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Credit: Postcards from Prison

All Alone in the World
By Nell Bernstein. Nationwide, more than seven million children are affected by the criminal justice system and can claim a parent in prison or jail, or under parole or probation supervision. All Alone in the World describes the impact of the criminal justice system on these children, highlights policy implications, and suggests a checklist for addressing these issues. November 2003.

Are Prisons Obsolete?
By Angela Y. Davis. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003.

The Autobiography of Tiyo Attallah Salah-El (Paperback)
By Tiyo Attallah Salah-el. November 2006.
Prison abolitionist, writer and organizer and activist Tiyo Attallah Salah-El has written his autobiography which includes his early life in Pennsylvania, the life he lived which led to his incarcerated for the last 35 years in SCI Dallas, PA, becoming a Quaker, a vast and extensive correspondence and organizing work and writing on behalf of prison abolition.
[This book at Amazon]

Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Adoption, Abortion, and Welfare in the United States
By Rickie Solinger, New York: Hill and Wang, 2001. An important book on how race and class is used to divide "deserving mothers" from other mothers, and how the concept of choice is shaped by race and politics.

Beyond Prisons: A New Interfaith Paradigm for Our Failed Prison System
Fortress Press, 2006. By Laura Magnani and Harmon L. Wray. "Beyond Prisons is a critique of Americas prisons and a strategy towards abolition. This strong indictment of the current system, undertaken by two respected experts on behalf of the American Friends Services Committee, traces the history and features of our penal system, offers strong ethical and moral assessments of it, and lays out a whole new paradigm of criminal justice based on restorative or transformative justice and reconciliation."

Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves
By Adam Hochschild. Paperback, 2005. The story of the British movement to abolish the slave trade.

Capitalist Punishment: Prison Privatization and Human Rights
Edited by Rodney Neufeld. Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2003.

Chicana Lives and Criminal Justice: Voices from El Barrio
By Juanita Diaz-Cotto. May 2006, University of Texas Press, Austin, TX 368 pp ISBN: 0-292-71316-9 (paperback): US $21.95 ISBN: 0-292-71272-3 (hardcover): US $55.00 Chicana Lives and Criminal Justice is the first comprehensive book to document the experiences of Chicanas with the U.S. criminal justice system. Set in California, it uses oral history to allow 24 Chicana pintas (prisoners/ former prisoners) to speak both about their lives and the impact of drug-war policies on them and their barrios.
http://www.juanitadiazcotto.com

Class, Race, Gender and Crime: Social Realties of Justice in America
Edited by Gregg Barak, et. al. Los Angeles: Roxbury, 2001.

Conned: How Millions Went to Prison, Lost the Vote, and Helped Send George W. Bush to the White House
By Sasha Abramsky. More than four million Americans, mainly poor, black, and Latino, have lost the right to vote. In some states, as many as a third of all African American men cannot take part in the most basic right of a democracy. The reason? Felony disenfranchisement laws, which remove the vote from people while they are in prison or on parole, and, in several states, for the rest of their lives.

Conscience and Consequence: A Prison Memoir
By Clare Hanrahan, 2004. Book about Hanrahan's 6 month imprisonment in Alderson Federal Prison (go to the book's website). "With increasingly harsh penalties for nonviolent civil disobedience, more protesters of government policies will end up in prison. Activists, and especially women in the US, should read this book." - Brian Burch, Resources for Radicals, Toronto, Canada.
ISBN 0-9758846-1-1. $18.00.

Convicted Survivors: The Imprisonment of Battered Women Who Kill
By Elizabeth Dermody Leonard. SUNY series in Women, Crime, and Criminology, 2002. Explores the experiences of women imprisoned for killing their male abusers and their treatment by the criminal justice system.

Couldnt Keep It To Myself: Testimonies From Our Imprisoned Sisters
By Wally Lamb and the women of York Correctional Institution. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.

Crime Control As Industry
By Nils Christie. New York: Routledge. Third edition, October 2000.

Criminal Injustice: Confronting the Prison Crisis
Edited by Elihu Rosenblatt. Boston: South End Press, 1996.

Criminal Justice System and Women: Offenders, Prisoners, Victims, and Workers
Edited by Barbara Raffel Price and Natalie J. Sokoloff. New York: McGraw-Hill. Third ed., 2003.

Cruel Justice: Three Strikes and the Politics of Crime in America's Golden State
By Joe Domanick. 2004. Paperback. When the people of California overwhelmingly voted for the 1994 "three strikes" law, many had no idea what they were approving. What few people realized, however, was that the sweeping nature of the law would put thousands of nonviolent men and women in prison for twenty-five years to life, for crimes as minor as shoplifting $2.69 worth of AA batteries, forging a check for $94.94, or attempting to buy a macadamia nut disguised as a $5 rock of cocaine. Joe Domanick reveals the drama of the shattered lives involved with the law. Focusing on personal stories, Cruel Justice expands to tell the larger tale of how the law came into existence; how it has played out; what political, social, and economic forces lie behind it; and how the politics of crime and fear work in America. Domanick demonstrates how laws passed in haste, without deliberation, and in reaction to public hysteria can have unforeseen consequences as tragic as those they were designed to thwart.

The Disenfranchisement of Ex-Felons
By Elizabeth Hull. An examination of disenfranchisement policy. Professor Hull, a political scientist, "provides a comprehensive overview of the history, nature, and far-reaching sociological and political consequences of denying ex-felons the right to vote." Criminologist Jerome Miller describes the book as "a rich historical narrative bolstered by the kind of contemporary salient data usually absent in discussions of this type." Temple University Press, January 2006.

Drug Crazy: How We Got Into This Mess and How We Can Get Out
By Mike Gray. New York: Random House, 1998.

Family Guide To Visiting California State Prisons
By Laura Frisbee. Frisbee provides first-hand knowledge from the experiences and problems she has encountered in her journeys to visit her family member. Along with the problems, she has also included many solutions that she found helpful in making the trips easier with fewer complications. A resource for families who have a loved one incarcerated in any of the 33 State Prisons in California. Cali Love Publishing, ISBN:0-9785313-0-2, 276 pp., $19.99, http://www.calilovepublishing.com.

Feminist Studies, Special Summer 2004 Issue on Women and Prisons
Includes pieces by Marilyn Buck Poetry; Ann Folwell Stanford; Bernardine Dohrn; Maria St. John; Ronnie Halperin and Jennifer L. Harris; Rachel Roth; Salome Chasnoff; Sarah Potter; Deborah Labelle and Sheryl Pimlott Kubiak; Rebecca B. Rank; Beth E. Richie; Marilyn Buck; Megan Sweeney; Sara L. Warner; Barbara Saunders; and Jasbir K. Puar Abu Ghraib. Read the complete Table of Contents and Background at: http://www.feministstudies.org/issues/vol-30-39/30-2.html

Freeing Tammy: Women, Drugs, and Incarceration
"Freeing Tammy: Women, Drugs, and Incarceration" by Jody Raphael. (paperback, University Press of New England) describes the effects of imprisonment on Tammy Johnson and her 11-year old son Terrence. 2007.
[Brochure (2MB)]

Global Lockdown: Race, Gender and the Prison-Industrial Complex
Edited by Julia Sudbury. "Global Lockdown makes a compelling case for the convergence of abolitionist prison and anti-globalization work in the age of global capitalism, neoliberalism, and U.S. economic and political hegemony." - Chandra Talpade Mohanty. Contributors include: Asale Angel-Ajani. Lisa Neve, Kim Pate, Kamala Kempadoo, Robbie Kina, Beth Richie, Shahnaz Kahn, Kemba Smith, Cristina Jose-Kampfner, Naomi Murakawa, Rebecca Bohrman, Juanita Diaz-Cotto, Manuela Ivone Pereira da Cunha, Biko Agozino, Elham Bayour, Linda Evans, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Lisa Vetten, Kailash Bhana, Melissa Upreti, and Debbie Kilroy.

Going Up The River: Travels in a Prison Nation
By Joseph T. Hallinan. New York: Random House, 2003.

Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California
By Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2006). Since 1980, the number of people in U.S. prisons has increased more than 450%. 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. The results--a vast and expensive prison system, a huge number off 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.

Great Wells of Democracy: Reconstructing Race in America
By Manning Marable. New York: Basic Books, 2003.

Hard Time Blues: How Politics Built A Prison Nation
By Sasha Abramsky. New York: Tomas Dunne Books, 2002.

The House That Herman Built
By Herman Wallace and Jackie Sumell. For over thirty-five years Herman Joshua Wallace has been in solitary confinement in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Solitary Confinement, or Closed Cell Restriction (CCR) at Angola consists of spending a minimum of 23 hours a day in a six-foot-by-nine-foot cell. Five years ago the activist/artist Jackie Sumell asked Herman a very simple question: "What kind of house does a man who has lived in a 6' x9' box for over thirty years dream of? "The answer to this question has manifested in a remarkable project called THE HOUSE THAT HERMAN BUILT.
http://www.hermanshouse.org/

How to Stop A Prison in Your Town: A Handbook for Community Members
California Prison Moratorium Project, June 2006. Book can be ordered and downloaded free at http://www.prisonactivist.org/pmp.

Imprisoning America: The Social Effects of Mass Incarceration
By Mary Pattillo, David Weiman, and Bruce Western. Russell Sage Foundation, 2004. Imprisoning America illustrates that the experience of incarceration itself, and not just the criminal involvement of inmates, negatively affects diverse aspects of society. By contributing to the social exclusion, incarceration may actually increase crime rates, and threaten public safety. This book highlights the need for new policies to support ex-prisoners and the families and communities to which they return.

In an Abusive State: How Neoliberalism Appropriated the Feminist Movement against Sexual Violence
By Kristin Bumiller (Duke). In an Abusive State puts forth a powerful argument: that the feminist campaign to stop sexual violence has entered into a problematic alliance with the neoliberal state. Kristin Bumiller chronicles the evolution of this alliance by examining the history of the anti-violence campaign, the production of cultural images about sexual violence, professional discourses on intimate violence, and the everyday lives of battered women. In the process, Bumiller reveals how the feminist fight against sexual violence has been shaped over recent decades by dramatic shifts in welfare policies, incarceration rates, and the surveillance role of social-service bureaucracies.

Drawing on archival research, individual case studies, testimonies of rape victims, and interviews with battered women, Bumiller raises fundamental concerns about the construction of sexual violence as a social problem. She describes how placing the issue of sexual violence on the public agenda has polarized gender- and race-based interests. She contends that as the social welfare state has intensified regulation and control, the availability of services for battered women and rape victims has become increasingly linked to their status as victims and their ability to recognize their problems in medical and psychological terms. Bumiller suggests that to counteract these tendencies, sexual violence should primarily be addressed in the context of communities and in terms of its links to social disadvantage. In an Abusive State is an impassioned call for feminists to reflect on how the co-optation of their movement by the neoliberal state creates the potential to inadvertently harm impoverished women and support punitive and racially based crime control efforts.

Inner Lives: Voices of African American Women in Prison
Edited by Paula C. Johnson. New York: New York University Press, 2003.

Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Prison Abolitionists
Mike Morris, ed. Prison Research Education Action Project, 1976. From discussions on the range of voices that comprise the movement for prison abolition to demystification of the myths surrounding the justification of imprisonment and practical steps toward breaking free from relying on imprisonment, Instead Of Prisons offers organizrs and activists a primer for strategy and actin in the fight to build a world without prisons. A reprint of this 1976 classic, with a new introduction from Critical Resistance.

When it was first published almost three decades ago, Instead of Prisons proposed a conceptual toolkit for those of us who believed then that ever larger numbers of prisons would result in a dangerous entrenchment of the racism we were trying to eliminate. We now face what was our worst nightmare: proliferating penal institutions linked to a global prison industrial complex that transforms bodies of color into society's excess. The republication of this handbook by Critical Resistance is a response to this contemporary emergency. Prisons must be abolished or there will be no hope for a democratic future.

New edition available at AK Press.

Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment
Edited by Marc Mauer and Meda Chesney-Lind. New York: New Press, 2002.

Jailed for Justice: A Woman's Guide to Federal Prison Camp
By Clare Hanrahan. Now in its 3rd edition.
ISBN 0-9758846-3-3. $12.00

A Jailhouse Lawyer's Manual
A legal resource produced to assist prisoners and others in negotiating the U.S. legal system. With thirty-two chapters on legal rights and procedures including Federal Habeas Corpus relief, AIDS in prison, religious freedom in prison, special issues of female prisoners, immigration law and legal research, the JLM is a major legal reference for prisoners and libraries across the country. The HRLR publishes this critical legal resource and delivers it to some of those whose rights are most threatened in our system yet who often have no access to legal assistance. A Spanish version of the JLM is also published. JLM is now one volume and costs $25.00. Also available free online. HRLR also publish the Immigration and Consular Access Supplement for $5.00.
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/hrlr/

Jakeman
By Deborah Ellis (Fitzhenry & Whiteside). Paperback 2007. A very good book for young (and not so young) readers. "The bus to Wickham Prison (in NY) carries Jake, his sister and an assortment of nervous and unhappy kids all anxious to see their moms." This time the bus trip will be different.

Juries: Conscience of the Community
By Mara Taub. Chandon Press, 1998. A collection of readings for students and prospective jurors on the realities of the police, court and penal system. An essential guide for understanding and action on the realities of our political system. This book can be ordered by email at cpr1911@yahoo.com or by writing The Coalition for Prisoners Rights, P.O. Box 1911, Santa Fe, NM 87504.

Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty
By Dorothy Roberts. New York: Pantheon, 1997.

Last One Over The Wall: The Massachusetts Experiment in Closing Reform Schools
By Jerome G. Miller, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991. Filled with insights on how bureaucracies maintain themselves, the damage incarceration causes to both the caged and the keepers, and much more - this book is even more relevant now than when it was first published. [Note: Last One Over the Wall is out of print but paperbacks can be purchased through abebooks.com and other used book dealers].

Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett
By Jennifer Gonnerman. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004. This book tells the story of Elaine Bartlett, who spent sixteen years in prison for a single sale of cocaine - a consequence of the Rockefeller drug laws. It book opens on the morning Elaine is set free from Bedford Hills after winning clemency.

Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis
By Christian Parenti. New York: Verso, 2000.

Making It in the Free World: Women in Transition from Prison
By Patricia O'Brien. SUNY series in Women, Crime, and Criminology. Paperback, 2001.
Explores how women who were incarcerated make the transition from prison back into society. This is the first study to address the important but neglected topic of how women return to the "free world" after single or multiple experiences of incarceration. It uses first-person narratives and a comprehensive review of contemporary theory to provide useful suggestions for practitioners and policymakers concerned with responding to the increasing number of women in the criminal justice system. The book challenges practitioners to be more proactive in recognizing the needs of this population and more responsive to these needs. O'Brien suggests policy changes, especially related to alternatives to incarceration. The first-person narratives of non-recidivist women provide concrete and powerful examples of the crucial mix of ingredients any woman needs to remain free and empowered in a context of powerlessness and increasing social control.

Merchandizing Prisoners: Who Really Pays for Prison Privatization?
One of the first books to objectively examine the privatization of prisons has been published by Byron Eugene Price, an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Administration at Rutgers University-Newark. The book, Merchandizing Prisoners: Who Really Pays for Prison Privatization - Greenwood Publishing Group has a March release date. This work looks at all 50 states and sets the record straight about the decision to privatize state prisons, revealing the political bias that often drives these policy choices. This work is one of the first to look at this topic and how it impacts African American communities and it is the only sole-authored work available that discusses the political economy of private prisons.

New Abolitionists: (Neo)slave Narratives And Contemporary Prison Writings
By Joy James, Paperback, 337 pages. State Univ of New York Press, 2005.

NewJack: Guarding Sing Sing
By Ted Conover. New York: Random House, 2000.

Pell Grants for Prisoners: An Issue in Public Administration
With an introduction by Marc Mauer. This is his second book, the other is: Prisoners' Guerrilla Handbook To Correspondence Programs in the United States and Canada: High School, Vocational, Paralegal, College and Graduate Courses. Second Edition. Both can be ordered from Biddle Publishing/Audenreed Press, PMB 103 13 Gurnet Road., Brunswick, Maine. 04011.The Pell Grant book is $28 plus $4 for shipping and the Prisoners' Guerrilla Handbook is $24.95. You can also go on line at www.biddle-audenreed.com. Jon Marc Taylor can be contacted directly at:

Jon Marc Taylor, PhD
#503273
1115 East Pence Road
Cameron, MO 64429
Jon Marc Taylor is the only person ever to receive his PhD while incarcerated.

Policing the National Body: Race, Gender and Criminalization
Edited by Jael Silliman and Anannya Bhattacharjee. A Project of the Committee on Women, Population and the Environment. Boston: South End Press, 2002.

Prison Nation: The Warehousing of Americas Poor
Edited by Tara Herivel and Paul Wright. New York: Routledge, 2003.

The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America
By Marie Gottschalk, Cambridge University Press. June2006.
Over the last three decades 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 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.

Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration
Paul Wright & Tara Herivel
This is the third and latest book in a series of Prison Legal News anthologies that examines the reality of mass imprisonment in America.

Locking up 2.3 million people isn't cheap. Each year federal, state, and local governments spend over $185 billion annually in tax dollars to ensure that one out of every 137 Americans is imprisoned. Prison Profiteers looks at the private prison companies, investment banks, churches, guard unions, medical corporations, and other industries and individuals that benefit from this country's experiment with mass imprisonment. It lets us follow the money from public to private hands and exposes how monies formerly designated for the public good are diverted to prisons and their maintenance.

Contributors include: Judy Greene on private prison giants Geo (formerlyWackenhut) and CCA; Anne-Marie Cusac on who sells electronic weapons to prison guards; Wil S. Hylton on the largest prison health care provider; Ian Urbina on how prison labor supports the military; Kirsten Levingston on the privatization of public defense; Jennifer Gonnerman on the costs to neighborhoods from which prisoners are removed; Kevin Pranis on the banks and brokerage houses that finance prison building; and Silja Talvi on the American Correctional Association as a tax-funded lobbyist for professional prison bureaucracies; Tara Herivel on juvenile prisons; Gary Hunter and Peter Wagner on the census and counting prisoners; David Reutter on Florida's prison industries; Alex Friedmann on the private prisoner transportation industry; Paul Von Zielbauer on the sordid history of Prison Health Services in New York; Steven Jackson on the prison telephone industry; Samantha Shapiro on religious groups being paid to run prisons and Clayton Mosher, Gregory Hooks and Peter Wood on the myth and reality of building rural prisons.

This is an exclusive paperback printing made just for Prison Legal News. Price: $19.95.
https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/104_ProductDetails.aspx

Race to Incarcerate
By Marc Mauer. New York: The New Press, 1999.

Right to be Hostile: Schools, Prisons, and the Making of Public Enemies
(Paperback) Scholar and activist Erica Meiners offers concrete examples and new insights into the school to prison' pipeline phenomenon, showing how disciplinary regulations, pedagogy, pop culture and more not only implicitly advance, but actually normalize an expectation of incarceration for urban youth. Analyzed through a framework of an expanding incarceration nation, Meiners demonstrates how educational practices that disproportionately target youth of color become linked directly to practices of racial profiling that are endemic in state structures. As early as preschool, such educational policies and practices disqualify increasing numbers of students of color as they are funneled through schools as under-educated, unemployable, 'dangerous,' and in need of surveillance and containment. By linking schools to prisons, Meiners asks researchers, activists, and educators to consider not just how our schools' physical structures resemble prisons - metal detectors or school uniforms - but the tentacles in policies, practices and informal knowledge that support, naturalize, and extend, relationships between incarceration and schools. Understanding how and why prison expansion is possible necessitates connecting schools to prisons and the criminal justice system, and redefining what counts as educational policy. London & NY, NY: Routledge, 2007

Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
By Douglas A. Blackmon. Doubleday, 468 pp., illustrated, $29.95 Douglas A. Blackmon's "Slavery By Another Name" details the rise and flourishing of African-American involuntary servitude long after its prohibition by the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution - particularly the 13th, banning slavery and involuntary servitude, and the 14th, guaranteeing the rights of citizenship and due process of law to all born or naturalized in the United States. (From the NY Times Book Review)

The Celling of America: An Inside Look at the U.S. Prison Industry
Edited by Daniel Burton-Rose. Monroe, Maine: A Prison Legal News Book, Common Courage Press, 1998.

The Condemnation of Little B: New Age Racism in America
By Elaine Brown. Boston: Beacon Press, 2002.

The Prison Index: Taking the Pulse of the Prison Industry
By Peter Wagner, 2003. Order from prisonpolicy.org.

Uncommon Community: One Congregation's Work with Prisoners
By John Speer, Skinner House Books, 2008, ISBN# 1-55896-538-6-978-1-55896-538-6.
In 2003, members of the Henry David Thoreau Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Fort Bend County, Texas, began a letter-writing program with prison inmates. Soon afterward they launched a creative writing workshop and then a program that allowed prisoners to serve as writing mentors to college students. Speer's book describes how these programs started and evolved, sharing details about what worked, what didn't and how the experience was transformational for all involved.
http://uuabookstore.org

When the Prisoners Ran Walpole: A True Story in the Movement for Prison Abolition
By Jamie Bissonette, with Ralph Hamm, Robert Dellelo, and Edward Rodman. South End Press, April 2008. In 1971, Attica's prison yard massacre shocked the public, prisoners, and political leaders across the United States. Massachusetts residents pledged to prevent such slaughter from ever happening there, and the governor agreed. Thus began a move for reform that eventually led to the prisoners at Walpole's Massachusetts Correctional Institute winning control of its day-to-day operations, with tremendous results. When the Prisoners Ran Walpole brings this vital history to life, revealing what can happen when there is public will for change and trust that the incarcerated can achieve it. For the first time in US history, prisoners secured authorization for their union to conduct collective bargaining with the prison administration. Their union, the National Prisoners Reform Association (NPRA), enabled prisoners to address their living and working conditions from the inside.
http://www.southendpress.org/2007/items/87705

Women Writing in Prison
An anthology published by Voices from Inside. VFI is a group in Western Massachusetts which facilitates writing workshops with incarcerated women, encouraging them to write their stories in their own unique voices. Books can be purchased for $17.00 each, plus $3.00 for shipping and handling. For additional information contact Voices from Inside, 103 Springfield St., Chicopee, MA 01013 or kim@voicesfrominside.org.

Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice
By David Oshinsky. Free Press, 1996.

© 2003-2007 The Real Cost of Prisons Project