Download or read book My Fellow Prisoners written by Mikhail Khodorkovsky and published by ABRAMS. This book was released on 2015-02-24 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Russian oil mogul and activist offers reflections on his decades-long incarceration under Putin in this “illuminating and brave” prison memoir (The Washington Post). Mikhail Khodorkovsky was Russia’s most successful businessman—and an outspoken critic of the Kremlin. As his oil company Yukos revived the Russian oil industry, Khodorkovsky began sponsoring programs to encourage civil society and fight corruption. Then he was arrested at gunpoint. Sentenced to ten years in a Siberian penal colony on fraud and tax evasion charges in 2003, Khodorkovsky was put on trial again in 2010 and sentenced to fourteen years on new charges that contradicted the previous ones. While imprisoned, Khodorkovsky fought for the rights of his fellow prisoners, going on hunger strike four times. After he was pardoned in 2013, he vowed to continue fighting for prisoners’ rights, and this book is dedicated to that work. A moving portrait of the prisoners Khodorkovsky met, My Fellow Prisoners is an eye-opening account of Russia’s brutal prison system. “Vivid, humane and poignant” —Financial Times

Download or read book Justice that Restores written by Charles W. Colson and published by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.. This book was released on 2001 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Something clearly is wrong with the current justice system in which repeat incarceration is high, injustice is rampant, and 25 percent of African-American males can expect to spend time behind bars. Colson's biblical ideas for reform have the potential to turn the system around, keep innocent people out of prison, and give victims some relief.

Download or read book The Cage of Days written by Michael G. Flaherty and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-22 with total page 479 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prisons operate according to the clockwork logic of our criminal justice system: we punish people by making them “serve” time. The Cage of Days combines the perspectives of K. C. Carceral, a formerly incarcerated convict criminologist, and Michael G. Flaherty, a sociologist who studies temporal experience. Drawing from Carceral’s field notes, his interviews with fellow inmates, and convict memoirs, this book reveals what time does to prisoners and what prisoners do to time. Carceral and Flaherty consider the connection between the subjective dimensions of time and the existential circumstances of imprisonment. Convicts find that their experience of time has become deeply distorted by the rhythm and routines of prison and by how authorities ensure that an inmate’s time is under their control. They become obsessed with the passage of time and preoccupied with regaining temporal autonomy, creating elaborate strategies for modifying their perception of time. To escape the feeling that their lives lack forward momentum, prisoners devise distinctive ways to mark the passage of time, but these tactics can backfire by intensifying their awareness of temporality. Providing rich and nuanced analysis grounded in the distinctive voices of diverse prisoners, The Cage of Days examines how prisons regulate time and how prisoners resist the temporal regime.

Download or read book Solitary written by Albert Woodfox and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2019-03-12 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An uncommonly powerful memoir about four decades in confinement . . . A profound book about friendship [and] solitary confinement in the United States.” —New York Times Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award Solitary is the unforgettable life story of a man who served more than four decades in solitary confinement—in a 6-foot by 9-foot cell, twenty-three hours a day, in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison—all for a crime he did not commit. That Albert Woodfox survived at all was a feat of extraordinary endurance. That he emerged whole from his odyssey within America’s prison and judicial systems is a triumph of the human spirit. While behind bars in his early twenties, Albert was inspired to join the Black Panther Party because of its social commitment and code of living. He was serving a fifty-year sentence in Angola for armed robbery when, on April 17, 1972, a white guard was killed. Albert and another member of the Panthers were accused of the crime and immediately put in solitary confinement. Without a shred of evidence against them, their trial was a sham of justice. Decades passed before Albert was finally released in February 2016. Sustained by the solidarity of two fellow Panthers, Albert turned his anger into activism and resistance. The Angola 3, as they became known, resolved never to be broken by the corruption that effectively held them for decades as political prisoners. Solitary is a clarion call to reform the inhumanity of solitary confinement in the United States and around the world.

Download or read book Inside Private Prisons written by Lauren-Brooke Eisen and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-07 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the tough-on-crime politics of the 1980s overcrowded state prisons, private companies saw potential profit in building and operating correctional facilities. Today more than a hundred thousand of the 1.5 million incarcerated Americans are held in private prisons in twenty-nine states and federal corrections. Private prisons are criticized for making money off mass incarceration—to the tune of $5 billion in annual revenue. Based on Lauren-Brooke Eisen’s work as a prosecutor, journalist, and attorney at policy think tanks, Inside Private Prisons blends investigative reportage and quantitative and historical research to analyze privatized corrections in America. From divestment campaigns to boardrooms to private immigration-detention centers across the Southwest, Eisen examines private prisons through the eyes of inmates, their families, correctional staff, policymakers, activists, Immigration and Customs Enforcement employees, undocumented immigrants, and the executives of America’s largest private prison corporations. Private prisons have become ground zero in the anti-mass-incarceration movement. Universities have divested from these companies, political candidates hesitate to accept their campaign donations, and the Department of Justice tried to phase out its contracts with them. On the other side, impoverished rural towns often try to lure the for-profit prison industry to build facilities and create new jobs. Neither an endorsement or a demonization, Inside Private Prisons details the complicated and perverse incentives rooted in the industry, from mandatory bed occupancy to vested interests in mass incarceration. If private prisons are here to stay, how can we fix them? This book is a blueprint for policymakers to reform practices and for concerned citizens to understand our changing carceral landscape.

Download or read book American Prison written by Shane Bauer and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-06-11 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An enraging, necessary look at the private prison system, and a convincing clarion call for prison reform.” —NPR.org New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2018 * One of President Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2018 * Winner of the 2019 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize * Winner of the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism * Winner of the 2019 RFK Book and Journalism Award * A New York Times Notable Book A ground-breaking and brave inside reckoning with the nexus of prison and profit in America: in one Louisiana prison and over the course of our country's history. In 2014, Shane Bauer was hired for $9 an hour to work as an entry-level prison guard at a private prison in Winnfield, Louisiana. An award-winning investigative journalist, he used his real name; there was no meaningful background check. Four months later, his employment came to an abrupt end. But he had seen enough, and in short order he wrote an exposé about his experiences that won a National Magazine Award and became the most-read feature in the history of the magazine Mother Jones. Still, there was much more that he needed to say. In American Prison, Bauer weaves a much deeper reckoning with his experiences together with a thoroughly researched history of for-profit prisons in America from their origins in the decades before the Civil War. For, as he soon realized, we can't understand the cruelty of our current system and its place in the larger story of mass incarceration without understanding where it came from. Private prisons became entrenched in the South as part of a systemic effort to keep the African-American labor force in place in the aftermath of slavery, and the echoes of these shameful origins are with us still. The private prison system is deliberately unaccountable to public scrutiny. Private prisons are not incentivized to tend to the health of their inmates, or to feed them well, or to attract and retain a highly-trained prison staff. Though Bauer befriends some of his colleagues and sympathizes with their plight, the chronic dysfunction of their lives only adds to the prison's sense of chaos. To his horror, Bauer finds himself becoming crueler and more aggressive the longer he works in the prison, and he is far from alone. A blistering indictment of the private prison system, and the powerful forces that drive it, American Prison is a necessary human document about the true face of justice in America.

Download or read book Prison Blossoms written by Alexander Berkman and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-05 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published here for the first time is a crucial document in the history of American radicalism—the "Prison Blossoms," a series of essays, narratives, poems, and fables composed by three activist anarchists imprisoned for the 1892 assault on anti-union steel tycoon Henry Clay Frick.

Download or read book Jailhouse Lawyers written by Mumia Abu-Jamal and published by City Lights Books. This book was released on 2020-09-18 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Expert and well-reasoned commentary on the justice system . . . His writings are dangerous.”—The Village Voice In Jailhouse Lawyers, award-winning journalist and death-row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal presents the stories and reflections of fellow prisoners-turned-advocates who have learned to use the court system to represent other prisoners—many uneducated or illiterate—and, in some cases, to win their freedom. In Abu-Jamal’s words, “This is the story of law learned, not in the ivory towers of multi-billion-dollar endowed universities [but] in the bowels of the slave-ship, in the dank dungeons of America.” Includes an introduction by Angela Y. Davis. Mumia Abu-Jamal’s books include Live From Death Row and Death Blossoms.

Download or read book The End of Prisons written by Mechthild E. Nagel and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2013-05-01 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together a collection of social justice scholars and activists who take Foucault’s concept of discipline and punishment to explain how prisons are constructed in society from nursing homes to zoos. This book expands the concept of prison to include any institution that dominates, oppresses, and controls. Criminologists and others, who have been concerned with reforming or dismantling the criminal justice system, have mostly avoided to look at larger carceral structures in society. In this book, for example, scholars and activists question the way patriarchy has incapacitated women and imagine the deinstitutionalization of people with disabilities. In a time when popular sentiment critiques the dominant role of the elites (the “one percenters”), the state’s role in policing dissenting voices, school children, LGBTQ persons, people of color, and American Indian Nations, needs to be investigated. A prison, as defined in this book, is an institution or system that oppresses and does not allow freedom for a particular group. Within this definition, we include the imprisonment of nonhuman animals and plants, which are too often overlooked.

Download or read book Constitutional Rights of Prisoners written by John W. Palmer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-09-19 with total page 1159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text details critical information on all aspects of prison litigation, including information on trial and appeal, conditions of isolated confinement, access to the courts, parole, right to medical aid and liabilities of prison officials. Highlighted topics include application of the Americans with Disabilities Act to prisons, protection given to HIV-positive inmates, and actions of the Supreme Court and Congress to stem the flow of prison litigation. Part II contains Judicial Decisions Relating to Part I.

Download or read book When Prisoners Come Home written by Joan Petersilia and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2003-03-20 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every year, hundreds of thousands of jailed Americans leave prison and return to society. Largely uneducated, unskilled, often without family support, and with the stigma of a prison record hanging over them, many if not most will experience serious social and psychological problems after release. Fewer than one in three prisoners receive substance abuse or mental health treatment while incarcerated, and each year fewer and fewer participate in the dwindling number of vocational or educational pre-release programs, leaving many all but unemployable. Not surprisingly, the great majority is rearrested, most within six months of their release. What happens when all those sent down the river come back up--and out? As long as there have been prisons, society has struggled with how best to help prisoners reintegrate once released. But the current situation is unprecedented. As a result of the quadrupling of the American prison population in the last quarter century, the number of returning offenders dwarfs anything in America's history. What happens when a large percentage of inner-city men, mostly Black and Hispanic, are regularly extracted, imprisoned, and then returned a few years later in worse shape and with dimmer prospects than when they committed the crime resulting in their imprisonment? What toll does this constant "churning" exact on a community? And what do these trends portend for public safety? A crisis looms, and the criminal justice and social welfare system is wholly unprepared to confront it. Drawing on dozens of interviews with inmates, former prisoners, and prison officials, Joan Petersilia convincingly shows us how the current system is failing, and failing badly. Unwilling merely to sound the alarm, Petersilia explores the harsh realities of prisoner reentry and offers specific solutions to prepare inmates for release, reduce recidivism, and restore them to full citizenship, while never losing sight of the demands of public safety. As the number of ex-convicts in America continues to grow, their systemic marginalization threatens the very society their imprisonment was meant to protect. America spent the last decade debating who should go to prison and for how long. Now it's time to decide what to do when prisoners come home.

Download or read book After Prison written by David J. Harding and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 2020-08-31 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The incarceration rate in the United States is the highest of any developed nation, with a prison population of approximately 2.3 million in 2016. Over 700,000 prisoners are released each year, and most face significant educational, economic, and social disadvantages. In After Prison, sociologist David Harding and criminologist Heather Harris provide a comprehensive account of young men’s experiences of reentry and reintegration in the era of mass incarceration. They focus on the unique challenges faced by 1,300 black and white youth aged 18 to 25 who were released from Michigan prisons in 2003, investigating the lives of those who achieved some measure of success after leaving prison as well as those who struggled with the challenges of creating new lives for themselves. The transition to young adulthood typically includes school completion, full-time employment, leaving the childhood home, marriage, and childbearing, events that are disrupted by incarceration. While one quarter of the young men who participated in the study successfully transitioned into adulthood—achieving employment and residential independence and avoiding arrest and incarceration—the same number of young men remained deeply involved with the criminal justice system, spending on average four out of the seven years after their initial release re-incarcerated. Not surprisingly, whites are more likely to experience success after prison. The authors attribute this racial disparity to the increased stigma of criminal records for blacks, racial discrimination, and differing levels of social network support that connect whites to higher quality jobs. Black men earn less than white men, are more concentrated in industries characterized by low wages and job insecurity, and are less likely to remain employed once they have a job. The authors demonstrate that families, social networks, neighborhoods, and labor market, educational, and criminal justice institutions can have a profound impact on young people’s lives. Their research indicates that residential stability is key to the transition to adulthood. Harding and Harris make the case for helping families, municipalities, and non-profit organizations provide formerly incarcerated young people access to long-term supportive housing and public housing. A remarkably large number of men in this study eventually enrolled in college, reflecting the growing recognition of college as a gateway to living wage work. But the young men in the study spent only brief spells in college, and the majority failed to earn degrees. They were most likely to enroll in community colleges, trade schools, and for-profit institutions, suggesting that interventions focused on these kinds of schools are more likely to be effective. The authors suggest that, in addition to helping students find employment, educational institutions can aid reentry efforts for the formerly incarcerated by providing supports like childcare and paid apprenticeships. After Prison offers a set of targeted policy interventions to improve these young people’s chances: lifting restrictions on federal financial aid for education, encouraging criminal record sealing and expungement, and reducing the use of incarceration in response to technical parole violations. This book will be an important contribution to the fields of scholarly work on the criminal justice system and disconnected youth.

Download or read book I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang written by Robert E. Burns and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2011-08-15 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang! is the amazing true story of one man's search for meaning, fall from grace, and eventual victory over injustice. In 1921, Robert E. Burns was a shell-shocked and penniless veteran who found himself at the mercy of Georgia's barbaric penal system when he fell in with a gang of petty thieves. Sentenced to six to ten years' hard labor for his part in a robbery that netted less than $6.00, Burns was shackled to a county chain gang. After four months of backbreaking work, he made a daring escape, dodging shotgun blasts, racing through swamps, and eluding bloodhounds on his way north. For seven years Burns lived as a free man. He married and became a prosperous Chicago businessman and publisher. When he fell in love with another woman, however, his jealous wife turned him in to the police, who arrested him as a fugitive from justice. Although he was promised lenient treatment and a quick pardon, he was back on a chain gang within a month. Undaunted, Burns did the impossible and escaped a second time, this time to New Jersey. He was still a hunted man living in hiding when this book was first published in 1932. The book and its movie version, nominated for a Best Picture Oscar in 1933, shocked the world by exposing Georgia's brutal treatment of prisoners. I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang! is a daring and heartbreaking book, an odyssey of misfortune, love, betrayal, adventure, and, above all, the unshakable courage and inner strength of the fugitive himself.

Download or read book Breathing Fire written by Jaime Lowe and published by MCD. This book was released on 2021-07-27 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dramatic, revelatory account of the female inmate firefighters who battle California wildfires. Shawna was overcome by the claustrophobia, the heat, the smoke, the fire, all just down the canyon and up the ravine. She was feeling the adrenaline, but also the terror of doing something for the first time. She knew how to run with a backpack; they had trained her physically. But that’s not training for flames. That’s not live fire. California’s fire season gets hotter, longer, and more extreme every year — fire season is now year-round. Of the thousands of firefighters who battle California’s blazes every year, roughly 30 percent of the on-the-ground wildland crews are inmates earning a dollar an hour. Approximately 200 of those firefighters are women serving on all-female crews. In Breathing Fire, Jaime Lowe expands on her revelatory work for The New York Times Magazine. She has spent years getting to know dozens of women who have participated in the fire camp program and spoken to captains, family and friends, correctional officers, and camp commanders. The result is a rare, illuminating look at how the fire camps actually operate — a story that encompasses California’s underlying catastrophes of climate change, economic disparity, and historical injustice, but also draws on deeply personal histories, relationships, desires, frustrations, and the emotional and physical intensity of firefighting. Lowe’s reporting is a groundbreaking investigation of the prison system, and an intimate portrayal of the women of California’s Correctional Camps who put their lives on the line, while imprisoned, to save a state in peril.

Download or read book Prisoner 88 written by Leah Pileggi and published by Charlesbridge Publishing. This book was released on 2013-08-01 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What if you were ten years old and thrown into prison with hardened criminals? That's just what happens to Jake Oliver Evans. Inspired by a true account of a prisoner in the Idaho Territorial Penitentiary in 1885, Jake's story is as affecting as it is shocking. Convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to five years, Jake is taken under the wing of a young guard and the kindly warden, as well as a few fellow prisoners. He is taught to read and given a job tending hogs at a nearby farm. In prison, Jake finds a home he has never had in a place most people are desperate to leave. But when he has to make a choice about right and wrong during an explosive escape attempt, Jake jeopardizes his friendships and his security. Debut novelist Leah Pileggi introduces a strong yet vulnerable character in an exciting and harrowing story of a child growing up on his own in America's Old West.

Download or read book The Story Within Us written by Megan Sweeney and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2012-09-15 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume features in-depth, oral interviews with eleven incarcerated women, each of whom offers a narrative of her life and her reading experiences within prison walls. The women share powerful stories about their complex and diverse efforts to negotiate difficult relationships, exercise agency in restrictive circumstances, and find meaning and beauty in the midst of pain. Their shared emphases on abuse, poverty, addiction, and mental illness illuminate the pathways that lead many women to prison and suggest possibilities for addressing the profound social problems that fuel crime. Framing the narratives within an analytic introduction and reflective afterword, Megan Sweeney highlights the crucial intellectual work that the incarcerated women perform despite myriad restrictions on reading and education in U.S. prisons. These women use the limited reading materials available to them as sources of guidance and support and as tools for self-reflection and self-education. Through their creative engagements with books, the women learn to reframe their own life stories, situate their experiences in relation to broader social patterns, deepen their understanding of others, experiment with new ways of being, and maintain a sense of connection with their fellow citizens on both sides of the prison fence.

Download or read book Prisoners Once Removed written by Jeremy Travis and published by The Urban Insitute. This book was released on 2003 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Addresses the issues of parenting behind bars and fostering successful family relationships after release.