Prison Industrial Complex For Beginners

Prison Industrial Complex For Beginners PDF Author: James Braxton Peterson
Publisher: For Beginners, LLC
ISBN: 1939994314
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
Prison Industrial Complex For Beginners is a graphic narrative project that attempts to distill the fundamental components of what scholars, activists, and artists have identified as the Mass Incarceration movement in the United States. Since the early 1990s, activist critics of the US prison system have marked its emergence as a "complex" in a manner comparable to how President Eisenhower described the Military Industrial Complex. Like its institutional "cousin," the Prison Industrial Complex features a critical combination of political ideology, far-reaching federal policy, and the neo-liberal directive to privatize institutions traditionally within the purview of the government. The result is that corporations have capital incentives to capture and contain human bodies. The Prison Industrial Complex relies on the "law and order" ideology fomented by President Nixon and developed at least partially in response to the unrest generated through the Civil Rights Movement. It is (and has been) enhanced and emboldened via the US "war on drugs," a slate of policies that by any account have failed to do anything except normalize the warehousing of nonviolent substance abusers in jails and prisons that serve more as criminal training centers then as redemptive spaces for citizens who might re-enter society successfully. Prison Industrial Complex For Beginners is a primer for how these issues emerged and how our awareness of the systems at work in mass incarceration might be the very first step in reforming an institution responsible for some of our most egregious contemporary civil rights violations.

Prison Industrial Complex For Beginners

Prison Industrial Complex For Beginners PDF Author: James Braxton Peterson
Publisher: For Beginners, LLC
ISBN: 1939994314
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 162

Get Book Here

Book Description
Prison Industrial Complex For Beginners is a graphic narrative project that attempts to distill the fundamental components of what scholars, activists, and artists have identified as the Mass Incarceration movement in the United States. Since the early 1990s, activist critics of the US prison system have marked its emergence as a "complex" in a manner comparable to how President Eisenhower described the Military Industrial Complex. Like its institutional "cousin," the Prison Industrial Complex features a critical combination of political ideology, far-reaching federal policy, and the neo-liberal directive to privatize institutions traditionally within the purview of the government. The result is that corporations have capital incentives to capture and contain human bodies. The Prison Industrial Complex relies on the "law and order" ideology fomented by President Nixon and developed at least partially in response to the unrest generated through the Civil Rights Movement. It is (and has been) enhanced and emboldened via the US "war on drugs," a slate of policies that by any account have failed to do anything except normalize the warehousing of nonviolent substance abusers in jails and prisons that serve more as criminal training centers then as redemptive spaces for citizens who might re-enter society successfully. Prison Industrial Complex For Beginners is a primer for how these issues emerged and how our awareness of the systems at work in mass incarceration might be the very first step in reforming an institution responsible for some of our most egregious contemporary civil rights violations.

Challenging the Prison-Industrial Complex

Challenging the Prison-Industrial Complex PDF Author: Stephen J. Hartnett
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252035828
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
Boldly and eloquently contributing to the argument against the prison system in the United States, these provocative essays offer an ideological and practical framework for empowering prisoners instead of incarcerating them. Experts and activists who have worked within and against the prison system join forces here to call attention to the debilitating effects of a punishment-driven society and offer clear-eyed alternatives that emphasize working directly with prisoners and their communities. Edited by Stephen John Hartnett, the volume offers rhetorical and political analyses of police culture, the so-called drug war, media coverage of crime stories, and the public-school-to-prison pipeline. The collection also includes case studies of successful prison arts and education programs in Michigan, California, Missouri, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania that provide creative and intellectual resources typically denied to citizens living behind bars. Writings and artwork created by prisoners in such programs richly enhance the volume. Contributors are Buzz Alexander, Rose Braz, Travis L. Dixon, Garrett Albert Duncan, Stephen John Hartnett, Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, Daniel Mark Larson, Erica R. Meiners, Janie Paul, Lori Pompa, Jonathan Shailor, Robin Sohnen, and Myesha Williams.

Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex

Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex PDF Author: Kevin Wehr
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135093113
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 102

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Book Description
This short text, ideal for Social Problems and Criminal Justice courses, examines the American prison system, its conditions, and its impact on society. Wehr and Aseltine define the prison industrial complex and explain how the current prison system is a contemporary social problem. They conclude by using California as a case study, and propose alternatives and alterations to the prison system.

The Prison Industrial Complex

The Prison Industrial Complex PDF Author: Angela Davis
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781902593227
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Ex Black Panther and now a leading academic dissident, Angela Davis has long been at the fore of the fight against the expansion of prisons. In this recent talk she reviews the background for the current prison building binge, the effects of mass incarceration on communities of colour, and particularly women of colour who are now one of the fastest growing segments of the US prison population. she also offers a personal view of her own time in prison and the imprisonment of others close to her. Double compact disc.

Captive Genders

Captive Genders PDF Author: Eric A. Stanley
Publisher: AK Press
ISBN: 1849352356
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 425

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Book Description
A Lambda Literary Award finalist, Captive Genders is a powerful tool against the prison industrial complex and for queer liberation. This expanded edition contains four new essays, including a foreword by CeCe McDonald and a new essay by Chelsea Manning. Eric Stanley is a postdoctoral fellow at UCSD. His writings appear in Social Text, American Quarterly, and Women and Performance, as well as various collections. Nat Smith works with Critical Resistance and the Trans/Variant and Intersex Justice Project. CeCe McDonald was unjustly incarcerated after fatally stabbing a transphobic attacker in 2011. She was released in 2014 after serving nineteen months for second-degree manslaughter.

Carving Out Rights from Inside the Prison Industrial Complex

Carving Out Rights from Inside the Prison Industrial Complex PDF Author: Aaron Hughes
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781732734562
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A bold statement for those living within the industrial prison complex, realized in block prints of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Inside prisons across the U.S., incarcerated people struggle everyday for their basic rights, claiming again and again their status as human beings. Here, within the largest democracy in the world (conditional though it may be), incarcerated people suffer indignities from terrible living conditions to physical and sexual violence, all under the aegis of justice. As a tool to discuss the limits and ideals of human rights within a carceral state, artists at Stateville Prison, who struggle daily for their own human rights, created block prints of each article in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The process of drawing, carving, and inking each print created the time and space for artists to critique and reflect on the ways the declaration is simultaneously aspirational, strategic, and fraught with the legacy of the violence of its founding states. For universal human rights to be relevant, it is essential that the most impacted people be heard and their vision of human rights centered. This book features the 30 brilliantly crafted prints presented alongside the corresponding articles from the declaration. The artists and authors ask essential questions of what it means to build a culture of human rights from below rather than institute rights from above. What happens when people denied their rights, begin to reimagine and carve them out once again? This project was inspired by Meredith Stern's Universal Declaration of Human Rights print project and developed in a class taught by Aaron Hughes through the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project.

Prison Industrial Complex Explodes

Prison Industrial Complex Explodes PDF Author: Mercedes Eng
Publisher: Talonbooks
ISBN: 9781772011814
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 96

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Book Description
Combining text from government questionnaires and reports, lyric poetry, and photography, Prison Industrial Complex Explodes examines the possibility of a privatized prison system in Canada leading up to then Prime Minister Harper's Conservative government passing the Anti-Terrorism Act, also known as Bill C-51. This legislation criminalizes Indigenous peoples' attempts to protect their traditional and unceded territories from ecological destruction by classifying their actions as acts of terrorism, at the same time that it criminalizes refugees, who as victims of colonization and globalization, attempt to flee genocide and poverty yet are targeted as suspected terrorists. Simultaneously, the incarceration of Indigenous people, refugees, and people of colour is rapidly increasing and corporations eagerly court the government for private-public partnerships to fund the building of new prisons and detention centres. Eng's father was an addict who supported his habit by breaking the law. As a result, she spent her formative years acquiring intimate knowledge of the Canadian prison system through visitation rights. The impetus for Prison Industrial Complex Explodes was the discovery of a cache of her father's prison correspondence: letters from the federal government stating their intention to deport him because of his criminal record; letters from prison justice advocate Michael Jackson advisingher father on deportation; letters from the RCMP regarding the theft of her father's property, a gold necklace, while in transport to prison; letters from family members and friends; letters from Eng and her brother. The cold formality of the government letters in accidental juxtaposition with the emotion of the personal letters struck a creative spark that led to the writing of poems in this collection.

Prison by Any Other Name

Prison by Any Other Name PDF Author: Maya Schenwar
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 162097701X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
With a new afterword from the authors, the critically praised indictment of widely embraced “alternatives to incarceration” Electronic monitoring. Locked-down drug treatment centers. House arrest. Mandated psychiatric treatment. Data driven surveillance. Extended probation. These are some of the key alternatives held up as cost effective substitutes for jails and prisons. But in a searing, “cogent critique” (Library Journal), Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law reveal that many of these so-called reforms actually weave in new strands of punishment and control, bringing new populations who would not otherwise have been subject to imprisonment under physical control by the state. Whether readers are seasoned abolitionists or are newly interested in sensible alternatives to retrograde policing and criminal justice policies and approaches, this highly praised book offers “a wealth of critical insights” that will help readers “tread carefully through the dizzying terrain of a world turned upside down” and “make sense of what should take the place of mass incarceration” (The Brooklyn Rail). With a foreword by Michelle Alexander, Prison by Any Other Name exposes how a kinder narrative of reform is effectively obscuring an agenda of social control, challenging us to question the ways we replicate the status quo when pursuing change, and offering a bolder vision for truly alternative justice practices.

Are Prisons Obsolete?

Are Prisons Obsolete? PDF Author: Angela Y. Davis
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
ISBN: 1609801040
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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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.

Inside Private Prisons

Inside Private Prisons PDF Author: Lauren-Brooke Eisen
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231542313
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 476

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Book Description
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.