Author: Nicholas Showers-Glover
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 280
Get Book Here
Book Description
Step into a world behind the walls of a maximum-security prison, where an unlikely allyship between three people who are supposed to be sworn enemies unfolds into something greater: a revolutionary movement for the American prison system. In this completely true life story, a former correctional officer of 14 years, a prisoner doing time for murder, and a former victim of violent crime, reveal with candid honesty how they found themselves seeing eye-to-eye and coming together in the shared desire to push for restorative justice and true correction in correctional facilities, from all sides -ultimately co-writing this book with the hopes that society will begin to see the urgent need for huge changes in America's prison system. Whether you've had any experience with the prison system or not, or are intrigued by prison reform, the story of this unique partnership will give you an eye-opening and human look not only at how the prison system works, but at how beliefs are built and broken down. See how time, observation, and reflection forces each of the authors to take a hard look at what they believe and experience the triumphs and struggles they both navigate in holding fast to some of those beliefs-and completely dismantling others. Get an inside perspective into how they each ultimately decide to climb out of the "prisoner" or "prison guard" or "victim" boxes and find common ground in a shared commitment for change. Discover what made all of them rebel against the system at the risk of alienation, or worse, from their peers in their quest for this change. And most importantly, understand the why and how behind their case for ground- breaking reform. Bring your open mind and curiosity to this book and walk away with a nuanced awareness of the hidden sides of the American prison system and what can be done to make it better.
Author: Laura Bufano Edge
Publisher: Twenty-First Century Books
ISBN: 0822587505
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 116
Get Book Here
Book Description
A history of the United States prison system and its many changes over the years.
Author: Gary York
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781849031493
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 298
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Shane Bauer
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735223580
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 384
Get Book Here
Book Description
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.
Author: Chris Hedges
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982154446
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272
Get Book Here
Book Description
"Chris Hedges's powerful memoir of his year of teaching inmates in a maximum-security New Jersey prison takes readers into the lives of men who were all but destined to become incarcerated because of their impoverished and dangerous childhoods and shows why criminal justice reform is so essential"--
Author: Albert Woodfox
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 0802146902
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 481
Get Book Here
Book Description
“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.
Author: Angela Y. Davis
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
ISBN: 1609801040
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 100
Get Book Here
Book Description
With her characteristic brilliance, grace and radical audacity, Angela Y. Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of the prison. As she quite correctly notes, American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. For generations of Americans, the abolition of slavery was sheerest illusion. Similarly,the entrenched system of racial segregation seemed to last forever, and generations lived in the midst of the practice, with few predicting its passage from custom. The brutal, exploitative (dare one say lucrative?) convict-lease system that succeeded formal slavery reaped millions to southern jurisdictions (and untold miseries for tens of thousands of men, and women). Few predicted its passing from the American penal landscape. Davis expertly argues how social movements transformed these social, political and cultural institutions, and made such practices untenable. In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Professor Davis seeks to illustrate that the time for the prison is approaching an end. She argues forthrightly for "decarceration", and argues for the transformation of the society as a whole.
Author: Tara Herivel
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415935388
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 350
Get Book Here
Book Description
First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Author: William J. Drummond
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520298365
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 339
Get Book Here
Book Description
San Quentin State Prison, California’s oldest prison and the nation’s largest, is notorious for once holding America’s most dangerous prisoners. But in 2008, the Bastille-by-the-Bay became a beacon for rehabilitation through the prisoner-run newspaper the San Quentin News. Prison Truth tells the story of how prisoners, many serving life terms, transformed the prison climate from what Johnny Cash called a living hell to an environment that fostered positive change in inmates’ lives. Award-winning journalist William J. Drummond takes us behind bars, introducing us to Arnulfo García, the visionary prisoner who led the revival of the newspaper. Drummond describes how the San Quentin News, after a twenty-year shutdown, was recalled to life under an enlightened warden and the small group of local retired newspaper veterans serving as advisers, which Drummond joined in 2012. Sharing how officials cautiously and often unwittingly allowed the newspaper to tell the stories of the incarcerated, Prison Truth illustrates the power of prison media to humanize the experiences of people inside penitentiary walls and to forge alliances with social justice networks seeking reform.
Author: Emily L. Thuma
Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281
Get Book Here
Book Description
A vital history of organizing within and beyond the walls of women’s prisons in the 1970s, illuminating a crucial chapter in today’s abolition feminist struggles. This new edition of an award-winning book features a foreword from acclaimed scholar-activist Sarah Haley and an afterword by Thuma. During the 1970s, grassroots activists within and beyond the walls of women’s prisons forged a radical politics against gender violence and incarceration. Scholar-activist Emily L. Thuma traces the making of this anticarceral feminism at the intersections of struggles for racial and economic justice, imprisoned and institutionalized people’s rights, and gender and sexual liberation. All Our Trials chronicles the organizing, ideas, and influence of those who placed criminalized and marginalized women at the heart of their antiviolence mobilizations. This activism confronted a "tough on crime" political agenda and clashed with the mainstream women’s movement’s strategy of resorting to the criminal legal system as a solution to sexual and domestic violence. Drawing on extensive research, Thuma weaves together the stories of mass defense campaigns, prisoner uprisings, coalition organizing, and activist publications that cut through prison walls. In the process, All Our Trials reveals a vibrant culture of opposition to interpersonal and state violence that both transforms our understanding of 1970s social movements and illuminates the history of present struggles for transformative justice. Winner of the 2020 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Studies Shortlisted for the Organization of American Historians’ Nickliss Prize and the American Studies Association’s Romero Prize
