Since the 1980s prison construction and incarceration rates in the U.S. have been rising exponentially, evoking huge public concern about their proliferation, their recent privatisation and their promise of enormous profits. But these prisons house hugely disproportionate numbers of people of colour, betraying the racism embedded in the system, while studies show that increasing prison sentences has had no effect on crime. Here, esteemed civil rights activist Angela Davis lays bare the situation and argues for a radical rethinking of our rehabilitation programmes.

Because people will make compromises and sacrifices, and they'll lose the vision. The A.C.L.U.'s Smart Justice campaign, the largest in the organization's history, has been started with a goal of reducing the prison population by 50 percent through local, state and federal initiatives to reform bail, prosecution, sentencing, parole and re-entry. (The department head has a different recollection.) She got her way and has been developing the concept of carceral geography ever since, a category of scholarship she more or less single-handedly invented, which examines the complex interrelationships among landscape, natural resources, political economy, infrastructure and the policing, jailing, caging and controlling of populations. In her 2007 book, "Golden Gulag," she draws upon her vast knowledge of political economy and geography to put together a portrait of significant historical change and the drive to embark upon what, as two California state analysts called it, "the largest prison building project in the history of the world."

When someone considers the mental and psychological damage that is caused to prisoners through measures like being thrown in the "hole" (solitary confinement with sensory deprivation)1, insufficient medical treatment for physical and mental illnesses, and physical and emotional abuse (strip searches being likened to sexual assault)2, one has to question how effective prisons are in allowing the prisoners to reform themselves and become individuals who are better able to function in society. [...] through the duration of the course, from the readings of Angela Y. Davis to Mary Rowlandson and up to the poetry from Guantánamo prisoners, my understanding of the concept of imprisonment changed.\n Their concerns tended to cluster around two main questions: (1) what would we do with dangerous criminals if prisons ceased to exist? and (2) how would social problems like poverty, violent crimes, drug use, mental illness, and theft be solved by getting rid of prisons?

Rethinking the American Prison Movement provides a short, accessible overview of the transformational and ongoing struggles against America's prison system. Dan Berger and Toussaint Losier show that prisoners have used strikes, lawsuits, uprisings, writings, and diverse coalitions with free-world allies to challenge prison conditions and other kinds of inequality. From the forced labor camps of the nineteenth century to the rebellious protests of the 1960s and 1970s to the rise of mass incarceration and its discontents, Rethinking the American Prison Movement is invaluable to anyone interested in the history of American prisons and the struggles for justice still echoing in the present day.

A major reappraisal of crime and punishment in America The huge prison buildup of the past four decades has few defenders, yet reforms to reduce the numbers of those incarcerated have been remarkably modest. Meanwhile, an ever-widening carceral state has sprouted in the shadows, extending its reach far beyond the prison gate. It sunders families and communities and reworks conceptions of democracy, rights, and citizenship--posing a formidable political and social challenge. In Caught, Marie Gottschalk examines why the carceral state remains so tenacious in the United States. She analyzes the shortcomings of the two dominant penal reform strategies--one focused on addressing racial disparities, the other on seeking bipartisan, race-neutral solutions centered on reentry, justice reinvestment, and reducing recidivism. With a new preface evaluating the effectiveness of recent proposals to reform mass incarceration, Caught offers a bracing appraisal of the politics of penal reform.

Despite the triumphant dismantling of the Jim Crow Laws, the system that once forced African Americans into a segregated second-class citizenship still haunts America, the US criminal justice system still unfairly targets black men and an entire segment of the population is deprived of their basic rights. Outside of prisons, a web of laws and regulations discriminates against these wrongly convicted ex-offenders in voting, housing, employment and education. Alexander here offers an urgent call for justice.

Danielle Sered's brilliant and groundbreaking Until We Reckon steers directly and unapologetically into the question of violence, offering approaches that will help end mass incarceration and increase safety. Widely recognized as one of the leading proponents of a restorative approach to violent crime, Sered asks us to reconsider the purposes of incarceration and argues persuasively that the needs of victims of violent crime are better met by asking people who commit violence to accept responsibility for their actions and make amends in ways that are meaningful to those they have hurt.

During the 1970s, grassroots women activists in and outside of prisons forged a radical politics against gender violence and incarceration. Emily L. Thuma traces the making of this anticarceral feminism at the intersections of struggles for racial and economic justice, prisoners' and psychiatric patients' rights, and gender and sexual liberation.  All Our Trials explores 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 archival research and first-person narratives, Thuma weaves together the stories of mass defense campaigns, prisoner uprisings, broad-based local coalitions, national gatherings, and radical print cultures that cut through prison walls. In the process, she illuminates a crucial chapter in an unfinished struggle--one that continues in today's movements against mass incarceration and in support of transformative justice.

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified decades of vulnerabilities, disparities, and injustices within the U.S. correctional system. The spread of the coronavirus poses a particularly serious threat to those that comprise the system, including personnel, attorneys, prisoners, their families and extends into the communities in which facilities are located. These correctional facilities and communities were especially underprepared for the sudden onset of a highly contagious virus, which has resulted in an exceedingly high number of infections among those who work and are held in the facilities. Rampant overcrowding in the U.S. correctional system, an aging population, and a population exhibiting high rates of underlying health conditions are highly likely to exacerbate the spread of this highly contagious virus. This potentially dire set of interrelated circumstances necessitates rapid decarceration measures that effectively balance public safety and public health. Unfortunately, there has been unclear guidance as well as changing and even contradictory information coming from the federal government concerning rapid measures to mitigate the spread of infection to justice system personnel and federal prisoners. In this paper we summarize the federal response and how it has impacted those responsible for implementation. Furthermore, we discuss how systemic deleterious conditions of the U.S. correctional system serve as both accelerants to as well as effects of the pandemic. We end highlighting critical issues relating to early release due to COVID-19 that will necessitate future research.

When teenagers scuffle during a basketball game, they are typically benched. But when Will got into it on the court, he and his rival were sprayed in the face at close range by a chemical similar to Mace, denied a shower for twenty-four hours, and then locked in solitary confinement for a month. One in three American children will be arrested by the time they are twenty-three, and many will spend time locked inside horrific detention centers that defy everything we know about how to rehabilitate young offenders. In a clear-eyed indictment of the juvenile justice system run amok, award-winning journalist Nell Bernstein shows that there is no right way to lock up a child. The very act of isolation denies delinquent children the thing that is most essential to their growth and rehabilitation: positive relationships with caring adults. Bernstein introduces us to youth across the nation who have suffered violence and psychological torture at the hands of the state. She presents these youths all as fully realized people, not victims. As they describe in their own voices their fight to maintain their humanity and protect their individuality in environments that would deny both, these young people offer a hopeful alternative to the doomed effort to reform a system that should only be dismantled. Burning Down the House is a clarion call to shut down our nation’s brutal and counterproductive juvenile prisons and bring our children home.

Addressing mass incarceration through smart decarceration initiatives is one of the Grand Challenges for Social Work named by the American Academy of Social Work Welfare and Research. The exponential growth of the U.S. prison system is largely due to legislation that targets marginalized communities, including people of color, poor people, people with mental illness, and those living with disabilities, as well as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) people of all ages. In this article, we seek to complicate the current conversation on smart decarceration by arguing that social workers committed to addressing mass incarceration should engage abolitionist theory, politics, and organizing in their work in order to effectively address the root causes driving the buildup of the prison nation. We engage feminist and queer theories as two theoretical interventions that can guide this work. We next describe how LGBTQ+ youth enter the criminal legal system, highlighting how normative systems of gender and sexuality subject LGBTQ+ youth to punitive policing, surveillance, and discipline. Finally, we share three models of prison abolitionist organizing led by LGBTQ+ people of color as case studies. By examining how these organizations embrace queer and feminist abolitionist frameworks, we identify concrete ways that social workers can adopt abolitionist principles and practices in their work to address mass incarceration.

A collection which represents years of struggle in the transgender, gender variant and queer liberation movements and the movement for the abolition of the prison industrial complex. Often discriminated against and harassed on the outside, time in prison can be especially difficult for this already marginalised group of people who may exist between the prison system's male/female institutions. Vulnerable to attack and often denied medical care or protection beyond segregation, they are often overlooked by mainstream rights campaigns.

This article centers incarcerated Indigenous women's voices, knowledges, and stories through an examination of (1983), edited by Beth Brant. Prioritizing these knowledges, which are often marginalized or absent in prison abolitionist literature, I illuminate the possibilities offered by decolonial approaches to prison abolition. This article explores the ways that Indigenous perspectives and stories are a vital part of the context for prison abolition in settler states and calls for non-Native prison abolitionists to attend to the experiences and stories of Indigenous incarcerated people as a central component of prison abolition as it is tied to decolonization.

This vital addition to carceral, prison, and disability studies draws important new links between deinstitutionalization and decarceration   Prison abolition and decarceration are increasingly debated, but it is often without taking into account the largest exodus of people from carceral facilities in the twentieth century: the closure of disability institutions and psychiatric hospitals. Decarcerating Disability provides a much-needed corrective, combining a genealogy of deinstitutionalization with critiques of the current prison system. Liat Ben-Moshe provides groundbreaking case studies that show how abolition is not an unattainable goal but rather a reality, and how it plays out in different arenas of incarceration--antipsychiatry, the field of intellectual disabilities, and the fight against the prison-industrial complex. Ben-Moshe discusses a range of topics, including why deinstitutionalization is often wrongly blamed for the rise in incarceration; who resists decarceration and deinstitutionalization, and the coalitions opposing such resistance; and how understanding deinstitutionalization as a form of residential integration makes visible intersections with racial desegregation. By connecting deinstitutionalization with prison abolition, Decarcerating Disability also illuminates some of the limitations of disability rights and inclusion discourses, as well as tactics such as litigation, in securing freedom.  Decarcerating Disability's rich analysis of lived experience, history, and culture helps to chart a way out of a failing system of incarceration.

The crisis of borders and prisons can be seen starkly in statistics. In 2011 some 1,500 migrants died trying to enter Europe, and the United States deported nearly 400,000 and imprisoned some 2.3 million people more than at any other time in history. International borders are increasingly militarized places embedded within domestic policing and imprisonment and entwined with expanding prison-industrial complexes. "Beyond Walls and Cages" offers scholarly and activist perspectives on these issues and explores how the international community can move toward a more humane future. Working at a range of geographic scales and locations, contributors examine concrete and ideological connections among prisons, migration policing and detention, border fortification, and militarization. They challenge the idea that prisons and borders create safety, security, and order, showing that they can be forms of coercive mobility that separate loved ones, disempower communities, and increase shared harms of poverty. Walls and cages can also fortify wealth and power inequalities, racism, and gender and sexual oppression. As governments increasingly rely on criminalization and violent measures of exclusion and containment, strategies for achieving change are essential. "Beyond Walls and Cages" develops abolitionist, no borders, and decolonial analyses and methods for social change, showing how seemingly disconnected forms of state violence are interconnected. Creating a more just and free world whether in the Mexico-U.S. borderlands, the Morocco-Spain region, South Africa, Montana, or Philadelphia requires that people who are most affected become central to building alternatives to global crosscurrents of criminalization and militarization. Contributors: Olga Aksyutina, Stokely Baksh, Cynthia Bejarano, Anne Bonds, Borderlands Autonomist, Collective, Andrew Burridge, Irina Contreras, Renee Feltz, Luis A. Fernandez, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Amy Gottlieb, Gael Guevara, Zoe Hammer, Julianne Hing, Subhash Kateel, Jodie M. Lawston, Bob Libal, Jenna M. Loyd, Lauren Martin, Laura McTighe, Matt Mitchelson, Maria Cristina Morales, Alison Mountz, Ruben R. Murillo, Joseph Nevins, Nicole Porter, Joshua M. Price, Said Saddiki, Micol Seigel, Rashad Shabazz, Christopher Stenken, Proma Tagore, Margo Tamez, Elizabeth Vargas, Monica W. Varsanyi, Mariana Viturro, Harsha Walia, Seth Freed Wessler."

Journalists John McCoy and Ethan Hoffman spent four months inside the walls of the Washington State Penitentiary at Walla Walla in 1978, just as Washington, once a leader in prison reform, abandoned its focus on reform and rehabilitation and returned to cell time and punishment. It was a brutal transition. McCoy and Hoffman roamed the maximum-security compound almost at will, observing and befriending prisoners and guards. The result is a striking depiction of a community in which there was little to do, much to fear, and a culture that both mimicked and scorned the outside world. McCoy's unadorned prose and Hoffman's stunning black-and-white photographs offer as authentic a portrayal of life in the Big House as "outsiders" are ever likely to experience. Originally published in 1981, Concrete Mama revealed a previously unseen stark and complex world of life on the inside, for which it won the Washington State Book Award. Long unavailable yet still relevant, it is revitalized in a second edition with an introduction by scholar Dan Berger that provides historical context for the book's ongoing resonance, along with several previously unpublished photographs.

At 2.26 million, incarcerated Americans not only outnumber the nation’s fourth-largest city, they make up a national constituency bound by a shared condition. Fourth City: Essays from the Prison in America presents more than seventy essays from twenty-seven states, written by incarcerated Americans chronicling their experience inside. In essays as moving as they are eloquent, the authors speak out against a national prison complex that fails so badly at the task of rehabilitation that 60% of the 650,000 Americans released each year return to prison. These essays document the authors’ efforts at self-help, the institutional resistance such efforts meet at nearly every turn, and the impact, in money and lives, that this resistance has on the public. Directly confronting the images of prisons and prisoners manufactured by popular media, so-called reality TV, and for-profit local and national news sources, Fourth City recognizes American prisoners as our primary, frontline witnesses to the dysfunction of the largest prison system on earth. Filled with deeply personal stories of coping, survival, resistance, and transformation, Fourth City should be read by every American who believes that law should achieve order in the cause of justice rather than at its cost.

The article presents the author's experiences as a prisoner. I am a recognized member of the Tule River Yokuts, Kashaya Pomo, and Lake County Pomo Nations. I am a former prisoner and was housed at the California Rehabilitation Center located at Norco. While imprisoned, I was influential in forming the prison's first American Indian women's support group and the first women's sweat lodge built at a state prison in California. Since my release I have allied myself with many American Indian support groups. My focus and commitment has always been to include support for American Indian women imprisoned within the "White Man's" criminal justice system.

After his 2014 expose about his experiences as a prison guard in a Lousisiana for-profit prison, Shane Bauer soon realised the cruelty of the current American system and its place in the larger story of mass incarceration cannot be understood without first understanding its origins. In American Prison, Bauer weaves together a deeper reckoning of his prison guard experience with a thorough history of for-profit prisons in America. A blistering accusation of the private prison system in the United States, American Prison is a necessary human document about the true face of justice in the USA.

"This collection of short meditations, written from a prison cell, captures the past two decades of police violence that gave rise to Black Lives Matter while digging deeply into the history of the United States. This is the book we need right now to find our bearings in the chaos."--Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States "[Mumia’s] writings are a wake-up call. He is a voice from our prophetic tradition, speaking to us here, now, lovingly, urgently.”--Cornel West "He allows us to reflect upon the fact that transformational possibilities often emerge where we least expect them.”--Angela Y. Davis In December 1981, Mumia Abu Jamal was shot and beaten into unconsciousness by Philadelphia police. He awoke to find himself shackled to a hospital bed, accused of killing a cop. He was convicted and sentenced to death in a trial that Amnesty International has denounced as failing to meet the minimum standards of judicial fairness. In Have Black Lives Ever Mattered?, Mumia gives voice to the many people of color who have fallen to police bullets or racist abuse, and offers the post-Ferguson generation advice on how to address police abuse in the United States. This collection of his radio commentaries on the topic features an in-depth essay written especially for this book to examine the history of policing in America, with its origins in the white slave patrols of the antebellum South and an explicit mission to terrorize the country’s black population. Applying a personal, historical, and political lens, Mumia provides a righteously angry and calmly principled radical black perspective on how racist violence is tearing our country apart and what must be done to turn things around. Mumia Abu-Jamal is author of many books, including Death Blossoms, Live from Death Row, All Things Censored, and Writing on the Wall.

"Within our current carceral landscape, transformative justice feminist praxis is an essential epistemic and organizing tool to achieve such freedom from violence. For those of us who have been victimized by both intimate partner violence and state violence, there is no other choice for us but to continue building community accountability circles and anti-violence movements that guarantee our collective survival. People who harm, like the carceral state, use intimate violence as a way to maintain power, which is why they don’t have an invested interest in ending it. We have to always be . . . “creating something else to be” (Morrison 1974, 52)" (Palacios, 2016, 107).