Effective Reading Strategies

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 privatization and their promise of enormous profits.

Sered asks us to reconsider the purposes of incarceration and argues persuasively that the needs of victims of violent crime are better met by asking people who commit violence to accept responsibility for their actions and make amends in ways that are meaningful to those they have hurt.

Stories of non-US citizens caught in the jaws of the immigration bureaucracy and subject to indefinite detention are in the headlines daily. These men, women, and children remain almost completely without rights, unprotected by law and the Constitution, and their status as outsiders, eventhough many of have lived and worked in this country for years, has left them vulnerable to the most extreme forms of state power.

Having gained unique access to California prisoners and corrections officials and to thousands of prisoners' written grievances and institutional responses, Kitty Calavita and Valerie Jenness take us inside one of the most significant, yet largely invisible, institutions in the United States.

The United States boasts the highest incarceration rate in the entire world. Perhaps not coincidentally, mass incarceration has been a financial boon to the private prison industry. Privatization of prisons is seen by some as a solution to state governments' budget problems, but the mission of these for-profit companies is not necessarily aligned with the reform system.

This moving, eye-opening memoir of an innocent man detained at Guantánamo Bay for fifteen years tells a story of humanity in the unlikeliest of places and an unprecedented look at life at Guantánamo.

An intimate, first-hand account of the emotional and physical experience of doing time in jail and the strategies for enduring it.

Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. It has spawned a whole generation of criminal justice reform activists motivated by Michelle Alexander's unforgettable argument that 'we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.'
Also available as an eBook HERE

An illuminating view of prison life, as told by currently and formerly incarcerated people, from the co-creators and co-hosts of the Peabody- and Pulitzer-nominated podcast Ear Hustle.

Each year, more than half a million Americans are released from prison and join a population of twenty million people who live with a felony record. Reuben Miller, a chaplain at the Cook County Jail in Chicago and now a sociologist studying mass incarceration, spent years alongside prisoners, ex-prisoners, their friends, and their families to understand the lifelong burden that even a single arrest can entail.

Beyond These Walls is an ambitious and far-ranging exploration that tracks the legacy of crime and imprisonment in the United States.

Using personal interview accounts, focus group discussions, and semi-structured questionnaires analysed from a sample of female long-term jail inmates, this book focuses on understanding the experiences of mothers in confinement, particularly with regard to coping with separation from children.