To stay up to date on mass incarceration news, follow Cross Cultural Solidarity’s Twitter list of incarceration scholars and activists.  See also The Marshall Project and The Sentencing Project, as well as the “Prisons and Policing” section at Truthout.  For a roundup of articles about the 2020 uprisings, click here. The extensive collection of articles below represents the thinking of the major incarceration scholars at work today.  For books, click here.

Mounah Abdel-Samad & Megan Welsh: “You’re an Embarrassment”: Un-housed people’s understandings of policing in downtown San Diego.

Christopher Lowen Agee: Gay Politics and Police Politics in the American City.        

Michelle Alexander:

• The New Jim Crow: How the war on drugs gave birth to a permanent American undercaste.
• Reckoning With Violence: We must face violent crime honestly and courageously if we are ever to end mass incarceration and provide survivors what they truly want and need to heal.
• The Newest Jim Crow: Recent criminal justice reforms contain the seeds of a frightening system of “e-carceration.”
• Telling My Son About Ferguson: I write and lecture about the horrors of our criminal justice system. Explaining the Darren Wilson decision to my child was much harder.
• Why Police Lie Under Oath: Perversely, the criminal justice system gives officers an incentive to perjure themselves.
• Go to Trial: Crash the Justice System.  What would happen if thousands of people charged with crimes refused to plead out?
• In Prison Reform, Money Trumps Civil Rights.
• Interview: Life After ‘The New Jim Crow.’
• What I Learned From Susan Burton, a Modern-Day Harriet Tubman.
• Obama’s Drug War: The administration is promoting failed law enforcement programs as economic stimulus.
• Where Have All the Black Men Gone?           

Bench Ansfield: How a 50-year-old study was misconstrued to create destructive broken-windows policing: The harmful policy was built on a shaky foundation.

Simon Balto:

• Why police cheered Trump’s dark speech: Rank-and-file officers have long been drawn to demagogues.
• Chicago’s History With Stop-and-Frisk Laws Is a Warning.           
• Review of Balto’s Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago.

Simon Balto and Max Felker-Kantor, in conversation: Contesting Police Power.

Emily Bazelon:

• If Prisons Don’t Work, What Will?   
• There’s a Wave of New Prosecutors. And They Mean Justice.  These district attorneys should make jail the exception and eliminate cash bail.
• There’s a Strong Case for Sticking With Bail Reform.         
• See more articles from Bazelon at her NYT page.

Aaron Bekemeyer: The long tie between police unions and police violence — and what to do about it.

Liat Ben-Moshe: Reviving the Asylum Is Not the Answer to Gun Violence: US prisons often operate as asylums for the disabled.

Liat Ben-Moshe: Why prisons are not ‘‘The New Asylums’’.

Dan Berger:

• Why Incarcerated People Hold the Keys to Prison Reform.     
• A Brief History of the “War on Cops”: The False Allegation That Enables Police Violence.  The war on cops does not exist, but the idea has been used to justify increasing police violence.
• Freedom From Violence: Lessons From Black Prisoner Organizing.  As prison organizing demonstrates, the pursuit of freedom from violence is rooted in care and creativity.
• Rise in White Prisoners Doesn’t Change Innate Racism of Prisons. 
• From Freedom Summer to Black August: At the dawn of mass incarceration, the creators of Black August saw that racism itself was being reinvented or at least being updated through the criminal justice system.
• “Prison Reform” Is Not Enough. In 2019, Let’s Fight for Decarceration.
• Are Florida prisons suppressing an inmate strike or just lying about it? We don’t know, because prisons are shrouded in secrecy.
• Rattling the Cages: This fall’s prison strikes are a model of how to both survive and challenge an authoritarian, racist order.
• The Imperial History of US Policing: An Interview with Stuart Schrader.
• Mass Incarceration and Its Mystification: A Review of The 13th.   

Dan Berger, Mariame Kaba, & David Stein: What Abolitionists Do.

Reginald Dwayne Betts: What Prison Takes Away: The oldest known incarceration memoir by an African American indicts a system that destroys souls.

Keisha N. Blain: Ida B. Wells offered the solution to police violence more than 100 years ago.

Lawrence D. Bobo and Victor Thompson: Racialized Mass Incarceration: Poverty, Prejudice, and Punishment.

Say Burgin: Rosa Parks on Police Brutality: The Speech We Never Heard.

Paul Butler: ‘I worked as a prosecutor. Then I was arrested. The experience made a man out of me. It made a black man out of me’

Jordan T. Camp & Christina Heatherton: Policing the Crisis, Policing the Planet.

Julio Capó Jr. The police chief who inspired Trump’s tweet glorifying violence: Trump echoed a former Miami police chief’s anti-black words and animus.

Dennis R. Childs: Slavery, the 13th Amendment, and Mass Incarceration: A Response to Patrick Rael.

Todd Clear: Why America’s Mass Incarceration Experiment Failed.         

Coalition on Homelessness: Punishing the Poorest: How the Criminalization of Homelessness Perpetuates Poverty in San Francisco.

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

• Mapping the New Jim Crow: America’s entire history is marked by the state imposing unfreedom on a large swath of the African American population.
• The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration.

Emma Coleman: Why criminal justice reform advocates are struggling in Trump’s America: The religious origins of President Trump’s war on crime.

Sam Collings-Wells:  How well-intentioned reforms could worsen mass incarceration: Breaking up Rikers Island’s jail complex, like reforming policing, may have unintended consequences.

Critical Resistance and INCITE!: Statement on Gender Violence and the Prison Industrial Complex.       

Angela J. Davis: Meet the Criminal Justice System’s Most Powerful Actors: To reform the justice system, look to prosecutors.

Matthew F. Delmont: Changing hearts and minds won’t stop police violence. The way Americans have long discussed racism is a huge part of the problem.

John Major Eason: Prisons and the Rural Ghetto: Prison construction becomes an attractive proposition in the face of poverty and the absence of other forms of private or public investment. To fight mass incarceration, we need different avenues for rural economic development.

Laura Edwards: The Constitution demands police accountability: Protesters have a right to oversight on police powers.

Garrett Felber: Fighting “Stop-and-Frisk” Policing from Rockefeller to Trump.

Max Felker-Kantor:

• What Jeff Sessions’s final act in office means for policing in America: Cutting consent decrees could cripple police reform.
• Max Felker-Kantor: Police departments should no longer be allowed to police themselves: The lack of outside accountability has allowed corruption and abuse to run rampant.
• Policing an Internal Border: LAPD, Immigration Law Enforcement, and Constructing the Criminal Alien.
• What the LAPD recruitment ad on Breitbart says about the department’s history.

Jennifer Kate Felner & Megan B. Welsh: Why Cities Must End Their Reliance on Police to Manage Homelessness – and How They Can Do It. 

James Forman Jr.:

• The Society of Fugitives: How does aggressive police surveillance transform an urban neighborhood? A sociologist reports from the inside.
• Another Justice: A conversation with James Forman, Jr.     
• How 20 years of stop and search has widened America’s racial divide.     
• Black Judges, Black Politicians, Black Prisoners: Political elites built the carceral state — and not just white ones.
• In “Locking Up Our Own,” James Forman Jr. explains the grave errors of the way black authority figures police the community.
• Fortress America: How 20th-century liberals helped create our age of mass incarceration.

Lee Gaines: Who Should Decide What Books Are Allowed In Prison?

Holly Genovese: The activists fighting mass incarceration? They’re not who you think. Far from the national spotlight, grass-roots activists are leading the way on prison reform.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore: The Worrying State of the Anti-Prison Movement.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore: Prisons and Class Warfare: Interview with Ruth Wilson Gilmore.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore and James Kilgore: The Case for Abolition: “We have grown weary of worn-out debates over the feasibility of a world without prisons.”

Ruth Wilson Gilmore and James Kilgore: Some Reflections on Prison Labor.

Che Gossett, Reina Gossett, & A.J. Lewis: Taking Freedom: Reclaiming Our Lineage: Organized Queer, Gender-Non-Conforming, and Transgender Resistance to Police Violence.

Marie Gottschalk:

• Conservatives Against Incarceration?  Fiscal conservatives were never going to bring down the carceral state. A broader fight against social inequality is needed.
• Trump’s First Step Act has been lauded by everyone from criminal justice reform organizations to Van Jones as an important blow against the carceral state. It’s not.
• It’s Not Just the Drug War: Progressive narratives about what’s driving mass incarceration don’t quite add up.
• Raze the Carceral State: We need to resist the belief that the only way to end mass incarceration is to tackle the root causes of crime.
• Kamala Harris’ Disturbing Brand of Criminal Justice Reform.
• America Needs a Third Reconstruction: The problem of mass incarceration is a problem of high inequality.
• The Democrats’ Shameful Legacy on Crime: Bill Clinton isn’t the only one who deserves blame for turning America into a carceral state.

Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve:

• The Waiting Room: For many released into the harsh environment outside Chicago’s Cook County Jail, it can be impossible to find their way home.
• The Chicago Culture That Created Jason Van Dyke: Judges who questioned the veracity of police testimony were considered disrespectful traitors and were treated as such.
• Chicago’s Racist Cops and Racist Courts.      
• Why Trump’s threat to ‘send in the Feds’ won’t help Chicago.      
• Rank and File Racism in the Power to Prosecute.
• Chicago’s Criminal Court System as Flawed as it’s Police.  

Matthew Guariglia: ‘Blue lives’ do matter — that’s the problem: How police identity trumps public interest.

Matthew Guariglia: What the loss of the New York police museum means for criminal-justice reform: Without historical records, we lose key insights into how law enforcement works — and how it fails.

Nancy A. Heitzeg:

• “Justice”: A Short Rant.  Stop asking for “justice” from the system that is killing us — demand abolition.
• Poverty as Prison, Reprise: We are a nation on lock down in more ways than we always see.
• The Daunting Task of Decarceration: It is possible that proposed “reform” isn’t meant to end mass incarceration at all, but rather create an opportunity for expanded profiteering.

Nancy A. Heitzeg & Kay Whitlock:

• Billionaire-Funded Criminal Justice Reform Actually Expands Carceral System.
• Moneyballing Justice: “Evidence-Based” Criminal Reforms Ignore Real Evidence. Proponents of “bipartisan criminal justice reform” fail to address exhaustive evidence of race-based policing.
• Prison Reform, Proposition 47 and the California Shell Game.
• “Bipartisan” Criminal Justice Reform: A Misguided Merger. The new Coalition for Public Safety provides cover for a neoliberal agenda.

Kelly Lytle Hernández:

• Amnesty or Abolition? Felons, illegals, and the case for a new abolition movement.
• Hobos in Heaven: Race, Incarceration, and the Rise of Los Angeles, 1880–1910.
• Why this ‘genius’ scholar is mapping out the world’s largest jail system.
• How the Government Built a Trap for Black Youth.
• The Rise of Incarceration in Los Angeles: An Interview with Kelly Lytle Hernandez.

Karlos K. Hill: Are Police Shootings Really Like Lynchings?

Elizabeth Hinton:

• From “War on Crime” to War on the Black Community: The Enduring Impact of President Johnson’s Crime Commission.
• How the ‘Central Park Five’ Changed the History of American Law: Ava DuVernay’s miniseries shows why the hysteria surrounding the 1989 case caused more children to stand trial as adults than at any other time in U.S. history.
• Color and Incarceration: Historian Elizabeth Hinton probes the roots of a gathering crisis.
• Turn Prisons Into Colleges.
• Interview with Elizabeth Hinton at “Black Perspectives.”
• The War on Crime, LBJ, and Ferguson.

Elizabeth Hinton, Julilly Kohler-Hausmann, & Vesla M. Weaver: Did Blacks Really Endorse the 1994 Crime Bill?

Pippa Holloway: A History of Stolen Citizenship. 

Matthew Hutson: The Trouble with Crime Statistics.

Jennifer A. Janechek: Disability, Inc.: The Exploitation of Difference by the Prison-Industrial Complex.

Volker Janssen: When the “Jungle” Met the Forest: Public Work, Civil Defense, and Prison Camps in Postwar California.

Chloé Cooper Jones: Fearing For His Life: Ramsey Orta filmed the killing of Eric Garner. The video traveled far, but it wouldn’t get justice for his dead friend. Instead, the NYPD would exact their revenge through targeted harassment and eventually imprisonment — Orta’s punishment for daring to show the world police brutality.

Journal of American History free June 2015 issue on “Historians and the Carceral State.” 

• Kelly Lytle Hernández, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, & Heather Ann Thompson: Introduction: Constructing the Carceral State.
• Kali Nicole Gross: African American Women, Mass Incarceration, and the Politics of Protection.
• Jeffrey S. Adler: Less Crime, More Punishment: Violence, Race, and Criminal Justice in Early Twentieth-Century America.
• Miroslava Chávez-García: Youth of Color and California’s Carceral State: The Fred C. Nelles Youth Correctional Facility.
• Timothy Stewart-Winter: Queer Law and Order: Sex, Criminality, and Policing in the Late Twentieth-Century United States.
• Robert T. Chase: We Are Not Slaves: Rethinking the Rise of Carceral States through the Lens of the Prisoners’ Rights Movement.
• Julilly Kohler-Hausmann: Guns and Butter: The Welfare State, the Carceral State, and the Politics of Exclusion in the Postwar United States.
• Elizabeth Hinton: “A War within Our Own Boundaries”: Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the Rise of the Carceral State.
• Alex Lichtenstein: Flocatex and the Fiscal Limits of Mass Incarceration: Toward a New Political Economy of the Postwar Carceral State.
• Matthew D. Lassiter:Impossible Criminals: The Suburban Imperatives of America’s War on Drugs.
• Torrie Hester: Deportability and the Carceral State.           
• Micol Seigel: Objects of Police History.
• Edward J. Escobar:The Unintended Consequences of the Carceral State: Chicana/o Political Mobilization in Post–World War II America.

Mariame Kaba: Towards the horizon of abolition: A conversation with Mariame Kaba.

• See Mariame Kaba’s personal website for her many articles. 

Esther Kaplan: Organizing Inside.

Peter Kelley: Nearly half of African-American women know someone in prison.

Amina Khan: Getting killed by police is a leading cause of death for young black men in America.

Issa Kohler-Hausmann: Performances in Misdemeanorland.

Issa Kohler-Hausmann: Interview, On Misdemeanors and Mass Incarceration.

Julilly Kohler-Hausmann: The Supremacy of Toughness: There is a Gendered Dimension to ‘Getting Tough.’

Rachel Kushner: Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind:

In three decades of advocating for prison abolition, the activist and scholar has helped transform how people think about criminal justice.

Daniel LaChance: How ‘Black Mirror’ exposes the racist reality of the death penalty in America: Unlike movies on the topic, the show highlights the uncomfortable truth about American executions.

Jamiles Lartey: By the numbers: US police kill more in days than other countries do in years.

Marisol LeBrón:

• Puerto Rico’s War on Its Poor: In the 1990s, Puerto Rico showed Washington how militarized policing and privatization can extract profits from poor people of color.
• Policing Worsens Public Safety for Puerto Rico’s Most Vulnerable.
• Policing is the Crisis. 
• Rosselló’s Gone, But Puerto Rico’s Fight Against Police Repression Continues.

Amy E. Lerman & Vesla M. Weaver: How Harsh Policing and Mass Imprisonment Create Second-Class American Citizens.

Glenn C. Loury: Ferguson Won’t Change Anything. What Will?

            Responses:

• Danielle Allen: The Problem Today is Racial Domination, Not Exclusion.
• Christopher Lebron: Loury Wants Us to be Reasonable When the Situation is Not.
• Harold Pollack: Ferguson Did Not Earn the Trust it Demanded.
• Melissa Nobles: Equal Justice Under the Law is the Civil Rights Issue of Our Time.
• Benjamin Justice & Tracey L. Meares: Police Single Out Certain Citizens as an Undesirable Class.

Willie Mack: Power and Policing in New York City.

Grace Mallon: President Trump can send the military to police Americans, but is doing so wise? The history of using militarized force domestically.

Mark Mauer:

• Incarceration Rates in an International Perspective.    
• Should felons vote? Yes.
• Long-Term Sentences: Time to Reconsider the Scale of Punishment.  Unduly long prison terms are counterproductive for public safety and contribute to the dynamic of diminishing returns as the prison system has expanded.
• See more from Mark Mauer at The Sentencing Project. 

Devin McGeehan Muchmore: Histories of Sexuality and the Carceral State.

Tracey L. Meares: Policing: A Public Good Gone Bad. Policing as we know is must be abolished before it can be transformed.

Tracey L. Meares and Vesla M. Weaver: Abolish the Police? Is policing a public good gone bad?

Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie, & Kay Whitlock: The Ghosts of Stonewall: Policing Gender, Policing Sex.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad:

• Why police accountability remains out of reach: Solutions have long been clear, but anti-black racism prevents their enactment.
• A critique: ‘Black Silent Majority,’ by Michael Javen Fortner.

Donna Murch:

• Crack in Los Angeles: Crisis, Militarization, and Black Response to the Late Twentieth-Century War on Drugs.
• Who’s to Blame for Mass Incarceration?
• Paying for Punishment: The New Debtors’ Prison.

Ethan Nadelmann:

• The Forty-Year Quagmire: An Exit Strategy for the War on Drugs.
• Exploring the Irrational Biases Behind the War on Drugs: Why have drug laws been disproportionately enforced against the poor and younger and darker-skinned members of society?

National Academy of Sciences: Risk of being killed by police use of force in the United States by age, race–ethnicity, and sex.

Julia C. Oparah: Feminism and the (Trans)gender Entrapment of Gender Nonconforming Prisoners.

Matthew R. Pembleton: We’ve spent a century fighting the war on drugs. It helped create an opioid crisis. The disastrous consequences of focusing on law enforcement and criminality.

Katrina Phillips: Longtime police brutality drove American Indians to join the George Floyd protests. Who were the American Indian Movement activists at the Minneapolis protests?

Tony Platt: Criminal justice reform in the U.S. has a long history of repressive outcomes: A decade from now under the First Step Act, expect that incarceration will be not so much reduced as diversified.

Portal Policing Project:

• Tracey L. Meares, Gwen Prowse, & Vesla M. Weaver: The State from Below: Distorted Responsiveness in Policed Communities.
• Spencer Piston, Gwen Prowse, & Vesla M. Weaver: Withdrawing and Drawing In: Political Discourse in Policed Communities.

Greg Prieto: Sanctuary and Public Safety: Busting the Myth that Immigrants Bring Crime.

Seth J. Prins & Brett Story: A Green New Deal for Decarceration: To save the planet, a Green New Deal has to transform our entire society. Part of that transformation must include the deconstruction of our system of mass incarceration.

Queer (In)Justice, Dean Spade, & Eric Stanley: Queering Prison Abolition, Now?

Patrick Rael: Demystifying the 13th Amendment and Its Impact on Mass Incarceration.

• See also Dennis R. Childs response: Slavery, the 13th Amendment, and Mass Incarceration: A Response to Patrick Rael.

Beth E. Richie:

• How Anti-violence Activism Taught Me to Become a Prison Abolitionist.
• Reimagining the Movement to End Gender Violence: Anti-racism, Prison Abolition, Women of Color Feminisms, and Other Radical Visions of Justice.
• The Effects of Violence on Communities.

Beth E. Richie ,Nicholas Freudenberg ,and Joanne Page: Reintegrating Women Leaving Jail Into Urban Communities.          

Andrea J. Ritchie:

• The Impact of the Trump Administration’s Federal Criminal Justice Initiatives on LGBTQ People &Communities and Opportunities for Local Resistance.
• How some cops use the badge to commit sex crimes.
• Why Young Girls Die Behind Bars.
• A Warrant to Search Your Vagina.   
• Black Mothers Are Not Just Survivors Of Police Violence, But Also Targets.
• “Prostitution-Related” Loitering Ordinance Promotes Racial Profiling in Chicago.
• Survivors of Sexual Violence by Police Need More Than a Quick Fix.
• See many more articles by Andrea J. Ritchie at Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color.

Andrew Sanders: What the U.S. can learn from the history of Northern Ireland: More policing is not the answer to our unrest.

Stuart Schrader:

• Policing Political Protest.
• The Making of the American Gulag: During the Cold War, the “police apparatus” was held up as a prime example of Soviet repression. Yet in its efforts to fight subversives, the United States ended up with its own carceral state. 
• An Empire of Patrolmen: During the Cold War, the US trained cops in more than fifty countries to suppress dissent. This “police professionalization” helped produce death squads in countries like El Salvador and mass incarceration in the United States.
• Policing Empire: The call to demilitarize police overlooks the longstanding link between policing and empire.
• To Protect and Serve Themselves: Police in US Politics since the 1960s.
• The Liberal Solution to Police Violence: Restoring Trust Will Ensure More Obedience.
• The Global Policeman Will Always Shoot People: Suleimani’s killing shows U.S. police and military power can’t be separated.
• See many more articles by Stuart Schrader at his personal website.

Sarah A. Seo:

• How Cars Transformed Policing: Before the mass adoption of the car, most communities barely had a police force and citizens shared responsibility for enforcing laws. Then the car changed everything.
• Officers have wide discretion when they pull over motorists. And the courts keep giving them more.

DanielleSered:

• Accounting for Violence: How to Increase Safety and Break Our Failed Reliance on Mass Incarceration.
• Expanding the Reach of Victim Services.                  
• Responding to the lasting impact of violence.           
• Read much more by DanielleSered here.

Tommie Shelby (interview): A Harvard political philosopher on why tougher policing in America won’t reduce crime.

Phil Smith: “There Is No Treatment Here:” Disability and Health Needs In A State Prison System.

Matthew Spina: When a protector becomes a predator: Every five days, a police officer in America is caught engaging in sexual abuse or misconduct. Others are never caught.

SPLC: SPLC sues private prison company that uses forced labor of detained immigrants in Georgia to boost profits.

David Stein: Trumpism and the Magnitude of Mass Incarceration.

Bryan Stevenson: Slavery gave America a fear of black people and a taste for violent punishment.  Both still define our criminal-justice system.

Brett Story (interview): We Talked To Filmmaker Brett Story About The Broken Prison System: The Prison in Twelve Landscapes goes behind the scenes of life in prison.

Flint Taylor:

• With Executive Order on Policing, Trump Declares Racialized War on Dissent.  The executive order can be read as an official authorization to pursue the most racist and reactionary criminal legal policies in recent memory.
• Blood on Their Hands: The Racist History of Modern Police Unions.  Police unions have always played a powerful role in defending cops, no matter how brutal and racist their actions.
• The Power of Public Outrage: Laquan McDonald’s Place in History.  A Black-led movement for justice kept alive the public outrage that led to Jason Van Dyke’s guilty verdict.
• Chicago Police Tortured Victims With Electric Shocks, Burns and Beatings. Under Commander Jon Burge, Black men endured torture and violence at the hands of Chicago police.
• See much more from Flint Taylor here, and here, and here.

Heather Ann Thompson:

• The policy mistakes from the 1990s that have made covid-19 worse: Being tough on crime and cutting benefits from the poor left millions more susceptible to disease. 
• America must listen to its prisoners before we make a major mistake: The anniversary of two major revolts remind us that tough-on-crime policies have created intense suffering in our prisons.
• How Prisons Change the Balance of Power in America: The 14th Amendment, when combined with the War on Crime, has paradoxically disenfranchised vast swaths of the population  and given the rural, white areas surrounding the prisons unforeseen political power.
• Inner-City Violence in the Age of Mass Incarceration: Harsh criminal-justice policies have thrown America’s poorest urban communities into chaos.
• Rethinking Working-Class Struggle through the Lens of the Carceral State: Toward a Labor History of Inmates and Guards.
• How a Series of Jail Rebellions Rocked New York—and Woke a City. It has been nearly 50 years since New York’s jails erupted in protest, but the lessons of that era feel more relevant than ever.
• How Attica’s Ugly Past Is Still Protected: Why advocates and survivors are disappointed by a new release of records from the 1971 retaking of Attica Correctional Facility.
• Empire State disgrace: The dark, secret history of the Attica Prison tragedy. Dozens were killed at Attica prison in a bloody 1971 clash. So why is New York state trying to hide the truth?
• What’s hidden behind the walls of America’s prisons.    
• See much more from Heather Ann Thompson here and here.

Emily Thuma:

• Against the “Prison/Psychiatric State”: Anti-violence Feminisms and the Politics of Confinement in the 1970s.
• How Feminists Resisted Prisons and Policing in the 1970s.   

John Tierney: Prison and the Poverty Trap.           

Alex S. Vitale:

• Police and the Liberal Fantasy: Body cameras and more training aren’t enough. We need to divert funding for police into funding for human needs.
• The Criminalization of Youth: If we want to offer children a better future, we need to get the criminal justice system out of their lives.
• Abolish the Drug Enforcement Administration… And use the savings to help the poor.
• Making the police more diverse or tinkering with their training won’t stop police killings of Black people. The problem is overpolicing.
• Let’s Build Up Communities Instead of Pouring Funds Into Police Oversight: Policing is an inherently violent and coercive tool that no amount of oversight and training can fix.
• Incremental Reforms Won’t Work: The Transformation of Policing Is Needed.
• See much more from Alex Vitale here, and here, and here.   

Loïc Wacquant:

• The Prison is an Outlaw Institution. 
• The Place of the Prison in the New Government of Poverty.
• The punitive regulation of poverty in the neoliberal age.
• The Body, the Ghetto and the Penal State.    
• From Slavery to Mass Incarceration.           
• Race as civic felony.
• Ordering Insecurity: Social Polarization and the Punitive Upsurge.
• See much more of Wacquant’s work at his personal website.

Olivia B. Waxman: Here’s How Stop-and-Frisk Laws Got Their Start.       

Vesla M. Weaver:

• The Untold Story of Mass Incarceration.
• How Mass Imprisonment Burdens the United States with a Distrustful Civic Underclass.
• The Only Government I Know: How the Criminal Justice System Degrades Democratic Citizenship.
• Frontlash: Race and the Development of Punitive Crime Policy.

Bruce Western:

• Crime and Punishment: Public Safety Doesn’t Require More Inmates.
• Reentry: Reversing mass imprisonment.
• The Challenge of Criminal Justice Reform.       
• The Growth of Incarceration in the United States – Causes, Consequences, and Proposed Reforms.
• In his new book ‘Homeward’, Harvard University professor Bruce Western explores what it’s like to reenter society after prison—and uncovers an epidemic of illness and mortality.
• Find many more articles by and featuring Bruce Western here and here.

Spencer J. Weinreich: Why prisoner abuse and deprivation persists in America: At heart, we still believe that people who are imprisoned deserve ill-treatment.

Kay Whitlock:

• How “Bipartisan Criminal Justice Reform” Institutionalizes a Right-Wing, Neoliberal Agenda.
• Faith, Inc. and Criminal Justice Reform.  Do faith-based programs work better than programs sponsored by the government or secular community-based organizations?
• Criminal InJustice: Beyond the Sessions – Trump Feint.

Catherine Zandonella: ‘The Torture Letters’: Laurence Ralph explores Chicago’s dark history.

For more resources on systemic racism, visit the systemic racism section of the website.