Gregory Shank (coord.) This issue took shape during the buildup to the Bush administration’s preemptive war against Iraq and the worldwide mobilization against it. Its contents appropriately reflect a longer view of US militarism and populist nationalism, the criminalization and repression of domestic dissent, and the movements that have challenged the power arrangements that sustain […]
Archives
Rachel Herzing
“Tweaking Armageddon”: The Potential and Limits of Conditions of Confinement Campaigns This commentary compares the discipline regimes in Eastern State Penitentiary, which opened its doors in 1829, with that faced by prisoners in the Security Housing Unit (SHU) of Pelican Bay State Prison in California, where inmates have initiated a hunger strike. commentary, Pelican Bay […]
Resisting Militarism and Globalized Punishment, Vol. 31: 1-2, 2004
Tony Platt and Gregory Shank, eds. This issue of Social Justice examines the widening net of incarceration, immigration policing, and drug and crime enforcement as well as the role of an increasingly authoritarian national security state in a globalized 21st-century economy. The phenomenon is transnational in scope, though the contributions here focus mainly on developments […]
Robert P. Weiss
“The Order of Attica” After the “disturbance,” the Attica convicts were stripped naked in the yard and made to crawl, with faces to the ground, back to their cells and thus relegated back “in place” as objects in the “order of things.” The “order” of Attica was an example of what can happen when social […]
Robert P. Weiss, Editor
Attica: The “Bitter Lessons” Forgotten? Issue Overview Attica prison Citation: Social Justice Vol. 18, No. 3 (1991): 1-12
Robert Weiss
Guest Editor’s Interview In this interview, Frank (Big Black) Smith and Akil Al-Jundi were asked to account for the degeneration of prisoner values and attitudes. Big Black and Akil were asked about their lives since 1971, about prisons today, and about their hopes and dreams for social justice. As Minister of Information for the Attica […]
Securing the Imperium: Criminal Justice Privatization and Neoliberal Globalization (Vol. 34, Nos. 3-4, 2007)
Bob Weiss, ed. This issue of Social Justice discusses the current resurgence, global expansion, and market concentration of the private security industry. Privatization of police, prisons, and the military is addressed in terms of the United States, China, Latin America, the UK, Australia, and South Africa. The issue covers capturing new capitalist frontiers; global market […]
Shoshana Pollack and Tiina Eldridge
Complicity and Redemption: Beyond the Insider/Outsider Research Dichotomy The authors look at the creation of possibilities for collaborative research by scholars and criminalized subjects. A collaboration between an academic/practitioner (Shoshana) and a formerly incarcerated woman (Tiina), the article aims to disrupt conventional ways of conducting and writing about research. The focus is on the process […]
Simone Weil Davis, with Bruce Michaels
Ripping Off Some Room for People to “Breathe Together”: Peer-to-Peer Education in Prison This article examines the construction of alliances against the dehumanizing effects of the prison-industrial complex by prison educators and their incarcerated peers. It argues that outside allies and faculty who work in higher-education prison programs affiliated with a university need to learn […]
Tony Ward
Review Essay on Prisons under Protest The central argument of Joe Sim’s book is that prison riots are not psychopathic orgies of destruction, but desperate attempts at communication. The reviewer urges greater attention to prisoner accounts of penal reality to help prisoners overcome their terrible isolation. book review, prison riots Citation: Social Justice Vol. 18, […]
Vicky Munro-Bjorklund
Popular Cultural Images of Criminals and Prisoners since Attica This article on the popular-cultural images of criminals shows how in the 20 years leading up to 1990 the entertainment and news media developed a symbiotic relation with demagogic politicians, helping to fashion a reactionary public attitude that is hostile to prisoner rights. prisoner rights, news […]
Vincenzo Ruggiero
Utopian Action and Participatory Disputes Is abolitionism a utopian posture in the face of social events, problems, and their solution? After specifying the type of utopianism implicitly embraced by penal abolitionism, this article traces some key features that constitute the religious, philosophical, and political underpinning of this school of thought. It then discusses how proponents […]
Vol. 39:4
{click on the author’s name to read the abstract and purchase single articles} TABLE OF CONTENTS Victoria E. Collins and Dawn L. Rothe, United States Support for Global Social Justice? Foreign Intervention and Realpolitik in Egypt’s Arab Spring Micol Seigel, “Convict Race”: Racialization in the Era of Hyperincarceration Steve Martinot, On the Epidemic of Police Killings Harald Bauder, The Possibilities of […]
Vol. 41-3
This issue includes a special section on PENAL ABOLITION AND PRISON REFORM; plus articles on US militarism in Latin America, hackers and privacy, the Víctor Jara case, and grassroots peacemaking in El Salvador. TABLE OF CONTENTS Militarism and Its Discontents: Neoliberalism, Repression, and Resistance in Twenty-First-Century US–Latin American Relations Ginger Williams & Jennifer Leigh Disney “It […]
Vol. 41-4: Youth under Control: Punishment and Reform in the Neoliberal State
This special issue critically analyzes the social and penal policies aimed at young people in the United States, focusing in particular on the punitive role played by schools, juvenile courts, and community-based programs.
Vol. 42-2: Beyond Mass Incarceration
BEYOND MASS INCARCERATION: CRISIS AND CRITIQUE IN NORTH AMERICAN PENAL SYSTEMS edited by Alessandro De Giorgi After decades of vertical increases in imprisonment rates, the US carceral system is in a state of structural crisis. A growing public awareness of the spiraling social and economic costs of this hypertrophic carceral machine seems to provide a […]