Mass Incarceration: An Introductory Reading List

Ruth Wilson Gilmore. The Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California. https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520242012/golden-gulag 

Pew Center on the State, 1 in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008 | Downloadable PDF

John Irwin, The Jail: Managing the Underclass in American Society (1985) https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520277342/the-jail 

FWD.us., Every Second: The Impact of the Incarceration Crisis on America’s Families | Downloadable PDF

Craig Gilmore & Kevin Pyle, Prison Town: Paying the Price. The Real Cost of Prisons Project.

Kelly Lytle Hernandez, City of Inmates: Conquest Rebellion and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles.

San Francisco Community Health Initiative, Build Justice Not Jails: A People’s Plan for Shifting Away from the Criminal Legal System Toward Community Based Solutions. Downloadable PDF

Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?

Mancini, Matthew. Race, Economics and the Abandonment of Convict Leasing. Journal of Negro History. V. 63. 1973. 

Mendieta, Eduardo. Plantations, Ghettos, Prisons: US Racial Geographies. Philosophy and Geography, V 7. 2004 

Simon, Jonathan. 2001. "Fear and Loathing in Late Modernity: Reflections on the Cultural Sources of Mass Imprisonment in the United States." Punishment & Society 3(1):21-33. 

Paul Butler, Stop and Frisk and Torture-Lite: Police Terror of Minority Communities, 12 OHIO ST. J. CRIM. L. 57-69 (2014) 

M. Anderson. How Mass Incarceration Pushes Black Children Further Behind in Schools. The Atlantic: January 16, 2017.

Miroslava Chaves-Garcia, States of Delinquency: Race and Science in the Making of California’s Juvenile Justice System.  

Escobar, Edward. Race, Police and the Making of a Political Identity: Mexican Americans and the Los Angeles Police Department.

Loyd, Jenna, M. Mitchelson and A. Burridge (eds.) Beyond Walls and Cages: Prisons, Borders and Global Crisis. Athens: University of Georgia Press. (2012).

Prison University Project, Equity and Excellence in Practice: A Guide for Higher Education in Prison. Downloadable PDF.

Lichtenstein, Alex. Twice the Work of Free Labor : The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South. New York. Verso. 1996 

Parenti, Christian. 1999. “Part I.” in Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis Revised and Expanded Edition. London; New York: Verso. 1-68. 

Norval Morris and David Rothman, eds., The Oxford History of the Prison (Oxford University Press, 1995). 

Caleb Smith, The Prison and the American Imagination (Yale University Press, 2011). Deborah McDowell, Claudrena Harold, and Juan Battle, eds., The Punitive Turn: New Approaches to Race and Incarceration (University of Virginia Press, 2013). 

Robert Perkinson, Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire (Metropolitan Books, 2010). 

Mona Lynch, Sunbelt Justice: Arizona and the Transformation of American Punishment (Stanford Law Books, 2010). 

Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Security (Duke University Press, 2009).