See also: the African American Intellectual Historical Society’s Prison Abolition Syllabus 2.0, the Urban History Association’s Histories of Police, Policing, and Police Unions in the United States, and Cross Cultural Solidarity’s resource page on mass incarceration articles.
Christopher Lowen Agee: The Streets of San Francisco: Policing and the Creation of a Cosmopolitan Liberal Politics, 1950-1972.
Michelle Alexander: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness.
Peter Andreas & Ethan Nadelmann: Policing the Globe: Criminalization and Crime Control in International Relations.
Joyce A. Arditti: Parental Incarceration and the Family: Psychological and Social Effects of Imprisonment on Children, Parents, and Caregivers.
Liat Ben-Moshe, Allison Carey, & Chris Chapman (editors): Disability Incarcerated: Imprisonment and Disability in the United States and Canada.
Simon Balto. Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power.
Emily Bazelon: Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration.
Dan Berger: Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era.
Catrien C.J.H. Bijleveld, David Farrington, Rolf Loeber, & Joseph Murray: Effects of Parental Incarceration on Children: Cross-National Comparative Studies.
Paul Butler: Chokehold: Policing Black Men.
Lisa Marie Cacho: Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected.
Jordan T. Camp & Christina Heatherton: Policing the Planet: Why the Policing Crisis Led to Black Lives Matter.
Jordan T. Camp: Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State.
Robert T. Chase: We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners’ Rights in Postwar America.
Dennis Childs: Slaves of the State: Black Incarceration from the Chain Gang to the Penitentiary.
Todd Clear: Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse.
Todd Clear, George Cole, & Michael Reisig: American Corrections (10th Edition.)
Todd Clear & Natasha Frost: The Punishment Imperative: The Rise and Failure of Mass Incarceration in America.
David Cole: No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System.
Megan Comfort: Doing Time Together: Love and Family in the Shadow of the Prison.
Angela J. Davis: Arbitrary Justice: The Power of the American Prosecutor.
Angela J. Davis, Mark Mauer, Bryan Stevenson, Jeremy Travis, and Bruce Western: Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment.
Angela Y. Davis:Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture.
Angela Y. Davis:Are Prisons Obsolete?
Angela Y. Davis:The Meaning of Freedom: And Other Difficult Dialogues.
Angela Y. Davis: Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement.
Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica Meiners, & Beth Richie: Abolition. Feminism. Now.
Michael Famighetti: Prison Nation.
Garrett Felber: Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State.
Max Felker-Kantor: Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD.
Michel Foucault:Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison.
James Forman Jr.: Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America.
Michael Javen Fortner: Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment.
Lawrence Friedman: Crime And Punishment In American History.
Dominique DuBois Gilliard:Rethinking Incarceration: Advocating for Justice That Restores.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore: Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California.
Wilson Ruth Gilmore: Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition.
Risa Goluboff: Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s.
Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve: Crook County: Racism and Injustice in America’s Largest Criminal Court.
Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve: The Waiting Room.
Marie Gottschalk: The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America.
Marie Gottschalk: Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics.
Aaron Griffith: God’s Law and Order: The Politics of Punishment in Evangelical America.
Sarah Hayley: No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity.
Nancy A. Heitzeg: The School-to-Prison Pipeline: Education, Discipline, and Racialized Double Standards.
Kelly Lytle Hernández: City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965.
Rachel Herzing & Justin Piche: How to Abolish Prisons: Lessons from the Movement Against Imprisonment.
Elizabeth Hinton: From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: the Making of Mass Incarceration in America.
Elizabeth Hinton: America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s.
Pippa Holloway: Living in Infamy: Felon Disfranchisement and the History of American Citizenship.
Devon Johnson: Deadly Injustice: Trayvon Martin, Race, and the Criminal Justice System.
Mariame Kaba: We Do This Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice.
David S. Kirk: Home Free: Prisoner Reentry and Residential Change after Hurricane Katrina.
Issa Kohler-Hausmann: Misdemeanorland: Criminal Courts and Social Control in an Age of Broken Windows Policing.
Julilly Kohler-Hausmann: Getting Tough: Welfare and Imprisonment in 1970s America.
Regina Kunzel: Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality.
Victoria Law & Maya Schenwar: Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms.
Marisol LeBrón: Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico.
Talitha L. LeFlouria: Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South.
Amy E. Lerman: The Modern Prison Paradox: Politics, Punishment, and Social Community.
Amy E. Lerman & Vesla M. Weaver: Arresting Citizenship: The Democratic Consequences of American Crime Control.
Joey L. Mogul & Andrea J. Ritchie: Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad: The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America.
Naomi Murakawa: The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America.
Devah Pager: Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration.
Anne E. Parsons: From Asylum to Prison: Deinstitutionalization and the Rise of Mass Incarceration after 1945.
Tony Platt: Beyond These Walls: Rethinking Crime and Punishment in the United States.
Laurence Ralph: The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence.
Beth E. Richie: Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation.
Natalie J. Ring & Amy Louise Wood: Crime and Punishment in the Jim Crow South.
Andrea Ritchie: Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color.
Lorna A. Rhodes: Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison.
Sarah A. Seo: Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom.
Danielle Sered:Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair.
Stuart Schrader: Badges without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing.
Micol Seigel: Violence Work: State Power and the Limits of Police.
Jonathan Simon: Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear.
Nat Smith & Eric A. Stanley (Editors): Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex.
Bryan Stevenson: Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption.
Brett Story: Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America.
Forrest Stuart: Down, Out, and Under Arrest: Policing and Everyday Life in Skid Row.
Flint Taylor: The Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago.
Heather Ann Thompson: Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy.
Emily L. Thuma All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence.
Alex S. Vitale: The End of Policing.
Loïc Wacquant: Prisons of Poverty.
Loïc Wacquant: Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity.
Hannah L. Walker: Mobilized by Injustice: Criminal Justice Contact, Political Participation, and Race.
Bruce Western: Homeward: Life in the Year After Prison.
For more resources on systemic racism, visit the systemic racism section of the website.