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With her characteristic brilliance, grace and radical audacity, Angela Y. Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of the prison. As she quite correctly notes, American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. For generations of Americans, the abolition of slavery was sheerest illusion. Similarly,the entrenched system of racial segregation seemed to last forever, and generations lived in the midst of the practice, with few predicting its passage from custom. The brutal, exploitative (dare one say lucrative?) convict-lease system that succeeded formal slavery reaped millions to southern jurisdictions (and untold miseries for tens of thousands of men, and women). Few predicted its passing from the American penal landscape. Davis expertly argues how social movements transformed these social, political and cultural institutions, and made such practices untenable. In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Professor Davis seeks to illustrate that the time for the prison is approaching an end. She argues forthrightly for "decarceration", and argues for the transformation of the society as a whole.

ABOUT THE BOOK Dr. Angela Y. Davis’ Are Prisons Obsolete? is a formative work about prison abolition. She explores and critiques the American penal system. The work is especially significant as the prison system continues to grow. She does not call for prison reform—although conditions will need to be ameliorated during decarceration—but for the eradication of prisons and their replacement with positive systems, such as schools, job training, health care and recreation programs. People have an extremely hard time imagining the world without prisons. We think that they are an inherent and unavoidable part of society. Davis examines the historical, social, racial, economic and political reasons and context that created the prison system, in order to "encourage readers to question their own assumptions about the prison" (Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? pg 10). Davis hopes that once these elements have been exposed it will be possible to "give up our usual way of thinking about punishment as an inevitable consequence of crime" (Davis 112) and imagine a world without prisons. MEET THE AUTHOR Nicole Bemboom is a San Francisco based writer. In addition to writing for the exciting new publisher Hyperink, she covers the best of modern craft and design for the online magazine Handful of Salt. She received her BA in Modern Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz. EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK In the chapter "Slavery, Civic Rights, and Abolitionist Perspectives Toward Prison," Davis examines the history of modern prisons, which started developing out of a reform of the corporeal punishment common in England during the American Revolution. Reformers believed that punishment “if carried out in isolation, behind the walls of the prison—would cease to be revenge and would actually reform those who had broken the law” (Davis 41). While this was meant to help people, it ended up growing into a situation in which prisoners were kept in unbearable silence and isolated cells, except while they did hard labor. Davis also shows how prisons took over the institution of slavery, which follows in more detail in the essay “Race and the Prison Sytem.” Davis examines the role of gender in the chapter “How Gender Structures the Prison System.” She finds the prisons reflect the gender structure in society, although she is careful to point out that defining women’s prisons as marginal helps to reinforce the assumption that male prisons are normal. She also details the terror and sexual abuse that is routine in prisons. Buy a copy to keep reading!

One of the most important problems faced by the United States is addressing its broken criminal justice system. This collection of essays offers a thorough examination of incarceration as a form of punishment. In addition to focusing on the philosophical aspects related to punishment, the volume’s diverse group of contributors provides additional background in criminology, economics, law, and sociology to help contextualize the philosophical issues. The first group of essays addresses whether or not our current institutions connected with punishment and incarceration are justified in a liberal society. The next set of chapters explores the negative effects of incarceration as a form of punishment, including its impact on children and families. The volume then describes how we arrived at our current situation in the United States, focusing on questions related to how we view prisons and prisoners, policing for profit, and the motivations of prosecutors in trying to secure convictions. Finally, Rethinking Punishment in the Era of Mass Incarceration examines specific policy alternatives that might offer solutions to our current approach to punishment and incarceration.

FEATURING: Barbara Brown Taylor Philip C. Kolin Amy Frykholm Joyce Polance PLUS: The Enduring World of Dr. Schultz: James Baldwin, Django Unchained, and the Crisis of Whiteness Painlove Soulful Resistance: Theological Body Knowledge on Tennessee's Death Row This Cursed Womb The Problem of Gay Friendship AND MORE . .

Revelations about U.S policies and practices of torture and abuse have captured headlines ever since the breaking of the Abu Ghraib prison story in April 2004. Since then, a debate has raged regarding what is and what is not acceptable behavior for the world’s leading democracy. It is within this context that Angela Davis, one of America’s most remarkable political figures, gave a series of interviews to discuss resistance and law, institutional sexual coercion, politics and prison. Davis talks about her own incarceration, as well as her experiences as "enemy of the state," and about having been put on the FBI’s "most wanted" list. She talks about the crucial role that international activism played in her case and the case of many other political prisoners. Throughout these interviews, Davis returns to her critique of a democracy that has been compromised by its racist origins and institutions. Discussing the most recent disclosures about the disavowed "chain of command," and the formal reports by the Red Cross and Human Rights Watch denouncing U.S. violation of human rights and the laws of war in Guantánamo, Afghanistan and Iraq, Davis focuses on the underpinnings of prison regimes in the United States.

Drawing on extensive interviews with ninety-four women prisoners, Megan Sweeney examines how incarcerated women use available reading materials to come to terms with their pasts, negotiate their present experiences, and reach toward different futures. Foregrounding the voices of African American women, Sweeney analyzes how prisoners read three popular genres: narratives of victimization, urban crime fiction, and self-help books. She outlines the history of reading and education in U.S. prisons, highlighting how the increasing dehumanization of prisoners has resulted in diminished prison libraries and restricted opportunities for reading. Although penal officials have sometimes endorsed reading as a means to control prisoners, Sweeney illuminates the resourceful ways in which prisoners educate and empower themselves through reading. Given the scarcity of counseling and education in prisons, women use books to make meaning from their experiences, to gain guidance and support, to experiment with new ways of being, and to maintain connections with the world.

This innovative volume proposes a reinvention of composition and rhetoric training with multiwriting, an alternative, open approach to composing that spans genres, media, disciplines, and cultures.

Philadelphia's community muralism movement is transforming the City of Brotherly Love into the Mural Capital of the World. This remarkable groundswell of public art includes some 3,500 wall-sized canvases: On warehouses and on schools, on mosques and in jails, in courthouses and along overpasses. In If These Walls Could Talk, Maureen O'Connell explores the theological and social significance of the movement. She calls attention to some of the most startling and powerful works it has produced and describes the narratives behind them. In doing so, O'Connell illustrates the ways that the arts can help us think about and work through the seemingly inescapable problems of urban poverty and arrive at responses that are both creative and effective. This is a book on American religion. It incorporates ethnography to explore faith communities that have used larger-than-life religious imagery to proclaim in unprecedented public ways their self-understandings, memories of the past, and visions of the future. It also examines the way this art functions in larger public discourse about problems facing every city in America. But If These Walls Could Talk is also theological text. It considers the theological implications of this most democratic expression of public art, mindful of the three components of every mural: the pieces themselves, those who create them, and those who interpret them. It illuminates a kind of beauty that seeks after social change or, in other words, the largely unexplored relationship between theological aesthetics and ethics.

Being Bad will change the way you think about the social and academic worlds of Black boys. In a poignant and harrowing journey from systems of education to systems of criminal justice, the author follows her brother, Chris, who has been designated a “bad kid” by his school, a “person of interest” by the police, and a “gangster” by society. Readers first meet Chris in a Chicago jail, where he is being held in connection with a string of street robberies. We then learn about Chris through insiders’ accounts that stretch across time to reveal key events preceding this tragic moment. Together, these stories explore such timely issues as the under-education of Black males, the place and importance of scapegoats in our culture, the on-the-ground reality of zero tolerance, the role of mainstream media in constructing Black masculinity, and the critical relationships between schools and prisons. No other book combines rigorous research, personal narrative, and compelling storytelling to examine the educational experiences of young Black males. Book Features: The natural history of an African American teenager navigating a labyrinth of social worlds. A detailed, concrete example of the school-to-prison pipeline phenomenon. Rare insightsof an African American family making sense of, and healing from, school wounds. Suggested resources of reliable places where educators can learn and do more. “Other books have focusedon the school-to-prison pipeline or the educational experiences of young African American males, but I know of none that bring the combination of rigorous research, up-close personal vantage point, and skilled storytelling provided by Laura in Being Bad.” —Gregory Michie, chicago public school teacher, author of Holler If You Hear Me, senior research associate at the Center for Policy Studies and Social Justice, Concordia University Chicago “Refusing to separate the threads that bind the oppressive fabric of contemporary urban life, Laura has crafted a story that is at once astutely critical, funny, engaging, tearful, dialogue-filled, profoundly theoretical, despairing, and filled with hope. Being Bad is a challenge and a gift to students, families, policymakers, soon-to-be teachers, social workers, and ethnographers.” —Michelle Fine, distinguished professor, Graduate Center, CUNY "Perhaps more than any other study on this topic, this book brings to life the complicated, fleshed, lived experience of those most directly and collaterally impacted by the politics of schooling and its relationship to our growing prison nation.” —Garrett Albert Duncan, associate professor of Education and African & African-American Studies, Washington University in St. Louis

As it examines daily struggles against appalling prison conditions and injustices, this collection of real-life prisoners' stories and analysis of the prison landscape as it is today documents both collective organizing and individual resistance among women incarcerated in the United States. In 1974, women imprisoned at New York's maximum-security prison at Bedford Hills staged what is known as the August Rebellion. Protesting the brutal beating of a fellow prisoner, the women fought off guards, holding seven of them hostage, and took over sections of the prison. While many have heard of the 1971 Attica prison uprising, the August Rebellion remains relatively unknown even in activist circles. Resistance Behind Bars challenges and seeks to change such oversights. Emphasizing women's agency in resisting the conditions of their confinement through forming peer education groups, clandestinely arranging ways for children to visit mothers in distant prisons, and raising public awareness about their lives, the book will spark further discussion and research into the lives of incarcerated women and galvanize much-needed outside support for their struggles. This updated and revised edition includes a new chapter about transgender, transsexual, intersex, and gender-variant people in prison and the specific challenges that they face.

Writings by twentieth-century imprisoned authors examining confinement, enslavement, and political organizing in prison.

There is now a long tradition of academic literature in media studies and criminology that has analysed how we come to think about crime, deviance and punishment. This book for the first time deals specifically with the role of language in this process, showing how critical linguistic analysis can provide further crucial insights into media representations of crime and criminals. Through case studies the book develops a toolkit for the analysis of language and images in examples taken from a range of media. Â The Language of Crimeand Deviance covers spoken, written and visual media discourses and focuses on a number of specific areas of crime and criminal justice, including media constructions of young people and women; media and the police, 'reality' crime shows; corporate crime; prison and drugs.It is therefore a welcome and valuable contribution to the fields of linguistics, criminology, media and cultural studies.

Ever since Eve tempted Adam with her apple, women have been regarded as a corrupting and destructive force. The very idea that women can be used as interrogation tools, as evidenced in the infamous Abu Ghraib torture photos, plays on age-old fears of women as sexually threatening weapons, and therefore the literal explosion of women onto the war scene should come as no surprise. From the female soldiers involved in Abu Ghraib to Palestinian women suicide bombers, women and their bodies have become powerful weapons in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. In Women as Weapons of War, Kelly Oliver reveals how the media and the administration frequently use metaphors of weaponry to describe women and female sexuality and forge a deliberate link between notions of vulnerability and images of violence. Focusing specifically on the U.S. campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, Oliver analyzes contemporary discourse surrounding women, sex, and gender and the use of women to justify America's decision to go to war. For example, the administration's call to liberate "women of cover," suggesting a woman's right to bare arms is a sign of freedom and progress. Oliver also considers what forms of cultural meaning, or lack of meaning, could cause both the guiltlessness demonstrated by female soldiers at Abu Ghraib and the profound commitment to death made by suicide bombers. She examines the pleasure taken in violence and the passion for death exhibited by these women and what kind of contexts created them. In conclusion, Oliver diagnoses our cultural fascination with sex, violence, and death and its relationship with live news coverage and embedded reporting, which naturalizes horrific events and stymies critical reflection. This process, she argues, further compromises the borders between fantasy and reality, fueling a kind of paranoid patriotism that results in extreme forms of violence.

Understanding Torture surveys the massive literature surrounding torture, arguing that, once properly understood, there can be no defense of torture in any circumstances.

In 1972, Will Campbell published an issue of the Committee of Southern Churchmen's journal, Katallagete, to shed light on the US prison system. None could anticipate how the system would expand exponentially in the next four decades. Today, the US operates the world's largest prison system, incarcerating nearly 1 in every 100 American adults. How did this expansion happen? What is the human toll of this retributive system? How might "ambassadors of reconciliation" respond to such a punitive institution? Replicating the firsthand nature of Will Campbell's original Katallagete collection, twenty new essays pull back the veil on today's prison-industrial complex. The plea throughout this collection is not for some better, more progressive institution to exact justice. Rather, the invitation is to hear from voices of experience how the system functions, listen to what the institution does to those locked in its cells, consider what an execution involves, and, most importantly, contemplate the scandalous call to be in reconciled community with those whom society discards and the system silences. Our story is that there are neither good nor bad people, neither felon nor free world. We are all one.

Combining a basic history of philosophical thought with the often quirky personal stories of famous philosophers, this comprehensive introduction to the world of philosophy answers more than 1,000 questions, ranging from What was the Enlightenment? to Why did the Pythagorians avoid fava beans? Analyzing the collective effort of philosophers throughout history in the pursuit of truth and wisdom, the guide explores the tangible significance of philosophical thought to modern society and civilization as a whole. With a wide range of information suitable for various knowledge bases—from junior high to junior college—this is an ideal resource for anyone looking to get a better grasp of the history of thought.

This book presents the diverse, expansive nature of African American Studies and its characteristic interdisciplinarity. It is intended for use with undergraduate/ beginning graduate students in African American Studies, American Studies and Ethnic Studie

Unique in its use of a sustainability framework, Social Welfare Policy for a Sustainable Future by Katherine S. van Wormer and Rosemary J. Link goes beyond U.S. borders to examine U.S. government policies—including child welfare, social services, health care, and criminal justice—within a global context. Guided by the belief that forces from the global market and globalization affect all social workers in their practice, the book addresses a wide range of relevant topics, including the refugee journey, the impact of new technologies, war trauma, global policy instruments, and restorative justice. A sustainability policy analysis model and an ecosystems framework for trauma-informed care are also presented in this timely text.

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