Download or read book Carceration State written by James Kühnel and published by Page Publishing Inc. This book was released on 2018-12-19 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Carceration State is a riveting tale of one man's journey into the criminal justice system. It exposes the dark side of incarceration and the brutality and injustice for prison profit. Mr. Kühnel examines not only the revolving doors of prison, probation, and parole and the state making of career criminals, but he also takes a deep look within himself, finding his own humanity.

Download or read book Understanding E Carceration written by James Kilgore and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2022-01-18 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A riveting primer on the growing trend of surveillance, monitoring, and control that is extending our prison system beyond physical walls and into a dark future—by the prize-winning author of Understanding Mass Incarceration “James Kilgore is one of my favorite commentators regarding the phenomenon of mass incarceration and the necessity of pursuing truly transformative change.” —Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow In the last decade, as the critique of mass incarceration has grown more powerful, many reformers have embraced changes that release people from prisons and jails. As educator, author, and activist James Kilgore brilliantly shows, these rapidly spreading reforms largely fall under the heading of “e-carceration”—a range of punitive technological interventions, from ankle monitors to facial recognition apps, that deprive people of their liberty, all in the name of ending mass incarceration. E-carceration can block people’s access to employment, housing, healthcare, and even the chance to spend time with loved ones. Many of these technologies gather data that lands in corporate and government databases and may lead to further punishment or the marketing of their data to Big Tech. This riveting primer on the world of techno-punishment comes from the author of award–winning Understanding Mass Incarceration. Himself a survivor of prison and e-carceration, Kilgore captures the breadth and complexity of these technologies and offers inspiring ideas on how to resist.

Download or read book Understanding Mass Incarceration written by James Kilgore and published by New Press, The. This book was released on 2015-08-11 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We all know that orange is the new black and mass incarceration is the new Jim Crow, but how much do we actually know about the structure, goals, and impact of our criminal justice system? Understanding Mass Incarceration offers the first comprehensive overview of the incarceration apparatus put in place by the world’s largest jailer: the United States. Drawing on a growing body of academic and professional work, Understanding Mass Incarceration describes in plain English the many competing theories of criminal justice—from rehabilitation to retribution, from restorative justice to justice reinvestment. In a lively and accessible style, author James Kilgore illuminates the difference between prisons and jails, probation and parole, laying out key concepts and policies such as the War on Drugs, broken windows policing, three-strikes sentencing, the school-to-prison pipeline, recidivism, and prison privatization. Informed by the crucial lenses of race and gender, he addresses issues typically omitted from the discussion: the rapidly increasing incarceration of women, Latinos, and transgender people; the growing imprisonment of immigrants; and the devastating impact of mass incarceration on communities. Both field guide and primer, Understanding Mass Incarceration will be an essential resource for those engaged in criminal justice activism as well as those new to the subject.

Download or read book Prison State written by Bert Useem and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-03-10 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Within the past 25 years, the prison population in America shot upward to reach a staggering 1.53 million by 2005. This book takes a broad, critical look at incarceration, the huge social experiment of American society. The authors investigate the causes and consequences of the prison buildup, often challenging previously held notions from scholarly and public discourse. By examining such themes as social discontent, safety and security within prisons, and impact on crime and on the labor market, Piehl and Useem use evidence to address the inevitable larger question, where should incarceration go next for American society, and where is it likely to go?

Download or read book Building the Prison State written by Heather Schoenfeld and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-02-19 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States incarcerates more people per capita than any other industrialized nation in the world—about 1 in 100 adults, or more than 2 million people—while national spending on prisons has catapulted 400 percent. Given the vast racial disparities in incarceration, the prison system also reinforces race and class divisions. How and why did we become the world’s leading jailer? And what can we, as a society, do about it? Reframing the story of mass incarceration, Heather Schoenfeld illustrates how the unfinished task of full equality for African Americans led to a series of policy choices that expanded the government’s power to punish, even as they were designed to protect individuals from arbitrary state violence. Examining civil rights protests, prison condition lawsuits, sentencing reforms, the War on Drugs, and the rise of conservative Tea Party politics, Schoenfeld explains why politicians veered from skepticism of prisons to an embrace of incarceration as the appropriate response to crime. To reduce the number of people behind bars, Schoenfeld argues that we must transform the political incentives for imprisonment and develop a new ideological basis for punishment.

Download or read book States of Incarceration written by Jarrod Shanahan and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2022-10-24 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A crucial book for our current moment, uncovering the history of mass incarceration in the United States and engaging with the major challenges of contemporary prison and police abolition activism. Inspired by the George Floyd Rebellion, States of Incarceration examines the ongoing reconfiguration of mass incarceration as crucial for understanding how race, class, and punishment shape America today. The rise of mass incarceration has coincided with massive disinvestment in working-class communities, particularly communities of color, and a commitment to criminalize poverty, addiction, and interpersonal violence. As Jarrod Shanahan and Zhandarka Kurti argue, the present is a moment of transition and potential reform of incarceration and, by extension, the American justice system. States of Incarceration provides insights into the rise of mass incarceration and its recent history while focusing on the needs of campaigners struggling with the issues of police and prison abolition, as well as the challenges that lie ahead. It is essential reading for anyone concerned with these questions.

Download or read book Incarceration and Race in Michigan written by Lynn O. Scott and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2019-12-01 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: State and local policies are key to understanding how to reduce prison populations. This anthology of critical and personal essays about the need to reform criminal justice policies that have led to mass incarceration provides a national perspective while remaining grounded in Michigan. Major components in this volume include a focus on current research on the impact of incarceration on minority groups, youth, and the mentally ill; and a focus on research on Michigan’s leadership in the area of reentry. Changes in policy will require a change in the public’s problematic images of incarcerated people. In this volume, academic research is combined with first-person narratives and paintings from people who have been directly affected by incarceration to allow readers to form more personal connections with those who face incarceration. At a time when much of the push to reduce prison populations is focused on the financial cost to states and cities, this book emphasizes the broader social and human costs of mass incarceration.

Download or read book Locked In written by John Pfaff and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2017-02-07 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Pfaff, let there be no doubt, is a reformer...Nonetheless, he believes that the standard story--popularized in particular by Michelle Alexander, in her influential book, The New Jim Crow--is false. We are desperately in need of reform, he insists, but we must reform the right things, and address the true problem."--Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker A groundbreaking examination of our system of imprisonment, revealing the true causes of mass incarceration as well as the best path to reform In the 1970s, the United States had an incarceration rate comparable to those of other liberal democracies-and that rate had held steady for over 100 years. Yet today, though the US is home to only about 5 percent of the world's population, we hold nearly one quarter of its prisoners. Mass incarceration is now widely considered one of the biggest social and political crises of our age. How did we get to this point? Locked In is a revelatory investigation into the root causes of mass incarceration by one of the most exciting scholars in the country. Having spent fifteen years studying the data on imprisonment, John Pfaff takes apart the reigning consensus created by Michelle Alexander and other reformers, revealing that the most widely accepted explanations-the failed War on Drugs, draconian sentencing laws, an increasing reliance on private prisons-tell us much less than we think. Pfaff urges us to look at other factors instead, including a major shift in prosecutor behavior that occurred in the mid-1990s, when prosecutors began bringing felony charges against arrestees about twice as often as they had before. He describes a fractured criminal justice system, in which counties don't pay for the people they send to state prisons, and in which white suburbs set law and order agendas for more-heavily minority cities. And he shows that if we hope to significantly reduce prison populations, we have no choice but to think differently about how to deal with people convicted of violent crimes-and why some people are violent in the first place. An authoritative, clear-eyed account of a national catastrophe, Locked In transforms our understanding of what ails the American system of punishment and ultimately forces us to reconsider how we can build a more equitable and humane society.

Download or read book Texas Tough written by Robert Perkinson and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2010-10-26 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vivid history of America's biggest, baddest prison system and how it came to lead the nation's punitive revolution In the prison business, all roads lead to Texas. The most locked-down state in the nation has led the way in criminal justice severity, from assembly-line executions to isolation supermaxes, from prison privatization to sentencing juveniles as adults. Texas Tough, a sweeping history of American imprisonment from the days of slavery to the present, shows how a plantation-based penal system once dismissed as barbaric became the national template. Drawing on convict accounts, official records, and interviews with prisoners, guards, and lawmakers, historian Robert Perkinson reveals the Southern roots of our present-day prison colossus. While conventional histories emphasize the North's rehabilitative approach, he shows how the retributive and profit-driven regime of the South ultimately triumphed. Most provocatively, he argues that just as convict leasing and segregation emerged in response to Reconstruction, so today's mass incarceration, with its vast racial disparities, must be seen as a backlash against civil rights. Illuminating for the first time the origins of America's prison juggernaut, Texas Tough points toward a more just and humane future.

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 After Prisons written by William G. Martin and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2016-08-04 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As recently as five years ago mass incarceration was widely considered to be a central, permanent feature of the political and social landscape. The number of people in U.S. prisons is still without historic parallel anywhere in the world or in U.S. history. But in the last few years, the population has decreased, in some states by almost a third. A broad consensus is emerging to reduce prison rolls. Politicians have called for repealing the harshest sentencing laws of the war on drugs, abolishing mandatory minimums and closing correctional facilities. Does the decrease in the prison population herald the dismantling of mass incarceration? This book provides an answer. Drawing on original research from across New York State, the contributors argue that while massive decarceration is taking place, the outcome to date is not the one wished for by reformers, namely a more just system. While drug law reform is clearly upon us, for example, a moral panic about heroin addiction and phantom meth labs has recently reached a fever pitch. As the penitentiary population drops and prisons close, the number of people in jail has swelled. New intelligence-led policing, and the rise of a reentry industry together have led to more surveillance and less social justice. Together these developments lead to justice disinvestment as the state sheds direct responsibility for the criminal justice system to the private and non-profit sector, while it extends its reach through new forms of community-based supervision, surveillance and policing into poor neighborhoods and communities of color. Celebration may be premature, in other words. Having endowed a group that is already disproportionately poor and people of color with the stigma of criminality, the state has left the formerly incarcerated and their communities to their fate. The future we face appears to be neither emancipatory reform nor simply the continuation of past mass incarceration. The challenge of freedom, on a scale not seen since the Reconstruction, remains before us.

Download or read book Caught written by Marie Gottschalk and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-16 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major reappraisal of crime and punishment in America The huge prison buildup of the past four decades has few defenders, yet reforms to reduce the numbers of those incarcerated have been remarkably modest. Meanwhile, an ever-widening carceral state has sprouted in the shadows, extending its reach far beyond the prison gate. It sunders families and communities and reworks conceptions of democracy, rights, and citizenship—posing a formidable political and social challenge. In Caught, Marie Gottschalk examines why the carceral state remains so tenacious in the United States. She analyzes the shortcomings of the two dominant penal reform strategies—one focused on addressing racial disparities, the other on seeking bipartisan, race-neutral solutions centered on reentry, justice reinvestment, and reducing recidivism. With a new preface evaluating the effectiveness of recent proposals to reform mass incarceration, Caught offers a bracing appraisal of the politics of penal reform.

Download or read book The Prison and the Gallows written by Marie Gottschalk and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-06-19 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States has built a carceral state that is unprecedented among Western countries and in US history. Nearly one in 50 people, excluding children and the elderly, is incarcerated today, a rate unsurpassed anywhere else in the world. What are some of the main political forces that explain this unprecedented reliance on mass imprisonment? Throughout American history, crime and punishment have been central features of American political development. This 2006 book examines the development of four key movements that mediated the construction of the carceral state in important ways: the victims' movement, the women's movement, the prisoners' rights movement, and opponents of the death penalty. This book argues that punitive penal policies were forged by particular social movements and interest groups within the constraints of larger institutional structures and historical developments that distinguish the United States from other Western countries.

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: 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 Library Services and Incarceration written by Jeanie Austin and published by American Library Association. This book was released on 2021-11-17 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As part of our mission to enhance learning and ensure access to information for all library patrons, our profession needs to come to terms with the consequences of mass incarceration, which have saturated the everyday lives of people in the United States and heavily impacts Black, Indigenous, and people of color; LGBTQ people; and people who are in poverty. Jeanie Austin, a librarian with San Francisco Public Library's Jail and Reentry Services program, helms this important contribution to the discourse, providing tools applicable in a variety of settings. This text covers practical information about services in public and academic libraries, and libraries in juvenile detention centers, jails, and prisons, while contextualizing these services for LIS classrooms and interdisciplinary scholars. It powerfully advocates for rethinking the intersections between librarianship and carceral systems, pointing the way towards different possibilities. This clear-eyed text begins with an overview of the convergence of library and information science and carceral systems within the United States, summarizing histories of information access and control such as book banning, and the ongoing work of incarcerated people and community members to gain more access to materials; examines the range of carceral institutions and their forms, including juvenile detention, jails, immigration detention centers, adult prisons, and forms of electronic monitoring; draws from research into the information practices of incarcerated people as well as individual accounts to examine the importance of information access while incarcerated; shares valuable case studies of various library systems that are currently providing both direct and indirect services, including programming, book clubs, library spaces, roving book carts, and remote reference; provides guidance on collection development tools and processes; discusses methods for providing reentry support through library materials and programming, from customized signage and displays to raising public awareness of the realities of policing and incarceration; gives advice on supporting community groups and providing outreach to transitional housing; includes tips for building organizational support and getting started, with advice on approaching library management, creating procedures for challenges, ensuring patron privacy, and how to approach partners who are involved with overseeing the functioning of the carceral facility; and concludes with a set of next steps, recommended reading, and points of reflection.

Download or read book Prisons Make Us Safer written by Victoria Law and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An accessible guide for activists, educators, and all who are interested in understanding how the prison system oppresses communities and harms individuals. The United States incarcerates more of its residents than any other nation. Though home to 5% of the global population, the United States has nearly 25% of the world’s prisoners—a total of over 2 million people. This number continues to steadily rise. Over the past 40 years, the number of people behind bars in the United States has increased by 500%. Journalist Victoria Law explains how racism and social control were the catalysts for mass incarceration and have continued to be its driving force: from the post-Civil War laws that states passed to imprison former slaves, to the laws passed under the “War Against Drugs” campaign that disproportionately imprison Black people. She breaks down these complicated issues into four main parts: 1. The rise and cause of mass incarceration 2. Myths about prison 3. Misconceptions about incarcerated people 4. How to end mass incarceration Through carefully conducted research and interviews with incarcerated people, Law identifies the 21 key myths that propel and maintain mass incarceration, including: • The system is broken and we simply need some reforms to fix it • Incarceration is necessary to keep our society safe • Prison is an effective way to get people into drug treatment • Private prison corporations drive mass incarceration “Prisons Make Us Safer” is a necessary guide for all who are interested in learning about the cause and rise of mass incarceration and how we can dismantle it.

Download or read book Prisons in the United States written by Cyndi Banks and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-03-27 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering perspectives from a range of experts, both academic and nonacademic, this reference book examines the development of prisons in the United States and addresses the principal contemporary issues and controversies of our prisons and prison systems. Prisons were initially created as a means of reforming offenders, but over time, the objective of rehabilitation gave way to a strategy of mass imprisonment—a system that has resulted in correctional facilities dealing with serious problems such as overcrowding, prison gangs, pervasive violence, and a significant incidence of mental illness among inmates. Prisons in the United States: A Reference Handbook examines the history of corrections in America, detailing how well-intentioned policies intended to "get tough on crime" sanctioned the dismantling of parole systems and resulted in laws that imposed mandatory minimum sentences. These changes contributed to the United States now having the biggest incarcerated population worldwide and the highest rate of incarceration. The book offers an accessible history of the development of the prison system in the United States and analyzes the various problems and controversies associated with prisons in the present day. The coverage includes key related issues, including those of race and gender, and enables readers to understand how past developments continue to affect public and official perceptions of the prison experience—for example, how the practice of keeping inmates in solitary confinement for lengthy periods has been reinvented and represents a return to a historically discredited practice. Accounts of former inmates and of correctional officers are integrated into the text, adding context and offering rarely heard perspectives on difficult issues affecting prisons.