It was twenty years ago that Mike Davis first used the phrase "Prison Industrial Complex" to describe the growth of prisons and prison populations in rural California. Since then, the national prison population has more than doubled from what was then a scandalous number to reach 2.4 million. More than ten years ago, it was again a scandal that part of the U.S.'s project of bringing "Freedom"to Iraq and Afghanistan meant torturing prisoners of war in remote sites hidden from legal scrutiny. For more than twenty years, incarceration has been part of every day life for a significant portion of Americans, as the incarceration of one individual has a lasting, negative impact on families and communities.
A movement to abolish (not reform) prisons has emerged for the second time in the United States, and in the last few years, that movement has been followed by a significant number of academic and popular books concerning the PIC, mass incarceration, and policing. I'm one of the people who write about prisons and policing, and I have a lot of friends and colleagues who I count among the most important authors on this subject. This makes it hard for me to recommend a small number of books, but I'm going to pick according to the following general criteria: Does the book make an intervention that challenges popular mythologies about prison? Is the book accessible to a non-academic audience? Does the book come from an abolitionist rather than a "reform" perspective? I'm going to include some less-accessible titles in the list because they are really essential.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California (2007). This book is really important, explaining the economics of prison - which are much different than you might think (hint: not privatization.) If you are an academic, and you are wondering what the most important book on the PIC or mass incarceration is, look no further. The opening chapters are grounded in Marxist political economy and, as the title suggests, explain the role of surpluses (finance capital, land, labor, state capacity) in producing the contemporary prison archipelago in the U.S. If you are not familiar with Marxist terminology, it might be good to peruse the introduction to Capital I mentioned in a post earlier this month before reading this book. If you are waffling, check out this video of Gilmore doing an interview with Laura Flanders.
James Kilgore, Understanding Mass Incarceration (2015). This book was written with the explicit goals of translating some of the central ideas to be found in academic writing about prison for general readers, explaining what is happening right now in contemporary prisons, and suggesting strategies for how to oppose them. Kilgore is also a former prisoner who draws on his experiences inside.
Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (2011) A to-the-point argument for abolishing prisons placed in long-term historical context.
CR-10 Collective Abolition Now! Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle Against the Prison Industrial Complex (2008), As the title and author suggest, this is a publication by the Critical Resistance 10th anniversary organization compiling short pieces including practical strategies for abolishing prisons in the United States.
Musical break and then Three MORE book recommendations!
One of the most frequently discussed issues in contemporary media coverage of prison is the massive growth of the women's prison population. The TV show, Orange is the New Black which is based on the memoir of Piper Kerman a white woman who spent a year and half in federal prison after getting busted for drug-trafficking, has increased interest in this subject. The best book that I have read on women and mass incarceration is: Beth Richie, Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence and America's Prison Nation. (2012) This book covers a range of important issues surrounding the incarceration of women. She seeks to encourage activism at the intersection between feminism and anti-prison organizing.
Another growing area in the prison regime is federal detention of immigrants. Jenna Lloyd, Matthew Mitchelson, and Andrew Burridge's Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders and Global Crisis is an edited collection combining academic and activist pieces (these are not mutually exclusive categories) on how immigrant detention and deportation politics relate to the larger economy and landscape of the U.S carceral state.
For the outro, I've got to recommend, Dan Berger's , Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era. It just came out in 2014, and was the winner of the Organization of American Historians' James Rawley prize for 2015. I haven't read this book yet, but I did read an earlier version of it, and based on that and the Google Books sample, it's eminently readable. It's really important to learn about the history of the 1960s-1970s radical prisoner movements if you want to understand the current conditions inside U.S. prisons.
A movement to abolish (not reform) prisons has emerged for the second time in the United States, and in the last few years, that movement has been followed by a significant number of academic and popular books concerning the PIC, mass incarceration, and policing. I'm one of the people who write about prisons and policing, and I have a lot of friends and colleagues who I count among the most important authors on this subject. This makes it hard for me to recommend a small number of books, but I'm going to pick according to the following general criteria: Does the book make an intervention that challenges popular mythologies about prison? Is the book accessible to a non-academic audience? Does the book come from an abolitionist rather than a "reform" perspective? I'm going to include some less-accessible titles in the list because they are really essential.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California (2007). This book is really important, explaining the economics of prison - which are much different than you might think (hint: not privatization.) If you are an academic, and you are wondering what the most important book on the PIC or mass incarceration is, look no further. The opening chapters are grounded in Marxist political economy and, as the title suggests, explain the role of surpluses (finance capital, land, labor, state capacity) in producing the contemporary prison archipelago in the U.S. If you are not familiar with Marxist terminology, it might be good to peruse the introduction to Capital I mentioned in a post earlier this month before reading this book. If you are waffling, check out this video of Gilmore doing an interview with Laura Flanders.
James Kilgore, Understanding Mass Incarceration (2015). This book was written with the explicit goals of translating some of the central ideas to be found in academic writing about prison for general readers, explaining what is happening right now in contemporary prisons, and suggesting strategies for how to oppose them. Kilgore is also a former prisoner who draws on his experiences inside.
Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (2011) A to-the-point argument for abolishing prisons placed in long-term historical context.
CR-10 Collective Abolition Now! Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle Against the Prison Industrial Complex (2008), As the title and author suggest, this is a publication by the Critical Resistance 10th anniversary organization compiling short pieces including practical strategies for abolishing prisons in the United States.
Musical break and then Three MORE book recommendations!
One of the most frequently discussed issues in contemporary media coverage of prison is the massive growth of the women's prison population. The TV show, Orange is the New Black which is based on the memoir of Piper Kerman a white woman who spent a year and half in federal prison after getting busted for drug-trafficking, has increased interest in this subject. The best book that I have read on women and mass incarceration is: Beth Richie, Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence and America's Prison Nation. (2012) This book covers a range of important issues surrounding the incarceration of women. She seeks to encourage activism at the intersection between feminism and anti-prison organizing.
Another growing area in the prison regime is federal detention of immigrants. Jenna Lloyd, Matthew Mitchelson, and Andrew Burridge's Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders and Global Crisis is an edited collection combining academic and activist pieces (these are not mutually exclusive categories) on how immigrant detention and deportation politics relate to the larger economy and landscape of the U.S carceral state.
For the outro, I've got to recommend, Dan Berger's , Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era. It just came out in 2014, and was the winner of the Organization of American Historians' James Rawley prize for 2015. I haven't read this book yet, but I did read an earlier version of it, and based on that and the Google Books sample, it's eminently readable. It's really important to learn about the history of the 1960s-1970s radical prisoner movements if you want to understand the current conditions inside U.S. prisons.
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