over 2.25 million, greater than the population of 100 different countries. In fact, if the US prison system were a country, it would be the 142nd most populous nation on earth, falling between Jamaica and Namibia. But besides comparisons based on sheer numbers, what might we learn if we viewed prison as a country? In A Country Called Prison, Mary Looman and John Carl will use this question as the starting point for a novel thought experiment"--

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 Running the Books written by Avi Steinberg and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2011-10-04 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Avi Steinberg is stumped. After defecting from yeshiva to attend Harvard, he has nothing but a senior thesis on Bugs Bunny to show for himself. While his friends and classmates advance in the world, Steinberg remains stuck at a crossroads, his “romantic” existence as a freelance obituary writer no longer cutting it. Seeking direction (and dental insurance) Steinberg takes a job running the library counter at a Boston prison. He is quickly drawn into the community of outcasts that forms among his bookshelves—an assortment of quirky regulars, including con men, pimps, minor prophets, even ghosts—all searching for the perfect book and a connection to the outside world. Steinberg recounts their daily dramas with heartbreak and humor in this one-of-a-kind memoir—a piercing exploration of prison culture and an entertaining tale of one young man’s earnest attempt to find his place in the world.

Download or read book Until We Reckon written by Danielle Sered and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The award-winning “radically original” (The Atlantic) restorative justice leader, whose work the Washington Post has called “totally sensible and totally revolutionary,” grapples with the problem of violent crime in the movement for prison abolition A National Book Foundation Literature for Justice honoree A Kirkus “Best Book of 2019 to Fight Racism and Xenophobia” Winner of the National Association of Community and Restorative Justice Journalism Award Finalist for the Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice In a book Democracy Now! calls a “complete overhaul of the way we’ve been taught to think about crime, punishment, and justice,” Danielle Sered, the executive director of Common Justice and renowned expert on violence, offers pragmatic solutions that take the place of prison, meeting the needs of survivors and creating pathways for people who have committed violence to repair harm. Critically, Sered argues that reckoning is owed not only on the part of individuals who have caused violence, but also by our nation for its overreliance on incarceration to produce safety—at a great cost to communities, survivors, racial equity, and the very fabric of our democracy. Although over half the people incarcerated in America today have committed violent offenses, the focus of reformers has been almost entirely on nonviolent and drug offenses. Called “innovative” and “truly remarkable” by The Atlantic and “a top-notch entry into the burgeoning incarceration debate” by Kirkus Reviews, Sered’s Until We Reckon argues with searing force and clarity that our communities are safer the less we rely on prisons and jails as a solution for wrongdoing. Sered asks us to reconsider the purposes of incarceration and argues persuasively that the needs of survivors of violent crime are better met by asking people who commit violence to accept responsibility for their actions and make amends in ways that are meaningful to those they have hurt—none of which happens in the context of a criminal trial or a prison sentence.

Download or read book American Prison written by Shane Bauer and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-09-18 with total page 384 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 The Second Chance Club written by Jason Hardy and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2021-02-16 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A former parole officer shines a bright light on a huge yet hidden part of our justice system through the intertwining stories of seven parolees striving to survive the chaos that awaits them after prison in this illuminating and dramatic book. Prompted by a dead-end retail job and a vague desire to increase the amount of justice in his hometown, Jason Hardy became a parole officer in New Orleans at the worst possible moment. Louisiana’s incarceration rates were the highest in the US and his department’s caseload had just been increased to 220 “offenders” per parole officer, whereas the national average is around 100. Almost immediately, he discovered that the biggest problem with our prison system is what we do—and don’t do—when people get out of prison. Deprived of social support and jobs, these former convicts are often worse off than when they first entered prison and Hardy dramatizes their dilemmas with empathy and grace. He’s given unique access to their lives and a growing recognition of their struggles and takes on his job with the hope that he can change people’s fates—but he quickly learns otherwise. The best Hardy and his colleagues can do is watch out for impending disaster and help clean up the mess left behind. But he finds that some of his charges can muster the miraculous power to save themselves. By following these heroes, he both stokes our hope and fuels our outrage by showing us how most offenders, even those with the best intentions, end up back in prison—or dead—because the system systematically fails them. Our focus should be, he argues, to give offenders the tools they need to re-enter society which is not only humane but also vastly cheaper for taxpayers. As immersive and dramatic as Evicted and as revelatory as The New Jim Crow, The Second Chance Club shows us how to solve the cruelest problems prisons create for offenders and society at large.

Download or read book In this Place Called Prison written by Rachel Ellis and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 638 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Criminologists and sociologists have long examined what governs the prison social world. However, prior studies have generally overlooked how religion organizes and stratifies life in prison. Drawing upon 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork inside a U.S. state women's prison, this dissertation demonstrates that religion is central to many inmates' daily activities. It contributes to their freedoms and privileges while also constraining their choices behind prison walls. Religion is woven into the fabric of prison life: threaded through material benefits, the prison social order, the meaning of incarceration, and even inmates' sexual identity. The extent to which inmates' experience is shaped by religion depends on their denominational affiliation and level of practice. As such, religion operates as a tool that leverages inequality among the prison population.Religious messages cast imprisonment as part of God's plan, simultaneously providing hope and a neoliberal framework of individual responsibility, but always in the shadow of demographic patterns of mass incarceration. Religious messages are noticeably silent on issues of race and social class, while dictating acceptable behavior around gender and motherhood that conceal normative racial and class expectations. Profoundly shaping how women view their incarceration, religion stretches into even the most private spaces, that of women's sexuality. In an environment where being "gay for the stay" is common, religious programs function as a space in which inmates can spend time with their romantic partners. However, conservative Protestant programs encourage inmates to relinquish homosexual relationships and instead embrace femininity and submission, leading to conflict between inmates who subscribe to these ideals and those who do not. Finally, while participation in religious programs is a mechanism of adaptation, improving inmates' quality of life by providing material resources and social support, it is also a mechanism of inequality, given that these resources are unavailable to secular inmates, and their distribution depends on denominational affiliation. Overall, this dissertation demonstrates how religion propagates inequality within an already disadvantaged population.

Download or read book City of Inmates written by Kelly Lytle Hernández and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-02-15 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Los Angeles incarcerates more people than any other city in the United States, which imprisons more people than any other nation on Earth. This book explains how the City of Angels became the capital city of the world's leading incarcerator. Marshaling more than two centuries of evidence, historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez unmasks how histories of native elimination, immigrant exclusion, and black disappearance drove the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles. In this telling, which spans from the Spanish colonial era to the outbreak of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, Hernandez documents the persistent historical bond between the racial fantasies of conquest, namely its settler colonial form, and the eliminatory capacities of incarceration. But City of Inmates is also a chronicle of resilience and rebellion, documenting how targeted peoples and communities have always fought back. They busted out of jail, forced Supreme Court rulings, advanced revolution across bars and borders, and, as in the summer of 1965, set fire to the belly of the city. With these acts those who fought the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles altered the course of history in the city, the borderlands, and beyond. This book recounts how the dynamics of conquest met deep reservoirs of rebellion as Los Angeles became the City of Inmates, the nation's carceral core. It is a story that is far from over.

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 128 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’

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.