Researching Mass Incarceration and Prison Abolition: Books: Imagining a Decarceral Future: Prison Abolition

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Excerpt from book description: "Abolishing State Violence is an urgent and accessible analysis of the key structures of state violence in our world today, and a clarion call to action for their abolition. Connecting movements for social justice with ideas for how activists can support and build on this analysis and strategy, this book shows that there are many mutually supportive abolition movements, each enhanced by a shared understanding of the relationship between structures of violence and a shared framework for challenging them on the basis of their roots in patriarchy, racism, militarism, settler colonialism, and capitalism."

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Book summary: "Feminist organizing by marginalized populations such as queer, anticapitalist, and non-white women, has pushed for abolition as a response to forms of state and interpersonal gender and sexual violence, but have largely been erased from this political moment. Leading scholar-activists trace historical genealogies, internationalist learnings, and everyday practices to grow our collective present and future that don't include police or new jails."

Excerpt from publisher's book description: "Gathering together Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s work from over three decades, Abolition Geography presents her singular contribution to the politics of abolition as theorist, researcher, and organizer, offering scholars and activists ways of seeing and doing to help navigate our turbulent present." Includes essays and interviews categorized in: Part III. "Prisons, Militarism, and the Anti-State State" and Part IV. "Organizing for Abolition."

Excerpt from book description: "In Abolitionist Intimacies, [Prof.] El Jones examines the movement to abolish prisons through the Black feminist principles of care and collectivity." This book also discusses the history of Canada's carceral institutions.

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Excerpt from book description: "This edited collection brings together writing from a range of activists and scholars, whose words are rooted in experience and solidarity with those putting their lives on the line to fight for police abolition in Canada. Together, they imagine a different world--one in which police power is eroded and dissolved forever, one in which it is possible to respond to distress and harm with assistance and care."

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Excerpt from book description: "In this powerful call to action, New York Times bestselling author Mariame Kaba and attorney and organizer Andrea J. Ritchie detail why policing doesn’t stop violence, instead perpetuating widespread harm; outline the many failures of contemporary police reforms; and explore demands to defund police, divest from policing, and invest in community resources to create greater safety through a Black feminist lens."

Excerpt from book description: "Drawing on decades of research, legal scholar and sociologist Dorothy Roberts reveals that the child welfare system is better understood as a 'family policing system' that collaborates with law enforcement and prisons to oppress Black communities. Child protection investigations ensnare a majority of Black children, putting their families under intense state surveillance and regulation. Black children are disproportionately likely to be torn from their families and placed in foster care, driving many to juvenile detention and imprisonment." On pp. 8-9, the author argues for "a radically reimagined way of caring for families and keeping children safe."

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Excerpt from book description: "Born of a stubborn hopefulness, Viral Justice offers a passionate, inspiring, and practical vision of how small changes can add up to large ones, transforming our relationships and communities and helping us build a more just and joyful world."

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Excerpt from publisher's comments: "Edited by activist and former San Francisco 49ers Super Bowl quarterback Colin Kaepernick, Abolition for the People is a manifesto calling for a world beyond prisons and policing. Abolition for the People brings together thirty essays representing a diversity of voices — political prisoners, grassroots organizers, scholars, and relatives of those killed by the anti-Black terrorism of policing and prisons. This collection presents readers with a moral choice: "Will you continue to be actively complicit in the perpetuation of these systems," Kaepernick asks in his introduction, "or will you take action to dismantle them for the benefit of a just future?""

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Excerpt from book description: "In her critically acclaimed first book Becoming Abolitionists, Purnell draws from her experiences as a lawyer, writer, and organizer initially skeptical about police abolition. She saw too much sexual violence and buried too many friends to consider getting rid of police in her hometown of St. Louis, let alone the nation. But the police were a placebo. Calling them felt like something, and something feels like everything when the other option seems like nothing. Purnell details how multi-racial social movements rooted in rebellion, risk-taking, and revolutionary love pushed her and a generation of activists toward abolition. The book travels across geography and time, and offers lessons that activists have learned from Ferguson to South Africa, from Reconstruction to contemporary protests against police shootings. Here, Purnell invites readers to envision new systems that work to address the root causes of violence."

Cradle Community "is a collective of organisers committed to radical education and building understanding of prison abolition and transformative justice."
See: Section 4: Free Them All, p. 164-.

Excerpt from book description: "Describing an experience of domestic homicide in her community and providing a deeply personal analysis of some of the most recent cases of homicide in Canada, the author inhabits the complexity of seeking abolitionist justice. Insurgent Love traces the major risk factors for domestic homicide within the structures of racial capitalism and suggests transformative, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, feminist approaches for safety, prevention and justice."

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Excerpt from book description: "In this timely collection of essays and interviews, Mariame Kaba [founder and director of Project NIA] reflects on the deep work of abolition and transformative political struggle. With chapters on seeking justice beyond the punishment system, transforming how we deal with harm and accountability, and finding hope in collective struggle for abolition, Kaba's work is deeply rooted in the relentless belief that we can fundamentally change the world."

Excerpt from book description: "Drawing on groundbreaking research from across the world, and covering virtually every area in the increasingly broad range of police work, [Prof. of Sociology] 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."

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Publisher's book description: "Revelations about U.S policies and practices of torture and abuse have captured headlines ever since the breaking of the Abu Ghraib prison story in April 2004. Since then, a debate has raged regarding what is and what is not acceptable behavior for the world's leading democracy. It is within this context that Angela Davis, one of America's most remarkable political figures, gave a series of interviews to discuss resistance and law, institutional sexual coercion, politics and prison. Davis talks about her own incarceration, as well as her experiences as "enemy of the state," and about having been put on the FBI's "most wanted" list. She talks about the crucial role that international activism played in her case and the case of many other political prisoners. Throughout these interviews, Davis returns to her critique of a democracy that has been compromised by its racist origins and institutions. Discussing the most recent disclosures about the disavowed "chain of command," and the formal reports by the Red Cross and Human Rights Watch denouncing U.S. violation of human rights and the laws of war in Guantánamo, Afghanistan and Iraq, Davis focuses on the underpinnings of prison regimes in the United States."

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Excerpt from Goodreads book description: "In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Professor Davis seeks to illustrate that the time for the prison is approaching an end. She argues forthrightly for "decarceration", and argues for the transformation of the society as a whole."

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Includes: It can be done: overcoming the Supreme Court to reform policing -- The path to meaningful police reform.

BLS Library owns 2 print copies.