Transitions / Formerly Incarcerated: Recommended Books

This book contains essays that explain the need for prison book programs and offer advice on how to establish or become involved with prison books programs, as well as shedding light on current challenges. While mass incarceration can make people feel powerless, this book details how ordinary people can organize and intervene in the largest imprisonment the world has ever known.

Drawing on extensive interviews with abolitionist crews all over North America, Herzing and Piché provide a collective reconstruction of what the grassroots movement to abolish prisons actually is, what initiatives it has launched, how it organizes itself, and how its protagonists build the day-to-day practice of politics.

Told through the portraits of two men imprisoned for murder, and the parole board that holds their freedom in the balance, Austen's unflinching storytelling forces us to reckon with some of the most profound questions underlying the country's values around crime and punishment.

In Reckoning with Restorative Justice, Leanne Trapedo Sims explores the experiences of women who are incarcerated at the Women's Community Correctional Center, the only women's prison in the state of Hawai'i. Adopting a decolonial and pro-abolitionist lens, she focuses particularly on women's participation in the Kailua Prison Writing Project and its accompanying Prison Monologues program.

Justin Brooks has spent his career freeing innocent people from prison. With You Might Go to Prison, Even Though You're Innocent, he offers up-close accounts of the cases he has fought, embedding them within a larger landscape of innocence claims and robust research on what we know about the causes of wrongful convictions.

An intimate's first-hand account of the emotional and physical experience of doing time in jail and the strategies for enduring it. Although jail sentences max out at a year, some spend years awaiting trial in jail. Indefinite is an ethnographic study of a California county jail that reflects on what it means to do jail time.

Each year, more than half a million Americans are released from prison and join a population of twenty million people who live with a felony record. Recently released individuals are faced with jobs that are off-limits, apartments that cannot be occupied and votes that cannot be cast.

This book compiles chapters written by individuals across the political spectrum, and within and outside the fields of prison education that address this need for reform. Chapters feature the voices of prominent national figures pushing for reform and current and former students who have benefitted from an education program while in prison.

Research on funds of knowledge has become a standard reference to signal a sociocultural orientation in education that seeks to build strategically on the experiences, resources, and knowledge of families and children, especially those from low-income communities of color. This book challenges existing deficit thinking in the field.

Incarceration Nations is a first-person odyssey through the prison systems of the world. Professor, journalist and founder of the Prison-to-College-Pipeline, Baz Dreisinger looks into the human stories of incarcerated men and women, rethinking of one of America's most far-reaching global exports: the modern prison complex.

This book offers a research and comparison-driven look at the school-to-prison pipeline, its racial dynamics, the connections to mass incarceration, and our flawed educational climate--and suggests practical remedies for change.

This concise, illustrated primer is a collaboration between one of mass incarceration's sharpest opponents, James Kilgore, and information artist Vic Liu. It brings to life the histories and means of daily survival of the marginalized people ensnared in this racist, ableist system of class-based oppression.

This book questions punishment as concept, social phenomenon and contemporary practice. It unpacks punishment's nature and the assumptions that underpin it, examines its targets, objectives and implications, and aims to unsettle the idea that there is something common-sensical, necessary and unavoidable about punitive justice.

How have jails become the deadliest waiting rooms in America? Death before Sentencing provides a sweeping exposé of thousands of avoidable deaths that have occurred in the U.S. county and local jail systems within the past few decades.

In the United States, prison conditions are inhumane, prisoners are treated without dignity, and sentences are extremely harsh. Mass incarceration and its devastating impact on black communities have been widely condemned as neoslavery. Can the practice of imprisonment be reformed, or does justice require it to be ended altogether?

Innocence Project attorney M. Chris Fabricant presents an insider's journey into the heart of a broken, racist system of justice and the role junk science plays in maintaining the status quo.

The Sentences That Create Us draws from the unique insights of over fifty justice-involved contributors and their allies to offer inspiration and resources for creating a literary life in prison.

The Three Death Sentences of Clarence Henderson is the story of Clarence Henderson, a wrongfully accused Black sharecropper who was sentenced to die three different times for a murder he didn't commit, and the prosecution desperate to pin the crime on him despite scant evidence.

Jessica Simes argues that mass incarceration should be conceptualized as one of the legacies of U.S. racial residential segregation, but that a focus on large cities has diverted vital scholarly and policy attention away from communities affected most by mass incarceration today.

A brilliant analysis of the foundations of racist policing in America: the day-to-day brutalities, largely hidden from public view, endured by Black youth growing up under constant police surveillance and the persistent threat of physical and psychological abuse.

After a childhood of poverty, violence, and being thrown away by the public education system, Bolden's life took him through the treacherous landscape of street gangs. He forged a new path through education, achieving the seemingly impossible for a formerly incarcerated ex-gangbanger.

Draws from both ethnographic and professional material, and situates the prison experience within both contemporary and historical contexts. Features first person accounts from male and female inmates and staff, revealing what it's actually like to live and work in prison.