Prison

[close] Join author Tara Ison from Nov 1-8, 2012 for a Q&A on her debut novel "A Child out of Alcatraz," available for the first time in all digital formats. This out-of-print novel was published to critical acclaim in 1998, and was named as a finalist for the Los Angeles Times' Book Prize for First Fiction. Searing, and enormously compelling, this stinging portrait of the downward spiral of a mother and young daughter on Alcatraz Island will haunt the reader's days and dreams. Tara will talk about the research that led her to write Child, the world of the novel, and the process and experience of writing this first book. Please join the conversation!

[close] ...November 20, 2013 to January 20, 2014...

[close] We read books on the prison industrial complex, prison abolition, and the lives of ex-cons, drug users, drug dealers, sex workers, illegal immigrants, the homeless, and others who systematically have their lives criminalized, particularly in the United States. Our mission is to raise awareness, not to 'save,' but to increase readers' ability to see people from all walks of life as equal, human, and deserving of protection under the law. We hope to convince people that when the law criminalizes for no cause but capturing money and labor and maintaining class, race, and sex/gender divides, then aware and active citizens must agitate for change.

[close] Laissez faire and mass incarceration: How could these possibly go together? Surprisingly, they have and they've been joined at the hip for a long time... It is widely believed today that the free market is the best mechanism ever invented to efficiently allocate resources in society. Just as fundamental is the belief that government has a legitimate and competent role in policing and punishing. The result, in this country, has been an incendiary combination of laissez faire and mass incarceration. Today, the United States incarcerates over one percent of its adult population, the highest number and rate in the world. In this book and on this forum, Bernard Harcourt discusses the birth of the idea of natural order in economic thought and its gradual evolution into today’s myth of the free market, and he explores how it could possibly have produced the largest government-run penal sphere on the globe. This forum will be live starting March 1, 2011.