Decarceration Reading List
Books:
- Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?
- Angela Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement
- Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider
- Beth Richie, Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation
- Cyntoia Brown Long, Free Cyntoia: My Search for Redemption in the American Prison System
- Eric A. Stanley & Nat Smith, Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex
- James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
- James Forman Jr, Locking Up Our Own
- Joey Mogul et. Al., Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States
- Martha Minow, When Should Law Forgive?
- Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age if Colorblindness
- Nancy A. Heitzeg, The School-to-Prison Pipeline: Education, Discipline, and Racialized Double Standards
- Reginald Dwayne Betts, A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison
- Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
- Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
- Wilbert Rideau, In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment and Deliverance
Articles:
- Becky Pettit & Bruce Western, Mass Imprisonment and the Life Course: Race and Class Inequality in U.S. Incarceration
- Hilary Binda et al., “You’re almost in this place that doesn’t exist”: The Impact of College in Prison as Understood by Formerly Incarcerated Students from the Northeastern United States
- Dexter Filkins, Who Gets to Vote in Florida?
- Erin Kelly, Law Enforcement in an Unjust Society
- Jackie Wang, Against Innocence: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Safety
- Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: “Panopticism”
- Peggy McIntosh, White privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
Documentaries:
- 13th (2016)
- I Am Not Your Negro (2016)
- Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools (2019)
- The Pruitt-Igoe Myth (2011)
- Trial 4 (2020)
Many of these readings and resources come from the course syllabus of Theorizing US Criminal Justice (CVS-0150-16), taught by Professor Hilary Binda.