books

Out of Sight, Out of Mind: On Locking up Our Own

Adam Shatz London Review of Books
If anyone doubted Black Americans still today suffer unfairly from incarceration rates and other horrific inequities out of all proportion to their numbers in the population, the case was closed by Michelle Alexander in her masterly The New Jim Crow (2010). Comes now James Forman Jr., to argue convincingly that key sections of the black community themselves abetted the criminalizing of black youths in a misguided effort to make so-called law and order work for them.

Exploiting Black Labor After the Abolition of Slavery

Kathy Roberts Forde, Bryan Bowman The Conversation
The exploitation of Black convict labor by the penal system and industrialists was central to southern politics and economics of the era. It was a carefully crafted answer to Black progress during Reconstruction – highly visible and widely known.

Friday Nite Videos -- October 7, 2016

Portside
RIGGED!!! | Sam Bee's Election Report. Rock Group Drive-By Truckers Take on the South. All The Things Mike Pence Said Donald Trump Didn’t Say, He Did. The Secret US Prisons You've Never Heard of Before. Do Cause and Effect Really Exist?

Rock Group Drive-By Truckers Take on the South

Drive-By Truckers formed in Athens, Georgia 20 years ago, and the band's been exploring the music and culture of the American South ever since. Their new album continues that tradition, with a piercing look at issues of race and police brutality. 

People with Mental Illness are 16 Times More Likely to Be Killed During a Police Encounter

Amy Goodman, John Snook
Before this year, we basically weren’t even able to really provide a very effective number of how many people with mental illness were killed by law enforcement officers. We know, across the country, that people with a mental illness are languishing in jails and emergency rooms, because we simply don’t have enough hospital beds for them.

books

Blood in the Water

Terry Hartle The Christian Science Monitor
This fresh look at the 1971 Attica, New York prison uprising, which was brutally repressed by then-Governor Nelson Rockefeller, is not just a history. It is an intervention into contemporary debates about the U.S. prison system.

tv

Why Are The Guards On Strike On 'Orange Is The New Black'? Privatization Got To Them

Mariella Mosthof Romper
One of Orange Is the New Black's greatest accomplishments in Season 3 was exploring the Litchfield guards' inner lives just as deeply, richly, and with just as much complexity as it has the inmates' lives. Rather than set up a false dichotomy where the prisoners are the "good guys" who just got themselves into a bad situation and the guards are the monsters, Season 3 shows us that the guards have it tough, too. So tough, in fact, that they decide to unionize.
Subscribe to Prisons