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:

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.

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