[On October 27th, 1994, the U.S. Justice Department announced that the population in federal and state prisons had topped one million for the first time in American history. To commemorate that sobering and horrifying statistic, one that has only gotten infinitely worse in the thirty years since, this week I’ve AmericanStudied prison stories from throughout our history. Leading up to this weekend post highlighting some vital further PrisonStudying reading!]
Five recent
books all PrisonStudiers should read (of the many that could populate such a
list, so please share more below, including older ones of course!):
1)
Michelle Alexander, The
New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010): I
wrote at length about Alexander’s book in
this post, and then got to teach it in my Fall
2016 Analyzing 21st-Century America course, so here I’ll just add
that few if any 21st-century books have been more prescient about a
key issue facing our society. Every other one in this list followed Alexander’s,
in every sense.
2)
Shaka Senghor, Writing
My Wrongs: Life, Death, and Redemption in an American Prison (2013): There
are a number of recent memoirs by incarcerated or formerly incarcerated
individuals, and every one of them is as worth our time and attention as all
such individuals are. But Senghor’s is particularly powerful on many levels,
including its central emphasis on one of the most brutal aspects of modern
prisons, solitary confinement.
3)
Bryan Stevenson, Just
Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014): I wrote at length
about Stevenson and his vital book when he
and it won the Stowe Prize in 2017, and have made extensive classroom and
scholarly use of the resources created by Stevenson’s Equal
Justice Initiative so I’m a certified super-fan. In many ways Just Mercy
represents a focused response to a particularly outdated aspect of our prison
and justice systems, the death penalty. But it’s also a wider look into the
roles that racism, economic inequality, and other forms of discrimination play
in every aspect those systems.
4)
Shane Bauer, American
Prison: A Reporter’s Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment
(2018): Bauer went undercover as a prison guard, not a prisoner, and so I don’t
want to suggest that his investigative journalist project was quite as bold nor
as brave as Nellie
Bly’s self-imprisonment in a mental asylum. But it’s still a unique and
important act that produced a striking book as a result, and one that offers a
distinctive perspective on prisons with which all of us should engage.
5)
Christine Montross, Waiting
for an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration (2020): The mental,
psychological, and emotional effects of prisons are one of those topics that I
imagine we all have some sense of, yet at the same time most of us have no real
sense of, if that duality makes sense. We can’t truly talk about this issue nor
about incarcerated Americans without a fuller such collective awareness, and
Montross’s book is thus a vital resource to add to this reading list.
Next
series starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other PrisonStudying readings you’d highlight?
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