Cross Cultural Solidarity

History; in the Service of Solidarity

Mass Incarceration: Articles

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 TruthoutFor 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:

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:

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

Emily Bazelon:

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:

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:

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:

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.:

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:

Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve:

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:

Nancy A. Heitzeg & Kay Whitlock:

Kelly Lytle Hernández:

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

Elizabeth Hinton:

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.” 

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

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:

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:

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:

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:

Donna Murch:

Ethan Nadelmann:

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:

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.

Beth E. Richie:

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

Andrea J. Ritchie:

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:

Sarah A. Seo:

DanielleSered:

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:

Heather Ann Thompson:

Emily Thuma:

John Tierney: Prison and the Poverty Trap.           

Alex S. Vitale:

Loïc Wacquant:

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

Vesla M. Weaver:

Bruce Western:

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:

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

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