Download or read book Lockdown on Rikers written by Mary E. Buser and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2015-09-29 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mary Buser began her career at Rikers Island as a social work intern, brimming with ideas and eager to help incarcerated women find a better path. Her reassignment to a men's jail coincided with the dawn of the city's "stop-and-frisk" policy, a flood of unprecedented arrests, and the biggest jailhouse build-up in New York City history. Committed to the possibility of growth for the scarred and tattooed masses who filed into her session booth, Buser was suddenly faced with black eyes, punched-out teeth, and frantic whispers of beatings by officers. Recognizing the greater danger of pointing a finger at one's captors, Buser attempted to help them, while also keeping them as well as herself, safe. Following her promotion to assistant chief, she was transferred to different jails, working in the Mental Health Center, and finally, at Rikers's notorious "jail within jail," the dreaded solitary confinement unit, where she saw horrors she'd never imagined. Finally, it became too much to bear, forcing Buser to flee Rikers and never look back - until now. Lockdown on Rikers shines a light into the deepest and most horrific recesses of the criminal justice system, and shows how far it has really drifted from the ideals we espouse.
Download or read book Life and Death in Rikers Island written by Homer Venters and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This revelatory and groundbreaking book concludes with the author's analysis of the case for closing Rikers Island jails and his advice on how to do it for the good of the incarcerated.
Download or read book A World Out of Reach written by Meghan O'Rourke and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-24 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selections from the "Pandemic Files" published by The Yale Review, the preeminent journal of literature and ideas “If only our response to the pandemic on other fronts could have been as speedy and potent as this literary one.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review In beautifully written and powerfully thought prose, A World Out of Reach offers a crucial record of COVID-19 and the cataclysmic spring of 2020—a record for us and for posterity—in the arresting voices of poets, essayists, scholars, and health care workers. Ranging from matters of policy and social justice to ancient history and personal stories of living under lockdown, this vivid compilation from The Yale Review presents a first draft of one of the most tumultuous periods in recent history. Contributors: Katie Kitamura • Laura Kolbe • Nitin Ahuja • Rena Xu • Alicia Christoff • Miranda Featherstone • Maya C. Popa • Major Jackson • John Witt • Octávio Luiz Motta Ferraz • Joan Naviyuk Kane • Nell Freudenberger • Briallen Hopper • Brandon Shimoda • Yusef Komunyakaa • Laren McClung • Eric O’Keefe-Krebs • Sean Lynch • Millicent Marcus • Meghana Mysore • Rachel Jamison Webster • Emily Ziff Griffin • Rowan Ricardo Philips • Kathryn Lofton • Monica Ferrell • Russell Morse • Randi Hutter Epstein • Noreen Khawaja • Victoria Chang • Joyelle McSweeney • Khameer Kidia • Emily Greenwood • Elisa Gabbert • Emily Bernard • Hafizah Geter • Emily Gogolak • Roger Reeves
Download or read book Corruption Officer written by Gary L. Heyward and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-03-31 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ex-Marine turned corrections officer at New York's Riker's Island describes in gritty detail how his life on one side of the law led him into a life on the other, smuggling drugs and other contraband inside the jail for a large profit. Original.
Download or read book Lockdown America written by Christian Parenti and published by Verso. This book was released on 2000 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lockdown America documents the horrors and absurdities of militarized policing, prisons, a fortified border, and the war on drugs. Its accessible and vivid prose makes clear the links between crime and politics in a period of gathering economic crisis.
Download or read book Storm on Rikers Island written by Fred Kreider and published by . This book was released on 2018-03 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Corrections officer Nicholas Billings has only just started working in America's most infamous jail, Rikers Island, when one of the worst winter storms on record shuts down all access to the facility. Norman Henkes, accused mass murderer and practicing occultist, has been locked away in Officer Billing's housing area. When grizzly, unexplained deaths begin to occur inside the jail, Billings begins to suspect that Henkes is somehow responsible. Each time he reports to work, Billings becomes more and more entangled in the growing horrors and depraved bloodshed.As the storm rages outside the prison walls, a quiet evil spreads it's black wings inside, sacrificing lives for an unspeakable demonic ritual that will test the very sanity of Billings and everyone he loves.
Download or read book Way Down in the Hole written by Angela J. Hattery and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-14 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on ethnographic observations and interviews with prisoners, correctional officers, and civilian staff conducted in solitary confinement units, Way Down in the Hole explores the myriad ways in which daily, intimate interactions between those locked up twenty-four hours a day and the correctional officers charged with their care, custody, and control produce and reproduce hegemonic racial ideologies. Smith and Hattery explore the outcome of building prisons in rural, economically depressed communities, staffing them with white people who live in and around these communities, filling them with Black and brown bodies from urban areas and then designing the structure of solitary confinement units such that the most private, intimate daily bodily functions take place in very public ways. Under these conditions, it shouldn’t be surprising, but is rarely considered, that such daily interactions produce and reproduce white racial resentment among many correctional officers and fuel the racialized tensions that prisoners often describe as the worst forms of dehumanization. Way Down in the Hole concludes with recommendations for reducing the use of solitary confinement, reforming its use in a limited context, and most importantly, creating an environment in which prisoners and staff co-exist in ways that recognize their individual humanity and reduce rather than reproduce racial antagonisms and racial resentment.
Download or read book Rikers High written by Paul Volponi and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2010-02-04 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unflinching story about justice, courage, and the life of one young man behind bars. It started out as an innocent day for Martin, but it quickly turned into his worst nightmare--arrested for something he didn't even mean to do. And five months later, he is still locked up in jail on infamous Rikers Island. Just when things couldn't get worse, Martin gets caught in a fight between two prisoners, and his face is slashed. He's scarred forever, but one good thing comes from the attack: Martin is transferred to a part of Rikers where inmates must attend high school. When he meets his caring and understanding teacher, will Martin open up and learn from his situation? Or will he be consumed by prison and getting revenge on his attackers? "Volponi, who taught on Rikers Island for six years, writes with an authenticity that will make readers feel Martin's fear."--Publishers Weekly "Volponi . . . brings to life a believable range of teachers, COs, and inmates and portrays power, hierarchies, and race relations both outside and inside the jail walls with unflinching realism."--School Library Journal "With down-to-earth language based on his own experiences . . . Volponi captures the reader."--VOYA
Download or read book Gorilla and the Bird written by Zack McDermott and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2017-09-26 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Soon to be an HBO limited series* "Glorious...one of the best memoirs I've read in years...a tragicomic gem about family, class, race, justice, and the spectacular weirdness of Wichita. [McDermott] can move from barely controlled hilarity to the brink of rage to aching tenderness in a single breath."--Marya Hornbacher, New York Times Book Review Zack McDermott, a 26-year-old Brooklyn public defender, woke up one morning convinced he was being filmed, Truman Show-style, as part of an audition for a TV pilot. Every passerby was an actor; every car would magically stop for him; everything he saw was a cue from "The Producer" to help inspire the performance of a lifetime. After a manic spree around Manhattan, Zack, who is bipolar, was arrested on a subway platform and admitted to Bellevue Hospital. So begins the story of Zack's freefall into psychosis and his desperate, poignant, often hilarious struggle to claw his way back to sanity. It's a journey that will take him from New York City back to his Kansas roots and to the one person who might be able to save him, his tough, big-hearted Midwestern mother, nicknamed the Bird, whose fierce and steadfast love is the light in Zack's dark world. Before his odyssey is over, Zack will be tackled by guards in mental wards, run naked through cornfields, receive secret messages from the TV, befriend a former Navy Seal and his talking stuffed monkey, and see the Virgin Mary in the whorls of his own back hair. But with the Bird's help, he just might have a shot at pulling through, starting over, and maybe even meeting a partner who can love him back, bipolar and all. Introducing an electrifying new voice, GORILLA AND THE BIRD is a raw and unforgettable account of a young man's unraveling and the relationship that saves him.
Download or read book Hell Is a Very Small Place written by Jean Casella and published by New Press, The. This book was released on 2014-11-11 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An unforgettable look at the peculiar horrors and humiliations involved in solitary confinement” from the prisoners who have survived it (New York Review of Books). On any given day, the United States holds more than eighty-thousand people in solitary confinement, a punishment that—beyond fifteen days—has been denounced as a form of cruel and degrading treatment by the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture. Now, in a book that will add a startling new dimension to the debates around human rights and prison reform, former and current prisoners describe the devastating effects of isolation on their minds and bodies, the solidarity expressed between individuals who live side by side for years without ever meeting one another face to face, the ever-present specters of madness and suicide, and the struggle to maintain hope and humanity. As Chelsea Manning wrote from her own solitary confinement cell, “The personal accounts by prisoners are some of the most disturbing that I have ever read.” These firsthand accounts are supplemented by the writing of noted experts, exploring the psychological, legal, ethical, and political dimensions of solitary confinement. “Do we really think it makes sense to lock so many people alone in tiny cells for twenty-three hours a day, for months, sometimes for years at a time? That is not going to make us safer. That’s not going to make us stronger.” —President Barack Obama “Elegant but harrowing.” —San Francisco Chronicle “A potent cry of anguish from men and women buried way down in the hole.” —Kirkus Reviews
Download or read book Hard Time Blues written by Sasha Abramsky and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In September 1996, fifty-three year old heroin addict Billy Ochoa was sentenced to 326 years in prison. His crime: committing $2100 worth of welfare fraud. Ochoa was sent to New Folsom supermax prison, joining thousands of other men who will spend the rest of their lives in California's teeming correctional facilities as a result of that state's tough Three Strikes law. His incarceration will cost over $20,000 a year until he dies. Hard Time Blues weaves together the story of the growth of the American prison system over the past quarter century primarily through the story of Ochoa, a career criminal who grew up in the barrios of post-World War II L.A. Ochoa, who had a long history of non-violent crimes committed to fund his drug habit, who cycled in and out of prison since the late 1960's, is a perfect example of how perennial misfits, rather than blood-soaked violent criminals, make up the majority of America's prisoners. This is also the story of the burgeoning careers of politicians such as former California Governor Pete Wilson, who rose to power on the "crime issue." Wilson, whose grandfather was a cop murdered by drug-runners in early twentieth century Chicago, scored a stunning come-from-behind re-election victory in 1994. In so doing, he came to epitomize the 1990s tough-on-crime politician. Award-winning journalist Sasha Abramsky uses immersion reportage to bring alive the political forces that have led America's prison and jail population to increase more than four fold in the past twenty years. Through the stories of Ochoa, Wilson, and others, he explores in devastating detail how the public has been manipulated into supporting mass incarceration during a period when crime rates have been steadily falling. Hard Time Blues deftly explores the War on Drugs, the Rockefeller Laws, the growth of the SuperMax Prisons, the climate of fear that led to laws such as Truth-in-Sentencing, and how the stunning repercussions of imprisoning two million citizens affect all of America. In the tradition of J. Anthony Lukas's Common Ground and Melissa Fay Greene's The Temple Bombing, Abramsky explores this new and dangerous fault-line in American society in a dramatic and compelling manner. From the opening courtroom scene through the final images behind the electrified fences of the nation's toughest, meanest prisons, Abramsky paints a grimly intimate portrait of the players and personalities behind this societal earthquake. Hard Time Blues combines a sense of history with a powerful narrative, to tell a story about issues and people that leads us to understand how The Land of the Free has become the world's largest prison nation.
Download or read book Arrested Justice written by Beth E. Richie and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2012-05-22 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Illuminates the threats Black women face and the lack of substantive public policy towards gendered violence Black women in marginalized communities are uniquely at risk of battering, rape, sexual harassment, stalking and incest. Through the compelling stories of Black women who have been most affected by racism, persistent poverty, class inequality, limited access to support resources or institutions, Beth E. Richie shows that the threat of violence to Black women has never been more serious, demonstrating how conservative legal, social, political and economic policies have impacted activism in the U.S.-based movement to end violence against women. Richie argues that Black women face particular peril because of the ways that race and culture have not figured centrally enough in the analysis of the causes and consequences of gender violence. As a result, the extent of physical, sexual and other forms of violence in the lives of Black women, the various forms it takes, and the contexts within which it occurs are minimized—at best—and frequently ignored. Arrested Justice brings issues of sexuality, class, age, and criminalization into focus right alongside of questions of public policy and gender violence, resulting in a compelling critique, a passionate re-framing of stories, and a call to action for change.
Download or read book 12 Angry Men written by Gregory S. Parks and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2010-11-04 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates was approached by the police on the front porch of his home in an affluent section of Cambridge, many people across the country reacted with surprise and disbelief. But many African American men from coast ...
Download or read book Rebel Speak written by Bryonn Rolly Bain and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2022-04-19 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through dialogues with activists including Albert Woodfox, founder of the first Black Panther Party prison chapter, and Susan Burton, founder of Los Angeles's A New Way of Life Reentry Project; a conversation with a warden pushing beyond traditions at Sing Sing Correctional Facility; and an intimate exchange with his brother returning from prison, Bryonn reveals countless unseen spaces of the movement to end human caging. Sampling his provocative sessions with influential artists and culture workers, like Public Enemy leader Chuck D and radical feminist MC Maya Jupiter, Bryonn opens up and guides discussions about the power of art and activism to build solidarity across disciplines and demand justice. With raw insight and radical introspection, Rebel Speak embodies the growing call for 'credible messengers' on prisons, policing, racial justice, abolitionist politics, and transformative organizing. .
Download or read book Jesus Hopped the A Train written by Stephen Adly Guirgis and published by Dramatists Play Service Inc. This book was released on 2002 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE STORY: Angel Cruz is a thirty-year-old bike messenger from NYC who has lost his best friend to a religious cult. At the opening of the play, he is in his second night of incarceration, awaiting trial for shooting the leader of that cult in the
Download or read book Inside Rikers written by Jennifer Wynn and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2002-07-24 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes the world's largest and most expensive correctional facility, offers an incisive portrait of its more than eighteen thousand inmates and the individuals who work there, and discusses the changes that have transformed the jail.
Download or read book Lockdown written by Raelyn Drake and published by Lerner + ORM. This book was released on 2018-08-01 with total page 70 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After aliens attack Earth, Sanjay is trapped inside his high school. A local group puts the school on lockdown, claiming they're looking out for the students. But when the teachers start to mysteriously disappear and no one will give Sanjay and his friends any real answers, they begin worrying that the situation isn't as safe and secure as it seems. What's really going on? Perfect for survival-story enthusiasts, this Attack on Earth novel is packed full of action and drama sure to make even the most reluctant readers fiercely turn the pages.
