Journals + Research Initiatives
- The AbolitionistA bilingual (English/Spanish) publication dedicated to the strategy and practice of prison industrial complex abolition. It is distributed absolutely free of charge to thousands of people in prisons, jails, and detention centers throughout the US, who in turn share the paper with many more of their fellow prisoners.
- Abolition JournalA Journal and Community of Radical Theory & Practice
- Abolition University / Cops Off CampusStudying within/against/beyond the university
- Black PerspectivesBlack Perspectives is the award-winning blog of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS). As engaged scholars, we are deeply committed to producing and disseminating cutting-edge research that is accessible to the public and is oriented towards advancing the lives of people of African descent and humanity. We serve as a medium to advance these critical goals.
- Carceral Studies Network (Duke University)The Carceral Studies Network hosts resources for those seeking to teach or learn about prisons, policing, and the carceral state. Designed by instructors and students at Duke University, the site is meant to help teachers develop new courses from the ground up, or enrich existing courses with new materials.
- InquestInquest is a forum for advancing bold decarceral ideas, brought to you by the Institute to End Mass Incarceration.
- Jailhouse Lawyer's HandbookThis Handbook explains how a person in prison or detention can start a lawsuit in federal court to fight against mistreatment and bad conditions. As a result of the fact that most prisoners are in state prisons, we focus on those.
- Journal of Prison Education & ReentryAn international, peer-reviewed journal for researchers and practitioners. JPER was initiated by scholars from Norway, Ireland, the UK and the US as an international journal for the publication of prison education research.
- Prison Legal NewsA project of the Human Rights Defense Center, is an independent 72-page monthly magazine that provides cutting edge review and analysis of prisoners' rights, court rulings and news concerning criminal justice-related issues.
- Research in Policing, Civil Rights, and Racial Justice (University of Chicago Press Journals)The research listed here was selected in collaboration with editors of our social science and history journals as a way to collect and surface recent or relevant work in policing, the courts, civil rights, racial justice history, racial health inequities, and activism. The articles are free to read for a limited time, and we encourage you to share the page with your colleagues, students, and peers.
- TruthoutTruthout is a nonprofit news organization dedicated to providing independent reporting and commentary on a diverse range of social justice issues. Since our founding in 2001, we have anchored our work in principles of accuracy, transparency, and independence from the influence of corporate and political forces.
Books
"Prisons Make Us Safer" and 20 Other Myths About Mass Incarceration by ISBN: 9780807029527Publication Date: 2021
Are Prisons Obsolete? by
Since the 1980s prison construction and incarceration rates in the U.S. have been rising exponentially, evoking huge public concern about their proliferation, their recent privatisation and their promise of enormous profits. But these prisons house hugely disproportionate numbers of people of colour, betraying the racism embedded in the system, while studies show that increasing prison sentences has had no effect on crime. Here, esteemed civil rights activist Angela Davis lays bare the situation and argues for a radical rethinking of our rehabilitation programmes.
ISBN: 9781583225813Publication Date: 2003
Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement by
Transformative justice seeks to solve the problem of violence at the grassroots level, without relying on punishment, incarceration, or policing. Community-based approaches to preventing crime and repairing its damage have existed for centuries. However, in the punitive atmosphere of contemporary criminal justice systems, they are often marginalised and operate under the radar. Beyond Survival puts these strategies front and centre as real alternatives to today s failed models of confinement and 'correction'. In this collection, a diverse group of authors focuses on concrete and practical forms of redress and accountability, assessing existing practices and marking paths forward. They use a variety of forms - from toolkits to personal essays - to delve deeply into the 'how to' of transformative justice, providing alternatives to calling the police, ways to support people having mental health crises, stories of community based murder investigations, and much more. At the same time, the
ISBN: 9781849353625Publication Date: 2020
Carceral Capitalism by
Essays on the contemporary continuum of incarceration: the biopolitics of juvenile delinquency, predatory policing, the political economy of fees and fines, and algorithmic policing. What we see happening in Ferguson and other cities around the country is not the creation of livable spaces, but the creation of living hells. When people are trapped in a cycle of debt it also can affect their subjectivity and how they temporally inhabit the world by making it difficult for them to imagine and plan for the future. What psychic toll does this have on residents? How does it feel to be routinely dehumanized and exploited by the police? --from Carceral Capitalism In this collection of essays in Semiotext(e)'s Intervention series, Jackie Wang examines the contemporary incarceration techniques that have emerged since the 1990s. The essays illustrate various aspects of the carceral continuum, including the biopolitics of juvenile delinquency, predatory policing, the political economy of fees and fines, cybernetic governance, and algorithmic policing. Included in this volume is Wang's influential critique of liberal anti-racist politics, "Against Innocence," as well as essays on RoboCop, techno-policing, and the aesthetic problem of making invisible forms of power legible. Wang shows that the new racial capitalism begins with parasitic governance and predatory lending that extends credit only to dispossess later. Predatory lending has a decidedly spatial character and exists in many forms, including subprime mortgage loans, student loans for sham for-profit colleges, car loans, rent-to-own scams, payday loans, and bail bond loans. Parasitic governance, Wang argues, operates through five primary techniques: financial states of exception, automation, extraction and looting, confinement, and gratuitous violence. While these techniques of governance often involve physical confinement and the state-sanctioned execution of black Americans, new carceral modes have blurred the distinction between the inside and outside of prison. As technologies of control are perfected, carcerality tends to bleed into society.
ISBN: 9781635900026Publication Date: 2018
Defund Fear: Safety Without Policing, Prisons, and Punishment by ISBN: 9780807003022Publication Date: 2021
The End of Policing by
How the police endanger us and why we need to find an alternative Recent years have seen an explosion of protest against police brutality and repression--most dramatically in Ferguson, Missouri, where longheld grievances erupted in violent demonstrations following the police killing of Michael Brown. Among activists, journalists, and politicians, the conversation about how to respond and improve policing has focused on accountability, diversity, training, and community relations. Unfortunately, these reforms will not produce results, either alone or in combination. The core of the problem must be addressed: the nature of modern policing itself. "Broken windows" practices, the militarization of law enforcement, and the dramatic expansion of the police's role over the last forty years have created a mandate for officers that must be rolled back. This book attempts to spark public discussion by revealing the tainted origins of modern policing as a tool of social control. It shows how the expansion of police authority is inconsistent with community empowerment, social justice--even public safety. Drawing on groundbreaking research from across the world, and covering virtually every area in the increasingly broad range of police work, Alex Vitale demonstrates how law enforcement has come to exacerbate the very problems it is supposed to solve. In contrast, there are places where the robust implementation of policing alternatives--such as legalization, restorative justice, and harm reduction--has led to reductions in crime, spending, and injustice. The best solution to bad policing may be an end to policing.
ISBN: 9781784782894Publication Date: 2017
The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America by
The explosive rise in the U.S. incarceration rate in the second half of the twentieth century, and the racial transformation of the prison population from mostly white at mid-century to sixty-five percent black and Latino in the present day, is a trend that cannot easily be ignored. Manybelieve that this shift began with the "tough on crime" policies advocated by Republicans and southern Democrats beginning in the late 1960s, which sought longer prison sentences, more frequent use of the death penalty, and the explicit or implicit targeting of politically marginalized people. InThe First Civil Right, Naomi Murakawa inverts the conventional wisdom by arguing that the expansion of the federal carceral state - a system that disproportionately imprisons blacks and Latinos - was, in fact, rooted in the civil-rights liberalism of the 1940s and early 1960s, not in the periodafter.Murakawa traces the development of the modern American prison system through several presidencies, both Republication and Democrat. Responding to calls to end the lawlessness and violence against blacks at the state and local levels, the Truman administration expanded the scope of what waspreviously a weak federal system. Later administrations from Johnson to Clinton expanded the federal presence even more. Ironically, these steps laid the groundwork for the creation of the vast penal archipelago that now exists in the United States. What began as a liberal initiative to curb the mobviolence and police brutality that had deprived racial minorities of their 'first civil right - physical safety - eventually evolved into the federal correctional system that now deprives them, in unjustly large numbers, of another important right: freedom.The First Civil Right is a groundbreaking analysis of root of the conflicts that lie at the intersection of race and the legal system in America.
ISBN: 9780199892785Publication Date: 2014
Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California by
Since 1980, the number of people in U.S. prisons has increased more than 450%. Despite a crime rate that has been falling steadily for decades, California has led the way in this explosion, with what a state analyst called "the biggest prison building project in the history of the world." Golden Gulag provides the first detailed explanation for that buildup by looking at how political and economic forces, ranging from global to local, conjoined to produce the prison boom. In an informed and impassioned account, Ruth Wilson Gilmore examines this issue through statewide, rural, and urban perspectives to explain how the expansion developed from surpluses of finance capital, labor, land, and state capacity. Detailing crises that hit California's economy with particular ferocity, she argues that defeats of radical struggles, weakening of labor, and shifting patterns of capital investment have been key conditions for prison growth. The results--a vast and expensive prison system, a huge number of incarcerated young people of color, and the increase in punitive justice such as the "three strikes" law--pose profound and troubling questions for the future of California, the United States, and the world. Golden Gulag provides a rich context for this complex dilemma, and at the same time challenges many cherished assumptions about who benefits and who suffers from the state's commitment to prison expansion.
ISBN: 9780520222564Publication Date: 2007
Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) by
Around the world, people are faced with crisis after crisis, from the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change-induced fires, floods, and storms to the ongoing horrors of mass incarceration, brutal immigration enforcement, endemic gender violence, and severe wealth inequality. As governments fail to respond to or actively engineer each crisis, ordinary people are finding bold and innovative ways to share resources and support vulnerable members of their communities. This survival work, when done alongside social movement demands for transformative change, is called mutual aid. This book is about mutual aid- why it is so important, what it looks like, and how to do it. It provides a grassroots theory of mutual aid, describes how mutual aid has been a part of all larger, powerful social movements, and offers concrete tools for organizing, such as how to work in groups, decision-making process, how to prevent and address conflict, and how to deal with burnout. Mutual aid isn't charity- it's a form of organizing where people get to create new systems of care and generosity so we can survive.
ISBN: 9781839762123Publication Date: 2020
Prison by Any Other Name by
A crucial indictment of widely embraced "alternatives to incarceration" that exposes how many of these new approaches actually widen the net of punishment and surveillance "But what does it mean--really--to celebrate reforms that convert your home into your prison?" --Michelle Alexander, from the foreword Electronic monitoring. Locked-down drug treatment centers. House arrest. Mandated psychiatric treatment. Data-driven surveillance. Extended probation. These are some of the key alternatives held up as cost-effective substitutes for jails and prisons. But many of these so-called reforms actually widen the net, weaving in new strands of punishment and control, and bringing new populations, who would not otherwise have been subject to imprisonment, under physical control by the state. As mainstream public opinion has begun to turn against mass incarceration, political figures on both sides of the spectrum are pushing for reform. But--though they're promoted as steps to confront high rates of imprisonment--many of these measures are transforming our homes and communities into prisons instead. In Prison by Any Other Name, activist journalists Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law reveal the way the kinder, gentler narrative of reform can obscure agendas of social control and challenge us to question the ways we replicate the status quo when pursuing change. A foreword by Michelle Alexander situates the book in the context of criminal justice reform conversations. Finally, the book offers a bolder vision for truly alternative justice practices.
ISBN: 9781620973103Publication Date: 2020
The Rise of Big Data Policing by
Winner, 2018 Law & Legal Studies PROSE Award The consequences of big data and algorithm-driven policing and its impact on law enforcement In a high-tech command center in downtown Los Angeles, a digital map lights up with 911 calls, television monitors track breaking news stories, surveillance cameras sweep the streets, and rows of networked computers link analysts and police officers to a wealth of law enforcement intelligence. This is just a glimpse into a future where software predicts future crimes, algorithms generate virtual "most-wanted" lists, and databanks collect personal and biometric information. The Rise of Big Data Policing introduces the cutting-edge technology that is changing how the police do their jobs and shows why it is more important than ever that citizens understand the far-reaching consequences of big data surveillance as a law enforcement tool. Andrew Guthrie Ferguson reveals how these new technologies --viewed as race-neutral and objective--have been eagerly adopted by police departments hoping to distance themselves from claims of racial bias and unconstitutional practices. After a series of high-profile police shootings and federal investigations into systemic police misconduct, and in an era of law enforcement budget cutbacks, data-driven policing has been billed as a way to "turn the page" on racial bias. But behind the data are real people, and difficult questions remain about racial discrimination and the potential to distort constitutional protections. In this first book on big data policing, Ferguson offers an examination of how new technologies will alter the who, where, when and how we police. These new technologies also offer data-driven methods to improve police accountability and to remedy the underlying socio-economic risk factors that encourage crime. The Rise of Big Data Policing is a must read for anyone concerned with how technology will revolutionize law enforcement and its potential threat to the security, privacy, and constitutional rights of citizens. Read an excerpt and interview with Andrew Guthrie Ferguson in The Economist.
ISBN: 9781479892822Publication Date: 2017
The Routledge International Handbook of Penal Abolition by ISBN: 9780429756795Publication Date: 2021
We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice by ISBN: 9781642595260Publication Date: 2021
Digital Projects
- Atlas of SurveillanceThrough a combination of crowdsourcing and data journalism, we are creating the largest-ever repository of information on which law enforcement agencies are using what surveillance technologies. The aim is to generate a resource for journalists, academics, and, most importantly, members of the public to check what’s been purchased locally and how technologies are spreading across the country.
- Interior BordersInterior Borders presents the locations of ICE detention centers across the United States before and after they were constructed. At first glance, these images may appear to present earlier, “before” photos as “free,” and current ICE facilities as newly emerging forms of subjugation. Upon closer examination, however, far from portraying a state of nature, the “before” images are also portraits of institutional violence, and the “after” images are portraits of historical continuities as well as ruptures.
- The Radical DatabaseA website dedicated to support the Black Lives Matter movement & share anti-racist resources. From bail funds for protestors, to non-profits, career help, food assistance, Black owned businesses, and so much more.
- Torn Apart / SeperadosA deep and radically new look at the territory and infrastructure of ICE’s financial regime in the USA. This data & visualization intervention peels back layers of culpability behind the humanitarian crisis of 2018.
- View-ThroughA community-based initiative in the Miami area to adjust the language used around incarceration on online search platforms. Our project utilizes synchronized, strategic internet searching to alter search predictions (the type-ahead suggestions that appear on sites such as Google). These predictions are generated by algorithms and are based in large part on search volume within a geographic region.
Research Databases
- Alternative Press Index This link opens in a new windowAlternative Press Index is a biannual subject index to over 300 alternative, left, and radical journals, newspapers, and magazines. The index is international and interdisciplinary, spanning the social sciences and humanities, with its central focus on the practice and theory of socialism, national liberation, labor, indigenous peoples, gays/lesbians, feminism, ecology, democracy, and anarchism.
- Alternative Press Index Archive This link opens in a new windowCovers the period 1969 through to 1990. This bibliographic database contains journal, newspaper, and magazine articles from over 700 international alternative, radical, and left periodicals. Covering theories and practices of socialism and revolution alongside ecology, democracy and anarchism, feminism and organized labor, indigenous peoples and gays/lesbians, the coverage is both international and interdisciplinary.
- Black Freedom Struggle in the United States This link opens in a new windowThis website contains approximately 1,600 documents focused on six different phases of Black Freedom: 1. Slavery and the Abolitionist Movement (1790-1860) -- 2. The Civil War and the Reconstruction Era (1861-1877) -- 3. Jim Crow Era from 1878 to the Great Depression (1878-1932) -- 4. The New Deal and World War II (1933-1945) -- 5. The Civil Rights and Black Power Movements (1946-1975) -- 6. The Contemporary Era (1976-2000). The documents presented here represent a selection of primary sources available in several ProQuest databases. The databases represented in this website include American Periodicals, Black Abolitionist Papers, ProQuest History Vault, ProQuest Congressional, Supreme Court Insight and Alexander Street's Black Thought and Culture.
- Black Lives Matter SpringerNature This link opens in a new windowWe have created a portal offering research insights about issues such as the history and social science of racism and police violence. The freely available content can be accessed through our Black Lives Matter portal. Within this collection you can explore eBooks, journal articles and research blogs on Social Inequality & Systemic Racism as well as content on Policing Race & Civil Unrest. We have also created podcast stories of black women in research telling their stories. ~ Publisher
- Black Studies Center This link opens in a new windowBlack Studies Center is a fully cross-searchable gateway to Black Studies including scholarly essays, recent periodicals, historical newspaper articles, reference books, and much more. It combines essential resources for research and teaching in Black Studies, including The Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience, Index to Black Periodicals Full Text, Black Literature Index, and the Chicago Defender historical newspaper.
- Black Studies in Video This link opens in a new windowBlack Studies in Video features award-winning documentaries, newsreels, interviews and archival footage surveying the evolution of black culture in the United States. In partnership with California Newsreel, the database provides unique access to their African American Classics collection, and includes films covering history, politics, art and culture, family structure, social and economic pressures, and gender relations
- Black Thought and Culture This link opens in a new windowBlack Thought and Culture provides non-fiction monographs, essays, articles, letters, speeches, political leaflets, and interviews written by major American black leaderscovering 250 years of history. Also includes The Black Panther newspaper and Black Panther oral histories.
- Black Women Writers This link opens in a new windowBlack Women Writers brings together the many voices of women from Africa and the African Diaspora. Offering fiction, poetry, and essays from three continents and 20 countries, the database gives a view of black women's struggles through time. New content is uploaded on a biweekly basis, giving users immediate access to a steadily growing treasury of extraordinary writings. The database currently features over 16,000 pages of poetry and prose.
- Crime, Punishment, and Popular Culture 1790-1920 This link opens in a new windowCrime, Punishment, and Popular Culture, 1790-1920 presents a broad history of crime in the long 19th century derived from French, German, Spanish, Australian, British and U.S. sources. The collection includes trial transcripts, court proceedings, police and forensic documents, photographs, true crime literature and detective novels, and newspaper accounts. This archive appeals to scholars in the fields of history, literature, law and criminal justice, as well as other fields.
- Ethnic American Newspapers, 1799-1971 This link opens in a new windowEthnic American Newspapers offers extensive coverage of many of the most influential ethnic groups in U.S. history. It enables the study of often-overlooked aspects of the nation's history, politics and culture, covering immigrant contributions to U.S. business, music, science, wars and more.
- Ethnic NewsWatch This link opens in a new windowEthnic NewsWatch indexes newspapers, magazines and journals of the ethnic and minority press, offering both national and regional coverage. Ethnic NewsWatch presents multi-ethnic and multi-cultural publications in one resource covering 1959-present. Individual publication coverage varies by title.
- Gender Studies Database This link opens in a new windowGender Studies Database combines the Women's Studies International and Men's Studies databases with the coverage of sexual diversity issues. GSD covers the full spectrum of gender-engaged scholarship.
- Human Rights Studies Online This link opens in a new windowHuman Rights Studies Online is a research and learning database providing comparative documentation, analysis, and interpretation of major human rights violations and atrocity crimes worldwide from 1900 to 2010. The collection includes primary and secondary materials across multiple media formats and content types for each selected event, including Armenia, the Holocaust, Cambodia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, Darfur, and more than thirty additional subjects
- Independent Voices This link opens in a new windowA four-year project to digitize over one million pages from the magazines, journals, newsletters, and newspapers of the alternative press archives of participating libraries spanning the 1960's to the 1980's. Starting with collections by feminists and the GI press, the collection will grow to include small literary magazines, underground newspapers, LGBT periodicals, the minority press (Latino, Black and Native American) and the extreme right-wing press.
- LGBT Studies in Video This link opens in a new windowA cinematic survey of the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people as well as the cultural and political evolution of the LGBT community. Features award-winning documentaries, interviews, archival footage, and select feature films exploring LGBT history, gay culture and subcultures, civil rights, marriage equality, LGBT families, AIDS, transgender issues, religious perspectives on homosexuality, global comparative experiences, and other topics.
- LGBT Thought and Culture This link opens in a new windowKey works and archival documentation of LGBT political and social movements throughout the twentieth century and into the present day. Collection includes seminal texts, letters, speeches, interviews, and ephemera covering the political evolution of gay rights as well as memoirs, biographies, poetry, and works of fiction that illuminate the lives of lesbians, gays, transgendered, and bisexual individuals and the community.
- Nexis Uni This link opens in a new windowNexis Uni features news, business and legal sources from LexisNexis, including U.S. Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1790, with an intuitive interface that offers quick discovery across all content types. Subscription does not include dockets.
- Oxford Bibliographies This link opens in a new windowOffers annotated bibliographies of the most important books and articles on specific topics in a growing range of subject areas. Particularly useful for anyone beginning research.
- U.S. Declassified Documents (formerly DDRS) This link opens in a new windowDeclassified Documents Reference System is a multi-disciplinary, comprehensive source whic covers the political, social, and economic development and forces in post-World War II America. This single source enables users to locate key information underpinning studies in international relations, American studies, United States foreign and domestic policy studies, journalism and more.
- Documenting White Supremacy and its Opponents in the 1920s This link opens in a new windowThe Documenting White Supremacy and its Opponents collection includes papers promoting and opposing white nationalism, published mainly in the 1920s. It brings together for the first time local, regional, and national newspapers published by Klan organizations and by sympathetic publishers from across the U.S. It also includes key anti-Klan voices from newspapers published by American Black, Catholic, and Jewish communities.
- Women and Social Movements, International 1840 to Present This link opens in a new windowOnline archive of published and manuscript primary sources focusing on womens international activism since the mid-nineteenth century. The archive includes proceedings of womens international conferences, books, pamphlets, articles from newspapers and journals, diary entries, and memoirs. It contains numerous online publications of contemporary Non-Governmental Organizations and also includes photographs and videos of major events and activists in the history of womens international social movements.
- Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 This link opens in a new windowBrings together primary documents, books, images, scholarly essays, book reviews, Web site reviews, and teaching tools, all documenting the multiplicity of womens activism in public life.
Exhibits + Special Collections
- Barring FreedomBarring Freedom highlights the role of the arts in cultivating critical engagements with issues of prisons, policing, and justice in the United States. At the center of Barring Freedom is an contemporary art exhibition and a participatory public art project emphasizing the different strategies artists use to bring into sight the social, racial, and economic workings of the nation's criminal justice system.