Researching Mass Incarceration and Prison Abolition

Constitutional Policing: Striving for a More Perfect Union by Michael A. Hardy, ed. There is not a single place in America where police and the community they serve do not exist side by side. America has always been the gold standard of democracy and freedom in the world. It has also been valued as that place where equal justice under the law is the rule and not the exception. While the nation is great in so many ways, it is not perfect. “We the people” continue to be challenged in two significant areas of development. One is in matters of “race” and the other is in the matters of “policing.” The issues of “race and policing” continue to lie at the center of our nation’s struggle to “form a more perfect union.” This book, Constitutional Policing: Striving for a More Perfect Union, examines the issues of policing in America and the pathways to achieve a level of constitutional policing that begins to address how our diverse nation and the communities we live in can become safer, more equitable, more respectful of our differences. The chapters in this book detail the legal challenges that will have to be engaged in if there is any hope of our communities becoming places where we truly are engaging the possibilities of government “of people, by the people, for the people.”

Uniform Feelings: Scenes from the Psychic Life of Policing by Jessi Lee Jackson In Uniform Feelings, American studies scholar and abolitionist psychotherapist Jessi Lee Jackson reads policing as a set of emotional and relational practices in order to shed light on the persistence of police violence. Jackson argues that psychological investments in U.S. police power emerge at various sites: her counseling room, manuals for addressing bias, museum displays, mortality statistics, and memorial walls honoring fallen officers. Drawing on queer, feminist, anticolonial, and Black engagements with psychoanalysis to think through U.S. policing—and bringing together a mix of clinical case studies, autotheory, and ethnographic research—the book moves from the individual to the institutional. Jackson begins with her work as a psychotherapist working across the spectrum of relationships to policing, and then turns to interrogate carceral psychology—the involvement of her profession in ongoing state violence. Jackson orbits around two key questions: how are our relationships shaped by proximity to state violence, and how can our social worlds be transformed to challenge state-sanctioned violence?

Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights by Erwin Chemerinsky An unprecedented work of civil rights and legal history, Presumed Guilty reveals how the Supreme Court has enabled racist policing and sanctioned law enforcement excesses through its decisions over the last half-century.

Violent Order: Essays on the Nature of Police by David Correia & Tyler Wall, eds. This book's radical theory of police argues that the police demand for order is a class order and a racialized and patriarchal order, by arguing that the police project, in order to fabricate and defend capitalist order,must patrol an imaginary line between society and nature, it must transform nature into inert matter made available for accumulation. Police don 't just patrol the ghetto or the Indian reservation, the thin blue line doesn 't just refer to a social order, rather police announce a general claim to domination--of labor and of nature.

Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing by Stuart Schrader In this groundbreaking exposé, Stuart Schrader shows how the United States projected imperial power overseas through police training and technical assistance--and how this effort reverberated to shape the policing of city streets at home. Examining diverse records, from recently declassified national security and intelligence materials to police textbooks and professional magazines, Schrader reveals how U.S. police leaders envisioned the beat to be as wide as the globe and worked to put everyday policing at the core of the Cold War project of counterinsurgency. A "smoking gun" book, Badges Without Borders offers a new account of the War on Crime, "law and order" politics, and global counterinsurgency, revealing the connections between foreign and domestic racial control.