October 26-27, 2024: A PrisonStudying Reading List

[On October 27th,1994, the U.S. Justice Department announced that the population infederal and state prisons had topped one million for the first time in Americanhistory. To commemorate that sobering and horrifying statistic, one that hasonly gotteninfinitely worse in the thirty years since, this week I’veAmericanStudied prison stories from throughout our history. Leading up to thisweekend post highlighting some vital further PrisonStudying reading!]

Five recentbooks all PrisonStudiers should read (of the many that could populate such alist, so please share more below, including older ones of course!):

1)     Michelle Alexander, TheNew Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010): Iwrote at length about Alexander’s book inthis post, and then got to teach it in my Fall2016 Analyzing 21st-Century America course, so here I’ll just addthat few if any 21st-century books have been more prescient about akey issue facing our society. Every other one in this list followed Alexander’s,in every sense.

2)     Shaka Senghor, WritingMy Wrongs: Life, Death, and Redemption in an American Prison (2013): Thereare a number of recent memoirs by incarcerated or formerly incarceratedindividuals, and every one of them is as worth our time and attention as allsuch individuals are. But Senghor’s is particularly powerful on many levels,including its central emphasis on one of the most brutal aspects of modernprisons, solitary confinement.

3)     Bryan Stevenson, JustMercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014): I wrote at lengthabout Stevenson and his vital book when heand it won the Stowe Prize in 2017, and have made extensive classroom andscholarly use of the resources created by Stevenson’s EqualJustice Initiative so I’m a certified super-fan. In many ways Just Mercyrepresents a focused response to a particularly outdated aspect of our prisonand justice systems, the death penalty. But it’s also a wider look into theroles that racism, economic inequality, and other forms of discrimination playin every aspect those systems.

4)     Shane Bauer, AmericanPrison: A Reporter’s Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment(2018): Bauer went undercover as a prison guard, not a prisoner, and so I don’twant to suggest that his investigative journalist project was quite as bold noras brave as NellieBly’s self-imprisonment in a mental asylum. But it’s still a unique andimportant act that produced a striking book as a result, and one that offers adistinctive perspective on prisons with which all of us should engage.

5)     Christine Montross, Waitingfor an Echo: The Madness of American Incarceration (2020): The mental,psychological, and emotional effects of prisons are one of those topics that Iimagine we all have some sense of, yet at the same time most of us have no realsense of, if that duality makes sense. We can’t truly talk about this issue norabout incarcerated Americans without a fuller such collective awareness, andMontross’s book is thus a vital resource to add to this reading list.

Nextseries starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Other PrisonStudying readings you’d highlight?