Reader at RCPP book event at Babylon Falling Bookstore in San Francisco

Books

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]

Mechthild Nagel's review of The Autobiography of Tiyo Attallah Salah-El appeared in the Journal of Prisons and Prisoners (vol. 16, #2, 2007) and is available on this web site at http://realcostofprisons.org/writing/nagel-review-tiyo.pdf.

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."

Beyond Vengeance, Beyond Duality: A Call for a Compassionate Revolution
By Sylvia Clute (Hampton Roads, 2010). Clute writes: "I take up the challenge of addressing how, together, we can create change that works for all of us. I begin with a central pillar of our culture: how we define justice. Justice is not something that happens only in a courtroom, where I spent many years as a trial attorney. Justice is at issue virtually everywhere, all of the time, we just fail to notice. Justice is at issue in how we react to a neighbor's hurtful act, in how we run our places of worship and in how we discipline our children. Justice is a core issue. In Beyond Vengeance, you learn how re-framing justice as love, instead of retribution, is a blueprint for transformative change."

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.

Changing Paradigms: Punishment and Restorative Discipline
By Paul Redekop. Herald, 296 pp., $18.99 paperback. Redekop calls for an approach to restorative justice that enables offenders to be active participants in making things right for all stakeholders—victims, offenders, the community and society as a whole.

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.

The Criminalization of Mental Illness: Crisis and Opportunity for the Justice System
By Risdon N. Slate, W. Wesley Johnson. 2008, 432 pp, ISBN: 978-1-59460-268-9. Paper. $45.00. For a myriad of reasons the criminal justice system has become the de facto mental health system, with the three largest inpatient psychiatric institutions in America being jails-not hospitals. This book explores how and why this is the case. Sensationalized cases often drive criminal justice policies that can sometimes be impulsively enacted and misguided. Coverage runs the gamut from specialized law enforcement responses, to mental health courts, to jails and prisons, to discharge planning, diversion, re-entry, and outpatient commitment. Also, criminal justice practitioners in their own words provide insight into and examples of the interface between the mental health and criminal justice systems. Throughout the book the balance between maintaining public safety and preserving civil liberties is considered as the state's police power and parens patriae roles are examined. Lastly, collaborative approaches for influencing and informing policies that are often driven by crises are discussed.

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.

Exiled Voices: Portals of Discovery
Stories, poems and drama by imprisoned writers. Edited by Susan Nagelsen. Introduction by Robert Johnson. Photographs by Lou Jones. New England College Press, 2008. A book of excellent writing by (mostly) lifers, with pictures, where allowed, of the writers and introductory interview essays of each writer by Susan Nagelsen. The introduction places the work of the writers in a political context.

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.

Good Punishment? Christian Moral Practice and U.S. Imprisonment
By James Samuel Logan. Eerdmans, 271 pp., $20.00 paperback. Drawing on Stanley Hauerwas's work in Christian ethics, Logan calls on the church to imagine and model a better response to crime and to help the rest of society construct one.

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.

Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse
By Todd R. Clear. Studies in Crime and Public Policy. Paperback- Oxford University Press, 2009.

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.

In Spite of the System: A Personal Story of Wrongful Conviction and Exoneration
By Gary Gauger and Julie Von Bergen. Wrongly arrested for the brutal murders of his parents. Interrogated for 18 hours. Convicted and sentenced to die. Years later, exonerated. Some people say Gary Gauger got out because the system worked. He says it happened "In Spite of the System." Fourcatfarm Press. 2009.
http://www.garygauger.com

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.

The Integration Debate
Edited by Chester Hartman and Gregory D. Squires. The book explores both long-standing and emerging controversies over the nation's ongoing struggles with discrimination and segregation. More urgently, it offers guidance on how these barriers can be overcome to achieve truly balanced and integrated living patterns." The book covers policy analysis and reform strategies in the areas of school desegregation, housing market discrimination, health disparities, and other areas of social policy. (Routledge, 2009. paperback $39.95 July 2009)

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-six 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 $30.00. Also available free online. HRLR also publish the Immigration and Consular Access Supplement for $5.00.
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/hrlr/

Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. The USA
By Mumia Abu-Jamal. Foreword by Angela Y. Davis. (2009) Published by City Lights Books. "In this book, Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. the U.S.A., Mumia Abu-Jamal introduces us to the valuable but exceedingly underappreciated contributions of prisoners who have learned how to use the law in defense of human rights. Jailhouse lawyers have challenged inhumane prison conditions, and even when they themselves have been unaware of this connection, they have implicitly followed the standards of such human rights instruments as the Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (1955), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), and the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (1984). Mumia argues that the passage of the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) is a violation of the Convention Against Torture, for in ruling out psychological or mental injury as a basis through which to recover damages, such sexual coercion as that represented in the Abu Ghraib photographs, if perpetrated inside a U.S. prison, would not have constituted evidence for a lawsuit. If jailhouse lawyers are concerned with broader human rights issues, they also defend their fellow prisoners who face the wrath of the federal and state governments and the administrative apparatus of the prison. Mumia Abu-Jamal's reach in this remarkable book is broadly historical and analytical on the one hand and intimate and specific on the other." (From the Introduction)

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.

Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration
By Devah Pager. University of Chicago Press. 2007

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.

Never Say Never: A Dedication to Love Beyond the Walls
By RY Willingham, Rhonda Harris, and Susan Castro (Paperback, 2007 iUniverse). Never Say Never is a book about the unpredictability of love and staying in love. Three women all marry incarcerated men and share how they celebrate these committed relationships against tremendous odds.
http://www.beyondthewalls.com

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

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
By Michelle Alexander, New Press, 2010. "Michelle Alexander argues that we have not ended racial cast in America: we have simply redesigned it. Alexander shows that by targeting black men through The War on Drugs and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control." An excellent book!

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

Ordinary Injustice: How America Holds Court
By Amy Bach. Metropolitan Books. 2009. Attorney and journalist Amy Bach spent eight years investigating the widespread courtroom failures that each day upend lives across America. In the process, she discovered how the professionals who work in the system, however well intentioned, cannot see the harm they are doing to the people they serve. Here is the public defender who pleads most of his clients guilty with scant knowledge about their circumstances; the judge who sets outrageous bail for negligible crimes; the prosecutor who habitually declines to pursue significant cases; the court that works together to achieve a wrongful conviction. She exposes an assembly-line approach to justice that rewards mediocre advocacy, bypasses due process, and shortchanges both defendants and victims to keep the court calendar moving. It is time, Bach argues, to institute a new method of checks and balances that will make injustice visible—the first and necessary step to reform.

Pell Grants for Prisoners: An Issue in Public Administration
By Jon Marc Taylor, PhD. With an introduction by Marc Mauer. Book be ordered from Biddle Publishing/Audenreed Press, PMB 103 13 Gurnet Road., Brunswick, Maine 04011. or on line at the address below. Jon Marc Taylor can be contacted directly at: Jon Marc Taylor, PhD, #503273, 1115 East Pence Road, Cameron, MO 64429.
http://www.biddle-audenreed.com

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.

The Politics of Imprisonment: How the Democratic Process Shapes the Way America Punishes Offenders
By Vanessa Barker. Oxford University Press, USA (August 2009). The attention devoted to the unprecedented levels of imprisonment in the United States obscure an obvious but understudied aspect of criminaljustice: there is no consistent punishment policy across the U.S. It is up to individual states to administer their criminal justice systems, and the differences among them are vast. For example, while some states enforce mandatory minimum sentencing, some even implementing harsh and degradingpractices, others rely on community sanctions. What accounts for these differences? The Politics of Imprisonment seeks to document and explain variation in American penal sanctioning, drawing out the larger lessons for America' overreliance on imprisonment. Grounding her study in a comparison of how California, Washington, and New York each developed distinctive penal regimes in the late 1960s and early 1970s--a critical period in the history of crime control policy and a time of unsettling social change--Vanessa Barker concretely demonstrates that subtle but crucial differences in political institutions, democratic traditions, and social trust shape the way American states punish offenders. Barker argues that the apparent link between public participation, punitiveness, and harsh justice is not universal but dependent upon the varying institutional contexts and patterns of civic engagement within the U.S. and across liberal democracies.

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

Prisoners Guerrilla Handbook to Correspondence Programs In the United States and Canada, 3rd Edition
Jon Marc Taylor and Susan Schwartzkopf (2009) Published by Prison Legal News. Prisoners' Guerrilla Handbook to Correspondence Programs in the U.S. and Canada, 3rd Edition (PGHCP) is written by Missouri prisoner Jon Marc Taylor who has successfully completed a B.S. degree, an M.A. degree and a Doctorate by mail while imprisoned. This book was initially published in the late 1990s. The second edition was published by Biddle Publishing in 2002. The publisher retired in 2007 and Prison Legal News took over the publishing of the book as the first title in its new book line.

With the expert assistance of Editor Susan Schwartzkopf, the third edition of PGHCP has been totally revamped and updated. Many colleges no longer offer correspondence courses, having gone totally to online distance learning courses. This book offers a complete description of more than 160 programs that are ideal for prisoners seeking to earn high school diplomas, associate, baccalaureate and graduate degrees and vocational and paralegal certificates. In addition to giving contact information for each school, Taylor includes tuition rates, text book costs, courses offered, transfer credits, time limits for completing course, whether the school is accredited, and if so by whom, and much, much more. What makes the book unique is Taylor’s first hand personal experience as an imprisoned distance learning student who has a basis for comparison and knows how to judge a college correspondence course from the perspective of an imprisoned student who doesn’t have e mail access and who cannot readily call his instructor.

Taylor also explains factors to be considered in selecting an educational program and how to make meaningful comparisons between the courses offered for the tuition charged. No money to pay for school? Taylor covers that too. Diploma mills? The book addresses how to recognize and avoid them. Any prisoner seeking to begin or continue their education behind bars will find this to be an invaluable road map.
https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/111_ProductDetails.aspx

Prison Religion: Faith-based Reform and the Constitution
By Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Princeton University Press 2009. "This book analyzes the record in a federal trial challenging the constitutionality of a faith-based prison rehabilitation program in an Iowa prison: Americans United v. Prison Fellowship Ministries. The plaintiffs in the case argued that a residential program that advertises itself as “Bible-based” and “Christ-centered,” and requires prisoners to memorize Bible passages and learn to apply them to their lives, violates the establishment clause of the First Amendment to the US Constitution. The judge agreed, describing the program, InnerChange Freedom Initiative, as a state-sponsored program of forced conversion. The book presents the testimony of the witnesses in the case and sets that testimony in the context of American penal and religious history. It addresses the convergence of two distinctive features of the United States: a place where a higher percentage of its population is incarcerated than anywhere else in the world, and a place that is often described as very religious."

Prisons and Punishment: Reconsidering Global Penality
Edited by Mechthild Nagel and Seth N. Asumah. Africa World Press. 2007. Focusing on cross-national perspectives about penal theories and empirical studies, this book brings together African, European and North American social philosophers and sociologists, political scientists, legal practitioners, prisoners and abolitionist activists, to reflect not only on the carceral society, notably in the Untied States, but also on the reconceptualization of punishment.

A Question of Freedom
Avery/Penguin, 2009. A memoir by R. Dwayne Betts. A story of literature, insanity and finding manhood in prison.

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

Reading Is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women's Prisons
By Meg Sweeney. (UNC Press, 2010). Drawing on extensive individual interviews and group discussions with ninety-four women imprisoned in North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, Reading Is My Window explores how women prisoners use the limited reading materials available to them to come to terms with their pasts, negotiate their present experiences, and reach toward different futures. The book offers the first analysis of incarcerated women’s reading practices, and it foregrounds the voices and experiences of African American women, one of the fastest growing yet least acknowledged populations in U.S. prisons.

Reading Is My Window situates contemporary prisoners' reading practices in relation to the history of reading and education in U.S. penal contexts, explores the material dimensions of women's reading practices, and analyzes the modes of reading that women adopt when engaging with three highly popular genres (narratives of victimization, African American crime fiction, and self-help and inspirational books). The book also discusses the many kinds of encounters fostered by book discussions and offers detailed portraits of two imprisoned readers, each of which weaves together the woman's life narrative and her own description of her reading practices.

Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women
By Vikki Law (PM Press, 2009). In 1974, women imprisoned at New York’s maximum-security prison at Bedford Hills staged what is known as the August Rebellion. Protesting the brutal beating of a fellow prisoner, the women fought off guards, holding seven of them hostage, and took over sections of the prison.

Why do activists know about Attica but not the August Rebellion? Resistance Behind Bars documents collective organizing and individual resistance among women incarcerated in the U.S. and challenges the reader to question why these instances and efforts have been ignored and why many assume that women do not organize to demand change. It fills the gap in the existing literature, which has focused mostly on the causes, conditions and effects of female imprisonment. Women have significantly disrupted the daily operations of their prison to protest injustices and demand change. More often, however, they have employed less visible means such as forming peer education groups, clandestinely organizing ways for children to visit mothers in distant prisons and raising public awareness about their conditions.

By emphasizing women's agency in resisting individually as well as organizing collectively against their conditions of confinement, Resistance will spark further discussion and research on incarcerated women's actions and also galvanize much-needed outside support for their struggle.
https://secure.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=91/

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

Shahid Reads His Own Palm
Poems by R. Dwayne Betts. (Alice James Books, 2010). An advocate for juvenile justice and prison reform, Betts is the national spokesperson for the Campaign for Youth Justice.

Slavery and the Gospel of Liberation
By Kurt Greenhalgh. 2010. Kurt Greenhalgh writes of his book: "My book presents a radical critique of the state, focusing on its legal and penal system - and supports penal abolition. It is written from a Christian-faith perspective rooted in liberation theology." The book can be freely downloaded:
http://www.slaveryorliberation.com

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)

Sunbelt Justice: Arizona and the Transformation of American Punishment
By Mona Lynch, Associate Professor, Criminology, Law and Society at UC Irvine. Stanford University Press, 2009. The book examines changes in Arizona’s criminal justice policies and practices over a 50 year period as a mode for understanding and explaining the multiple dynamics underlying the dramatic penal transformations and the rise of mass incarceration that occurred across the United States in the late 20th century.
http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=17521

Teaching The Arts Behind Bars
By Rachel Marie-Crane Williams, Northeastern University Press, 2003. Essays and discussions of the challenges, rewards, ethical complexities, and emotional toll of working with inmates in adult and juvenile prisons, jails.

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

The Violence of Incarceration
Edited by Phil Scraton and Jude McCulloch. 2008. Price: £60 (to be published in soft cover 2009). Routledge. Conceived in the immediate aftermath of the humiliations and killings of prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq, of the suicides and hunger strikes at Guantánamo Bay and of the disappearances of detainees through extraordinary rendition, this book explores the connections between these shameful events and the inhumanity and degradation of domestic prisons within the 'allied' states, including the USA, Canada, Australia, the UK and Ireland. The central theme is that the revelations of extreme brutality perpetrated by allied soldiers represent the inevitable end-product of domestic incarceration predicated on the use of extreme violence including lethal force.

When A Heart Turns Rock Solid
By Timothy Black (Pantheon), $29.95. The Rivera family moved to Springfield, Mass., with their three sons, Julio, Fausto and Sammy, in the late 1980s. (No real names are used in this book.) That's right when the city's metalworking factories were closing down, the city was becoming a major center for illicit drug distribution, the public schools were graduating only 50 percent of their Puerto Rican students, and the War on Drugs was handing out mandatory minimum sentences with a vengeance. It was a perfect storm. Although the Rivera brothers were smart, capable, and had supportive parents, these powerful forces would whip them by varying degrees.

In When A Heart Turns Rock Solid, Timothy Black, a professor at University of Hartford, follows Julio, Fausto and Sammy as they go between the streets and prisons, jobs and crime. Black conducts an 18-year-long ethnographic study. He records conversations, hangs out with them on street corners, plays pool and drinks with them until the early morning. He bails one brother out of jail and leads an intervention to stop another's heroin dependence. Hartford Advocate review

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

Writing As Resistance: the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons Anthology 1988-2002
Robert Gaucher, Editor. Published by Canadian Scholars Press (Toronto) 2002.

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.