Researching Mass Incarceration and Prison Abolition

No Cop City, No Cop World: Lessons from the Movement by Micah Herskind, Mariah Parker & Kamau Franklin, eds. The Stop Cop City movement is a decentralized effort to stop the construction of a $120 million police training facility and the destruction of 170 acres of the Weelaunee Forest outside of Atlanta, Georgia. This is the first collection of essays bringing together organizers and activists who have been involved in the years-long struggle to Stop Cop City. Connecting movements for environmental justice, police abolition, and Indigenous sovereignty, this expansive collection highlights the strategy, tactics, and ideologies that transformed a local collective action into a powerful international movement. Featuring the voices of forest defenders, environmental justice advocates, political prisoners, Indigenous activists, abolitionists, educators, legal scholars, and academics, these wide-ranging essays explore the history of the intersectional movement, the diverse tactics embraced by activists, tributes to Tortuguita, the 26-year-old queer Indigenous forest defender murdered by Georgia State Patrol troopers, and the intense police and legal repression faced by organizers. Making critical connections between oppression and resistance at home and abroad, the movement to Stop Cop City has expanded to a fight against a Cop World.

Radical Acts of Justice: How Ordinary People Are Dismantling Mass Incarceration by Jocelyn Simonson Radical Acts of Justice tells the stories of ordinary people joining together in collective acts of resistance: paying bail for a stranger, using social media to let the public know what everyday courtroom proceedings are like, making a video about someone’s life for a criminal court judge, presenting a budget proposal to the city council. When people join together to contest received ideas of justice and safety, they challenge the ideas that prosecutions and prisons make us safer; that public officials charged with maintaining “law and order” are carrying out the will of the people; and that justice requires putting people in cages. Through collective action, these groups live out new and more radical ideas of what justice can look like.

The End of Family Court: How Abolishing the Court Brings Justice to Children and Families by Jane M. Spinak Spinak proposes concrete steps toward abolishing the court: shifting most family supports out of the court’s sphere, vastly reducing the types and number of matters that need court intervention, and ensuring that any case that requires legal adjudication has the due process protections of a court of law. She calls for strategies that center trusting and respecting the abilities of communities to create and sustain meaningful solutions for families."

The Problem with Capital Punishment and Why It Should Be Abolished in America by Vincent R. Jones The intended focus of The Problem with Capital Punishment and Why It Should Be Abolished in America is to take a harsh, critical look at theories in support of the use of this form of punishment and expose the truth about capital punishment: it is extremely costly; it is arbitrarily applied; there have been too many innocent persons exonerated from death row; and the only consistency with execution seems to be that of the mentally ill, the poor, and those without adequate legal representation and by using methods that are inhumane and 'cruel and unusual'."

Abolishing State Violence: A World Beyond Bombs, Borders, and Cages (ebook) by Ray Acheson 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.

Abolition. Feminism. Now. by Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners & Beth E. Richie. 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.

Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Brenna Bhandar & Alberto Toscano (eds.) 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."

Abolitionist Intimacies by El Jones In Abolitionist Intimacies, [Prof.] El Jones examines the movement to abolish prisons through the Black feminist principles of care and collectivity.

Disarm, Defund, Dismantle: Police Abolition in Canada (ebook) by Shiri Pasternak, Kevin Walby & Abby Stadnyk, eds. 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.

No More Police: A Case for Abolition (ebook) by Mariame Kaba & Andrea J. Ritchie 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.

Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families - and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World by Dorothy Roberts 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."

Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want by Ruha Benjamin 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.

How We Stay Free: Notes on a Black Uprising by Christopher R. Rogers, Fajr Muhammad & the Paul Robeson House & Museum, eds. An anthology-in-action of the culture and politics of Black liberation, rooted in Philadelphia’s Black Radical Tradition.

Rehearsals for Living by Robyn Maynard & Leanna Betasamosake Simpson When much of the world entered pandemic lockdown in spring 2020, Robyn Maynard, influential author of Policing Black Lives, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, award-winning author of several books, including the recent novel Noopiming, began writing each other letters—a gesture sparked by friendship and solidarity, and by a desire for kinship and connection in a world shattering under the intersecting crises of pandemic, police killings, and climate catastrophe. Their letters soon grew into a powerful exchange on the subject of where we go from here. Rehearsals for Living is a captivating book, part debate, part dialogue, part lively and detailed familial correspondence between two razor-sharp writers convening on what it means to get free as the world spins into some new orbit.

Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom (ebook) by Derecka Purnell 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.

Abolition for the People: The Movement for a Future Without Policing and Prisons by Colin Kaepernick, contributor & ed. 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?"

Brick by Brick: How We Build a World Without Prisons by Cradle Community Cradle Community is a collective of organisers committed to radical education and building understanding of prison abolition and transformative justice.

Insurgent Love: Abolition and Domestic Homicide by Ardath Whynacht 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.

We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice by Mariame Kaba 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.

The Nation on No Map: Black Anarchism and Abolition (ebook) by William C. Anderson The Nation On No Map uses Black anarchism as a tool of survival in an age of crisis.

Decarcerating Disability by Liat Ben-Moshe Prison abolition and decarceration are increasingly debated, but it is often without taking into account the largest exodus of people from carceral facilities in the twentieth century: the closure of disability institutions and psychiatric hospitals. Decarcerating Disability provides a much-needed corrective, combining a genealogy of deinstitutionalization with critiques of the current prison system.

The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale 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.

Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture / interviews with Angela Y. Davis by Angela Y. Davis 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.

Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Y. Davis 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.

The Abolition of Prison by Jacques Lesage de le Haye, Scott Branson (translator) The Abolition of Prison provides a reflection from a longtime prison abolitionist, psychoanalyst, and former prisoner on the history, theory, and practice of anti-prison activism in France and globally over the last fifty years. This book powerfully makes the case for the end of prisons, punishment, and guilt and, instead, suggests we work towards social change, care, collectivity. The book weaves together Lesage deLa Haye’s own experiences—in prison, as a psychiatrist, and as a social theorist—with the simple argument that, if we take the reasons for prison and punishment at their word, we must evaluate the system as a complete failure. So then why continue to support it and funnel money into it?

Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement by Angela Y. Davis In these newly collected essays, interviews, and speeches, world-renowned activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis illuminates the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world. Reflecting on the importance of black feminism, intersectionality, and prison abolitionism for today's struggles, Davis discusses the legacies of previous liberation struggles, from the Black Freedom Movement to the South African anti-Apartheid movement. She highlights connections and analyzes today's struggles against state terror, from Ferguson to Palestine. Facing a world of outrageous injustice, Davis challenges us to imagine and build the movement for human liberation. And in doing so, she reminds us that "Freedom is a constant struggle."