Add a Comment (0)

 Email This

Digg this!

 Share & Bookmark

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness New Press, 2010

While racial justice advocates focus on affirmative action, millions of African Americans have lost their basic civil rights -- the right to vote, to have access to housing and education -- through the penal system. In a powerful new book, litigator Michelle Alexander argues that the mass incarceration of people of color in this country is a system of social control, similar to Jim Crow segregation, and that a widespread movement is needed to overturn it.

 Add a Comment (0)

 Email This

Digg this!

 Share & Bookmark

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California U.C. Press, 2007

Critical Resistance

More than one in every one hundred adults in the US is behind bars. What accounts for the 450% increase in the number of incarcerated people since 1980? Is it rising crime rates, or racism, or something else? Ruth Wilson Gilmore shared her analysis, and described anti-prison activism, before an audience at The Evergreen State College.

 Add a Comment (0)

 Email This

Digg this!

 Share & Bookmark

Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest Routledge, 1995

Why does the US torture people who it knows have no actionable intelligence? What does paranoia have to do with torture conducted at places like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo? What has the commentary surrounding the Abu Ghraib photographs crucially ignored? Anne McClintock weighs in on these and other matters.

 Add a Comment (0)

 Email This

Digg this!

 Share & Bookmark

Ogletree & Sarat, eds., When Law Fails: Making Sense of Miscarriages of Justice NYU Press, 2009

Art is Moving

Death penalty abolitionists have made tangible progress. The wrongful conviction of innocent people has spurred reform. And yet, contends Douglas Berman, a huge problem goes largely unnoticed and unaddressed: the American affinity for what he calls extreme punishment. Also, Lisa Rasmussen and Lauren Odell Usher talk about the art show Art & the Body Politick.

 Add a Comment (0)

 Email This

Digg this!

 Share & Bookmark

Staughton Lynd, Lucasville: The Untold Story of a Prison Uprising Temple U. Press, 2004

Anarchists, with their goal of abolishing the state, and Marxists, who have often sought state power to achieve their ends, have been at odds for a long time. Veteran dissident Staughton Lynd and anarchist historian Andrej Grubacic have sought a synthesis of sorts between the two radical disciplines; their collaboration has resulted in the new book Wobblies and Zapatistas.

 Add a Comment (0)

 Email This

Digg this!

 Share & Bookmark

Council on Contemporary Families

Terry Kupers, Prison Madness: The Mental Health Crisis Behind Bars and What We Must Do About It Jossey-Bass, 1999

Many conservatives are calling for a return to a Golden Age of marriage and family. According to Stephanie Coontz, that Golden Age never existed; she also describes the recent revolution in the role and function of marriage. And Terry Kupers asserts that what we are doing in prison to people suffering from mental illness is making them more disturbed and more difficult to rehabilitate.