Our librarians continue to add resources to this research guide and to Brooklyn Law School Library's collection. When you access this guide in future, please reload this web page.
BLS researchers who plan to work off campus and do not live in a BLS residence: implement the BLS proxy instructions for 1 web browser, then close/reopen that browser. Librarians recommend using Firefox for the proxy server. This will allow you to access many BLS ebooks and ejournals off campus. Need help implementing the BLS proxy instructions? Contact: library.lab@brooklaw.edu
Program descriptions below include links to the authors' books in BLS Library's SARA catalog.
Apr. 1, 2025 @ 6 p.m. (ET): Brooklyn Law School Book Talk and Discussion: Sentencing, Second Chances & Justice, with U.S. District Judge Frederic Block & BLS Alumnus Todd Blanche ‘03, Deputy Attorney General of the United States, moderated by President and Joseph Crea Dean David Meyer (please RSVP here)
A Second Chance: A Federal Judge Decides Who Deserves It by Sept. 25, 2024: Brooklyn Book Festival Bookend Event was: Protect Your People: Challenging Mass Incarceration Together
This event featured the recent book Protect Your People: How Ordinary Families Are Using Participatory Defense to Challenge Mass Incarceration (The New Press, 2024). The panelists were: Raj Jayadev, the book's author and a MacArthur Fellow, Heather Lewis, Executive Director of the Reuniting Family Bail Fund, and Justine “Taz” Moore, Director of Training at the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls. These speakers conversed with Brooklyn Law School Professor & Associate Dean Jocelyn Simonson, author of Radical Acts of Justice: How Ordinary People are Dismantling Mass Incarceration (The New Press, 2023). As noted here, this program highlighted “the innovative storytelling techniques of groups of people who have changed the outcomes of criminal cases by intervening collectively through ‘participatory defense.’” Brooklyn Law School's Center for Criminal Justice sponsored this event.
Protect Your People: Challenging Mass Incarceration Together by Sept. 29, 2024: Brooklyn Book Festival Festival Day events at BLS included:
Dreaming of Freedom: How We Move Beyond an Expanding Police State
Brooklyn Book Festival's program description stated: "With 'robot dogs' at the border, automated surveillance, and arbitrary decisions controlling probation and parole, a system of policing and punishment seems less concerned with fairness or safety than with social control. What does it all have to do with justice?" Program participants will be: sociologist Ruha Benjamin (author of Imagination: A Manifesto), journalist Ben Austen (Correction: Parole, Prison, and the Possibility of Change), and lawyer and anthropologist Petra Molnar (The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence). Moderated by Vincent Schiraldi, former Probation Commissioner of New York City and author of Mass Supervision: Probation, Parole, and the Illusion of Safety and Freedom.
Debt, Solidarity, and Economic Justice presented by Brooklyn Law School
Brooklyn Book Festival's program description stated: "A conversation about the legal, political, and economic forces shaping debt markets and horizons for change and the abolition of debt featuring: Luke Messac (Your Money or Your Life: Debt Collection in American Medicine), Chrystin Ondersma (Dignity Not Debt: An Abolitionist Approach to Economic Justice), Melissa Jacoby (Unjust Debts: How Our Bankruptcy System Makes America More Unequal) and Astra Taylor (co-author of Solidarity: The Past, Present, And Future Of A World-Changing Idea and founder of the Debt Collective). Moderated by Vijay Raghavan, Associate Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law School."
Recording of Oct. 17, 2024 Book Talk and Discussion at Brooklyn Law School: Prof. Adam Kolber's Punishment for the Greater Good
BLS program description stated: In his new book, Punishment for the Greater Good (Oxford University Press, June 2024), Professor Adam J. Kolber tackles the most fundamental question related to criminal punishment: What, if anything, justifies the suffering and deprivation of liberty associated with incarceration and other forms of punishment? Kolber defends a “consequentialist” approach that focuses on deterring, incapacitating, and rehabilitating offenders rather than the more common “retributivist” approach that focuses on giving people the suffering they deserve for past wrongdoing. Our panel of commentators will feature distinguished philosophers and legal scholars.
Moderator: Alice Ristroph, Les Fagen Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law School. Discussants: Chad Flanders, Professor of Law and (by courtesy) Philosophy, St. Louis University School of Law; Nathan Hanna, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Drexel University; Kierstan Kaushal-Carter, Provost's Postdoctoral Fellow in Law, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School; and Benjamin Vilhauer, Professor, Department of Philosophy, CUNY City College and Graduate Center. Sponsored by Brooklyn Law School's Center for Criminal Justice.
Punishment for the Greater Good by Recording of Oct. 23, 2023 Book Talk: Jocelyn Simonson and James Forman Jr. Discuss Radical Acts of Justice at the Center for Brooklyn History
Click here to view Prof. Simonson's Aug. 17, 2023 Book Talk and Reading at Politics and Prose book store in Washington, D.C.
Radical Acts of Justice: How Ordinary People Are Dismantling Mass Incarceration by Recording of Sept. 19, 2022 Book Talk and Discussion at Brooklyn Law School: The Women's House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison: A Conversation with Hugh Ryan, Writer and Curator
Moderator: Kate Mogulescu, Associate Professor of Clinical Law, Brooklyn Law School
Book description: "This singular history of a prison, and the queer women and trans people held there, is a window into the policing of queerness and radical politics in the 20th century. The Women’s House of Detention, a landmark that ushered in the modern era of women’s imprisonment, is now largely forgotten. But when it stood in New York City’s Greenwich Village, from 1929 to 1974, it was a nexus for the tens of thousands of women, transgender men, and gender-nonconforming people who inhabited its crowded cells. Some were famous – Angela Davis, Andrea Dworkin, Afeni Shakur – but the vast majority were incarcerated for the crimes of being poor and improperly feminine. Today, approximately 40 percent of the people in women’s prisons identify as queer; in earlier decades, that percentage was almost certainly higher."
The Women's House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison by Would you like to donate a book (or books) to a public library collection at a New York City carceral facility or a residence for people reentering our community after incarceration?
Brooklyn's Greenlight Bookstore website hosts the Prison Library Support Network Wish List.
Q: Who chooses these books?
A: New York City library workers who offer library services to New York City's carceral facilities and residences.
Greenlight Bookstore explains that if you choose a book(s) and pay online, the shipping cost is included and the book(s) will be delivered to a public library collection in a New York City carceral facility or residence.
For more information about book donations, donation guidelines and highly requested types of books, visit this New York Public Library web page.
For information about Brooklyn Public Library's programs and services (including volunteer opportunities) for incarcerated individuals, visit this Brooklyn Public Library web page.
Brooklyn Law School LIbrary will fill requests from incarcerated individuals for specific materials (please include correct citations). Please list the most desired materials first. Due to budget and staffing constraints, requests are limited to one per month (per person), with a limit of 100 pages per request. Because of licensing restrictions, sometimes our library cannot fill certain requests. Our library staff mails photocopies and printouts of sources to an incarcerated individual's return address. Please mail correspondence to: Brooklyn Law School Library, 250 Joralemon Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201.
Beyond the Bars Conference 2025 Recap (annual conference, sponsored by Center for Justice at Columbia University & Center for Justice at Columbia School of Social Work)
Justice 101 Series provides monthly, free, virtual programs made available by the Center for Justice Education at Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site. Below are links to an upcoming program (which requires advance registration) and program recordings.
This LibGuide was last substantively updated:
On: Mar. 31, 2025
At: 3:39 PM
By: Jean Davis