As banks crashed, belts tightened, and cupboards emptied across the country, American prisons grew fat. Doing Time in the Depression tells the story of the 1930s as seen from the cell blocks and ...cotton fields of Texas and California prisons, state institutions that held growing numbers of working people from around the country and the world--overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately non-white, and displaced by economic crisis.Ethan Blue paints a vivid portrait of everyday life inside Texas and California's penal systems. Each element of prison life--from numbing boredom to hard labor, from meager pleasure in popular culture to crushing pain from illness or violence--demonstrated a contest between keepers and the kept. From the moment they arrived to the day they would leave, inmates struggled over the meanings of race and manhood, power and poverty, and of the state itself. In this richly layered account, Blue compellingly argues that punishment in California and Texas played a critical role in producing a distinctive set of class, race, and gender identities in the 1930s, some of which reinforced the social hierarchies and ideologies of New Deal America, and others of which undercut and troubled the established social order. He reveals the underside of the modern state in two very different prison systems, and the making of grim institutions whose power would only grow across the century.
Way Down in the Hole Kupers, Terry A; Smith, Earl; Hattery, Angela J
2022, 2022-10-14
eBook
Based on ethnographic observations and interviews with prisoners, correctional officers, and civilian staff conducted in solitary confinement units, Way Down in the Hole explores the myriad ways in ...which daily, intimate interactions between those locked up twenty-four hours a day and the correctional officers charged with their care, custody, and control produce and reproduce hegemonic racial ideologies. Smith and Hattery explore the outcome of building prisons in rural, economically depressed communities, staffing them with white people who live in and around these communities, filling them with Black and brown bodies from urban areas and then designing the structure of solitary confinement units such that the most private, intimate daily bodily functions take place in very public ways. Under these conditions, it shouldn’t be surprising, but is rarely considered, that such daily interactions produce and reproduce white racial resentment among many correctional officers and fuel the racialized tensions that prisoners often describe as the worst forms of dehumanization. Way Down in the Hole concludes with recommendations for reducing the use of solitary confinement, reforming its use in a limited context, and most importantly, creating an environment in which prisoners and staff co-exist in ways that recognize their individual humanity and reduce rather than reproduce racial antagonisms and racial resentment.
<a href=https://youtu.be/UuAB63fhge0> Way Down the Hole Video 1 (https://youtu.be/UuAB63fhge0)
<a href=https://youtu.be/TwEuw1cTrcQ> Way Down the Hole Video 2 (https://youtu.be/TwEuw1cTrcQ)
<a href=https://youtu.be/bOcBv_UnHIs> Way Down the Hole Video 3 (https://youtu.be/bOcBv_UnHIs)
<a href=https://youtu.be/cx_l1S8D77c> Way Down the Hole Video 4 (https://youtu.be/cx_l1S8D77c)
Bruce F. Adams examines how Russia's Main Prison Administration was created, the number of prisoners it managed in what types of prisons, and what it accomplished. While providing a thorough account ...of prison management at a crucial time in Russia's history, Adams explores broader discussions of reform within Russia's government and society, especially after the Revolution of 1905, when arguments on such topics as parole and probation boiled in the arena of raucous public debate.
In Stick Together and Come Back Home, Patrick Lopez-Aguado examines how what happens inside a prison affects what happens outside of it. Following the experiences of seventy youth and adults as they ...navigate juvenile justice and penal facilities before finally going back home, he outlines how institutional authorities structure a “carceral social order” that racially and geographically divides criminalized populations into gang-associated affiliations. These affiliations come to shape one’s exposure to both violence and criminal labeling, and as they spill over the institutional walls they establish how these unfold in high-incarceration neighborhoods as well, revealing the insidious set of consequences that mass incarceration holds for poor communities of color.
Finding that institutions could be important centres of civic activity, self-edification, and 'scientific' study, Prisons, Asylums, and the Public sheds new light on popular nineteenth-century ...attitudes towards the insane and the criminal.
"When I testify in court, I am often asked: 'What is the damage of long-term solitary confinement?' . . . Many prisoners emerge from prison after years in solitary with very serious psychiatric ...symptoms even though outwardly they may appear emotionally stable. The damage from isolation is dreadfully real."-Terry Allen KupersImagine spending nearly twenty-four hours a day alone, confined to an eight-by-ten-foot windowless cell. This is the reality of approximately one hundred thousand inmates in solitary confinement in the United States today. Terry Allen Kupers, one of the nation's foremost experts on the mental health effects of solitary confinement, tells the powerful stories of the inmates he has interviewed while investigating prison conditions during the past forty years. Touring supermax security prisons as a forensic psychiatrist, Kupers has met prisoners who have been viciously beaten or raped, subdued with immobilizing gas, or ignored in the face of urgent medical and psychiatric needs. Kupers criticizes the physical and psychological abuse of prisoners and then offers rehabilitative alternatives to supermax isolation.Solitaryis a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the true damage that solitary confinement inflicts on individuals living in isolation as well as on our society as a whole.
The Primeiro Comando do Capital (PCC) is a Sao Paulo prison gang that since the 1990s has expanded into the most powerful criminal network in Brazil. Karina Biondi's rich ethnography of the PCC is ...uniquely informed by her insider-outsider status. Prior to his acquittal, Biondi's husband was incarcerated in a PCC-dominated prison for several years. During the period of Biondi's intense and intimate visits with her husband and her extensive fieldwork in prisons and on the streets of Sao Paulo, the PCC effectively controlled more than 90 percent of Sao Paulo's 147 prison facilities.Available for the first time in English, Biondi's riveting portrait of the PCC illuminates how the organization operates inside and outside of prison, creatively elaborating on a decentered, non-hierarchical, and far-reaching command system. This system challenges both the police forces against which the PCC has declared war and the methods and analytic concepts traditionally employed by social scientists concerned with crime, incarceration, and policing. Biondi posits that the PCC embodies a "politics of transcendence," a group identity that is braided together with, but also autonomous from, its decentralized parts. Biondi also situates the PCC in relation to redemocratization and rampant socioeconomic inequality in Brazil, as well as to counter-state movements, crime, and punishment in the Americas.
