Michel Foucault on Attica: An Interview This interview was conducted soon after Foucault’s visit to the prison at Attica after studying exclusion and prison reform in France. He uses the metaphor that at first sight you have the impression you are visiting more than just a factory, that you are visiting the inside of a […]
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John Lowman and Brian MacLean
Prisons and Protest in Canada John Lowman and Brian MacLean report 69 major prison “disturbances” in the mid-1970s. In the 1980s alone in the United States, there were dozens of serious disturbances and, although many were not progressive, some showed prisoner unity and politicality. If the rationale for prison has changed over the past 150 […]
Judah Schept, Tyler Wall, and Avi Brisman
Building, Staffing and Insulating: An Architecture of Criminological Complicity in the School-to-Prison Pipeline The concept of the school-to-prison pipeline illuminates and dissects the continuum between education and incarceration. Most often, the concept is deployed to call attention to the criminalization of youth of color in urban schools and the mechanisms that facilitate their entry into […]
Justin Piché
Playing the “Treasury Card” to Contest Prison Expansion: Lessons from a Public Criminology Campaign This article explores how Canadian abolitionists have sought to tap into public anxieties about the economy to contest the further entrenchment of imprisonment through campaigns emphasizing the impact of punishment measures on the pocketbooks of taxpayers. Building on Loader’s discussion on […]
Justin Piché
Assessing the Boundaries of Public Criminology: On What Does (Not) Count The author interrogates the project of a “public criminology” and assesses what counts as scholarly engagement within this criminological framework through an analysis of its objectives, publics, and practices. In this context, Piché criticizes public criminology for pursuing a reformist agenda that buttresses the […]
Karen Wald
The San Quentin Six Case: Perspective and Analysis Wald exposes deteriorating prison conditions and describes prisoners’ resistance under monopoly capitalism. The article details the San Quentin Six case, which had its roots in the long history of prisoner resistance, the rise of the prison support movement, and the efforts of the state to smash and […]
Leonidas Cheliotis, Benjamin Fleury-Steiner, Mona Lynch, Rebecca McLennan, Tony Platt, and Jonathan Simon
Book Review Symposium: Jonathan Simon, Mass Incarceration on Trial An international review symposium featuring comments by five contributors discusses Jonathan Simon’s Mass Incarceration on Trial: A Remarkable Court Decision and the Future of Prisons in America (2014). This book takes on the difficult challenge of decrypting current penal trends and imagining the possible futures of […]
Lisa Wright, Dawn Moore, and Vincent Kazmierski
Policing Carceral Boundaries: Access to Information and Research with Prisoners This article discusses the struggle of researchers and imprisoned populations to gain access to information about spaces of confinement. The authors provide a framework for penetrating the borders of the carceral system that is based on the experiences of many critical researchers who have been […]
Marie Gottschalk
Razing the Carceral State This article examines the deeply racialized and classed architecture of the American carceral edifice to illustrate how the growing opposition to mass incarceration in the United States has tended to gravitate toward two equally flawed positions. The first focuses on racial discrimination as the main line of attack against the carceral […]
Michael E. Deutsch and Jan Susler
Political Prisoners in the United States: The Hidden Reality The authors describe the treatment of political prisoners at Marion Federal Penitentiary. Because California, Oklahoma, and Maryland have modeled prisons after Marion, other states will likely also employ their facilities for the segregation and punishment of political activists and protest organizers. political prisoners, SHUs Citation: Social […]
Michael E. Deutsch, Dennis Cunningham, and Elizabeth M. Fink
Twenty Years Later—Attica Civil Rights Case Finally Cleared for Trial Attorneys for the Attica Brothers provide an account of the uprising and its suppression that has been largely hidden. The Attica civil rights case went on trial almost 20 years to the day after the world was shocked by the unparalleled use of excessive force […]
Mick Ryan and Tony Ward
Prison Abolition in the UK: They Dare Not Speak Its Name? This article discusses the history, achievements, and prospects of the movement for prison or penal abolition in the United Kingdom, and in particular the ideas promoted by RAP (Radical Alternatives to Prison) in the 1970s and 1980s. The authors argue that while RAP patently […]
Noah De Lissovoy
Injury and Accumulation: Making Sense of the Punishing State This article suggests that the pervasive racialization of contemporary state violence calls for an analysis of the penal state that identifies racism and “coloniality” (i.e., the material and symbolic domination of communities of color) as essential components of late capitalism. This approach allows De Lissovoy to […]
Paul T. Takagi: Recollections and Writings
Paul T. Takagi and Gregory Shank (2012), 156 pp., paper, ISBN 978-0-9352060-1-2. $21.95 This collection of biographical essays also includes Paul T. Takagi’s previously unpublished writings. It reviews a 140-year period in which Japanese Americans forged a new trans-Pacific identity. Historians will find a fresh interpretation of the reasons behind the tragic episode of placing […]
Policing, Detention, Deportation, and Resistance, Vol. 36: 2, 2009
Jodie Michelle Lawston and Martha Escobar, eds. This issue of Social Justice demonstrates that imprisonment, including immigrant detention, is essential to the US drive to preserve geopolitical dominance. It examines activist efforts to resist this trend and urges the building of bridges between prison abolition and immigrant justice work. The issue brings together a multiplicity […]
Punishment and Penal Discipline: Essays on the Prison and the Prisoners’ Movement
Edited by Tony Platt and Paul Takagi (2nd printing, 1982). 200 pp., paper, ISBN 0-935206-00-0. $14.95 The present crisis in prison conditions has been decades in the making. What are its real causes? What are the class forces at work in the penal system? This important anthology of 16 essays selected from Crime and Social Justice addresses […]