Creating Choices or Repeating History: Canadian Female Offenders and Correctional Reform This article examines the conclusions of a recent Task Force on women in Canadian prisons. The Task Force helped to illuminate the plight of women, especially Native offenders (who represent a disproportionate number of incarcerated women in Canada). Although the Task Force recommendations for […]
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Adela Beckerman
Women in Prison: The Conflict between Confinement and Parental Rights In the United States and Canada most female prisoners are mothers. In the United States, women prisoners can be permanently separated from their children if they are unable to provide arrangements for childcare, or are unable to maintain regular contact. This article addresses the obstacles […]
Elmer H. Johnson
Managing Prisoners in Japan: “Attica” Is Not Probable The author provides a national example that differs greatly from the situation in the UK, Canada, and the United States. Japanese prisons are relatively tranquil; aggression against staff and other convicts is rare, and riots are unheard of. Certainly, the very close supervision, ritualism, and severe sanctioning […]
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 […]
Joe Sim
“We Are Not Animals, We Are Human Beings”: Prisons, Protest, and Politics in England and Wales, 1969-1990 This article discusses the policy implications of the disastrous road of warehousing a growing underclass. In both the UK and United States, understaffing, gross overcrowding, and a general deterioration in the quality of prison life have made prisoners […]
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 […]
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 […]
David Gilbert
“These Criminals Have No Respect for Human Life” Gilbert provides a first-hand account of a May 1990 disciplined and widely supported protest action at Attica over the killing of a black prisoner. The article also assesses changes in the values and attitudes of guards and prisoners at Attica since 1971. The author argues that “prisoners […]
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 […]
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 […]
John K. Simon
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 […]
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 […]
Robert P. Weiss, Editor
Attica: The “Bitter Lessons” Forgotten? Issue Overview Attica prison Citation: Social Justice Vol. 18, No. 3 (1991): 1-12
Vol. 18-3 Attica: 1971-1991 — A Commemorative Issue
This issue provides a retrospective on the Attica rebellion, an assessment of prisoner struggles in the United States, Canada, England and Wales, and Japan since 1971, and thoughts on a new penology for the 1990s. It is of enduring historical value. TABLE OF CONTENTS Attica: The “Bitter Lessons” Forgotten? Robert P. Weiss, Editor [free pdf […]
Steven Volk
Review: The Political Power of Music in Chile’s Popular Unity Period McSherry’s analysis opens the door to a reconsideration of political formation during the Popular Unity years, an essential historiographic contribution. book review, hegemony, Allende, Nueva Canción, Chile Citation: Social Justice Vol. 43, No. 1 (2016): 106-110
Daniel Patten
The Mass Incarceration of Nations and the Global War on Drugs: Making Comparisons between the United States Domestic and Foreign Drug Policies This article offers an overview of the current domestic war on drugs in the United States and the subsequent mass incarceration of individuals. The domestic and foreign drug policy fronts are compared by […]