Incarceration

INCARCERATION

How is it that the USA has 4% of the world’s population but 16% of the incarcerated?

Topic 5

WHY INCARCERATION?

Why do we lock people up? How is the criminal justice system actually providing "justice"? Did Jim Crow really ever end? For every election term since the 70’s, candidates would spew forth their policy to handle “crime”. Both sides. Mandatory Sentencing. Three strikes. But this dog whistle politics went much deeper than stopping crime. We have created a societal pandemic that needs to be addressed.

“Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings.”
-Angela Davis

Incarceration

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Incarceration

RESOURCES

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander
“Two years after Obama’s election, Alexander put the entire criminal justice system on trial, exposing racial discrimination from lawmaking to policing to the denial of voting rights to ex-prisoners. This bestseller struck the spark that would eventually light the fire of Black Lives Matter.”
—Ibram X. Kendi, The New York Times

“[The New Jim Crow] transformed forever the way thinkers and activists view the phenomenon of mass incarceration.”
—Slate

Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, by James Forman Jr.“A masterly account of how a generation of black elected officials wrestled with recurring crises of violence and drug use in the nation’s capital . . . A big deal and a major breakthrough . . . Forman’s novel claim is this: What most explains the punitive turn in black America is not a repudiation of civil rights activism, as some have argued, but an embrace of it . . . Locking Up Our Own compel[s] readers to wrestle with some very tough questions about the nature of American democracy and its deep roots in racism, inequality and punishment . . . [Forman shows] that the solution will lie not only with policy changes but with individual changes of heart, too.”
—Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The New York Times Book Review

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, by Bryan Stevenson
“An unforgettable true story about the potential for mercy to redeem us, and a clarion call to end mass incarceration in America — from one of the most inspiring lawyers of our time. Bryan Stevenson was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit law office in Montgomery, Alabama, dedicated to defending the poor, the incarcerated, and the wrongly condemned.

Just Mercy tells the story of EJI, from the early days with a small staff facing the nation’s highest death sentencing and execution rates, through a successful campaign to challenge the cruel practice of sentencing children to die in prison, to revolutionary projects designed to confront Americans with our history of racial injustice.” – from the Publisher

Are Prisons Obsolete?, by Angela Davis
"As Angela Y. Davis has written, “prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings.” Prisons do not contain a “criminal population” running rampant but rather a population that society has repeatedly failed. Uprisings in response to the hellish conditions Black folk have been forced to live in, both in and out of prison, have been criminalized as well. In her book Are Prisons Obsolete?, Davis effectively analyzes the purpose of prisons. “These prisons represent the application of sophisticated, modern technology dedicated entirely to the task of social control,” she writes, “and they isolate, regulate, and surveil more effectively than anything that has preceded them.” An institution based on social control instead of social well-being is an institution that needs to be abolished."
—Colin Kaepernick, from Abolition for the People: The Movement for a Future Without Police & Prisons

Orange is the New Black, by Piper Kerman
“Following a plea deal for her 10-year-old crime, Piper spent a year in the infamous women’s correctional facility in Danbury, Connecticut, which she found to be no “Club Fed.” In Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison, Piper takes readers into B-Dorm, a community of colorful, eccentric, vividly drawn women. Their stories raise issues of friendship and family, mental illness, the odd cliques and codes of behavior, the role of religion, the uneasy relationship between prisoner and jailor, and the almost complete lack of guidance for life after prison. Compelling, moving, and often hilarious, Orange is the New Black sheds a unique light on life inside a women’s prison, by a Smith College graduate who did the crime and did the time.”
– from the Publisher

In Defense of Flogging, by Peter Moskos
“If we're capable of taking Moskos' idea as a serious option to incarceration, it could have profound consequences for a nation that incarcerates its citizens at a rate that's seven times as high as the other nations of the world. Clearly we have to find a way to reduce prison populations, and this just might be a logical one.... In Defense of Flogging forces the reader to confront issues surrounding incarceration that most Americans would prefer not to think about.”
–The Daily Beast

We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice, by Mariame Kaba
“In her new book, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us Mariame Kaba demonstrates the ways that discipline—in intellect, in practice, in relationship—leads not to despair, but to hope. The far-ranging series of essays and interviews draws on her deep practice as a seasoned organizer who persistently distills the questions surrounding abolition to basic human decisions about the world we want to inhabit and how we will go about building it. Abolition, as Mariame sees and practices, is fundamentally both generous and pragmatic and her writing will move both seasoned abolitionists and those just now asking these questions for the first time to join in her conclusion that ‘your cynicism is unrealistic.”
—Danielle Sered, author, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence, by Emily L Thuma
"All Our Trials is a tour de force. It stands among the best books on the history of modern feminist politics and represents one of the most elucidating histories of the US carceral state produced to date. Emily Thuma centers criminalized women’s ideas and organizing, providing graceful historical analysis that will undoubtedly influence current conversations about imprisonment, gender, and sexual violence. This history opens a fiercely urgent path toward an anticarceral feminist future."
--Sarah Haley, author of No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity

Rethinking the American Prison Movement, by Dan Berger
"From the penitentiaries and workhouses of the nineteenth century to the current prison-industrial complex, the United States has been a world leader in incarceration, discipline, and punishment. Dan Berger and Toussaint Losier examine the social movements that rose to reform or resist the American prison system, with attention to the marginalized activists and their allies who fought for justice both inside and beyond prison walls. This is a necessary and important book."
―Thomas J. Sugrue, author of Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North

Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair, by Danielle Sered
"Danielle Sered provocatively offers and backs up a vision that actually promotes real healing for crime survivors and improves community safety. A must-read for anyone who truly wants to dismantle mass incarceration."
―Nick Turner, president, Vera Institute of Justice

13th
“Filmmaker Ava DuVernay explores the history of racial inequality in the United States, focusing on the fact that the nation's prisons are disproportionately filled with African-Americans.”
–Rotten Tomatoes

“In this thought-provoking documentary, scholars, activists and politicians analyze the criminalization of African Americans and the U.S. prison boom.”
–Netflix

Q Ball
“In Q BALL, several convicts in California's oldest prison, San Quentin, participate in a basketball program. The film focuses mainly on star forward Harry "ATL" Smith, whose impressive skills could lead to a future in the NBA, if he can focus and learn to trust his teammates before he's paroled. Coach Rafael Cuevas, a convicted murderer, does his best to make sure that the team practices discipline and positivity. Older convict Allan "Black" McIntosh, a nonviolent victim of the Three Strikes law, acts as quiet role model. As the team -- called the Warriors -- embarks on its season, they all look forward to the final game against the Golden State Warriors' G League team.”
–CSM

The Prison in Twelve Landscapes “A cinematic journey through a series of seemingly ordinary American landscapes, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes excavates the hidden world of the modern prison system and explores lives outside the gates affected by prisons.

By examining the impact of mass incarceration from outside the prison walls, the film takes us to unexpected locations — from a California mountainside where female prisoners fight raging wildfires, to a Bronx warehouse with goods destined for the state correctional system, to a rural Kentucky mining town that now depends on the local penitentiary for jobs. The film visits two communities – Baltimore and St. Louis County, Missouri – bristling from racially motivated violence and rising tensions between African American communities and police, where we meet a Missouri woman who ends up in jail because she didn’t put her garbage bin lid on properly. And in New York, we meet a formerly incarcerated chess player and join family members on a dark street corner waiting for the bus to Attica.”
–PBS

Time
Time is a 2020 American documentary film produced and directed by Garrett Bradley. It follows Sibil Fox Richardson, fighting for the release of her husband, Rob, who is serving a 60-year prison sentence for engaging in an armed bank robbery.

They Call Us Monsters
They Call Us Monsters is a 2016 American documentary directed and produced by Ben Lear. The film follows three juveniles: Juan Gamez, Antonio Hernandez and Jarad Nava. The teenagers participate in a screenwriting class at Barry J. Nidorf Juvenile Hall in Los Angeles, California with producer Gabriel Cowan.