Rethinking the American Prison Movement provides a short, accessible overview of the transformational and ongoing struggles against America’s prison system. Dan Berger and Toussaint Losier show that ...prisoners have used strikes, lawsuits, uprisings, writings, and diverse coalitions with free-world allies to challenge prison conditions and other kinds of inequality. From the forced labor camps of the nineteenth century to the rebellious protests of the 1960s and 1970s to the rise of mass incarceration and its discontents, Rethinking the American Prison Movement is invaluable to anyone interested in the history of American prisons and the struggles for justice still echoing in the present day.
For four days in October 1932, during the height of the Great Depression, prisoners at Kingston Penitentiary revolted. They took control of their workshops and brought the convict labour regime to a ...halt, until the guards and militia violently regained control. This revolt was the culmination of more than a year of organizing and collective actions. Prisoners wrote manifestos, participated in work refusals, elected representatives, and developed a sophisticated critique of the conditions of their incarceration and the penitentiary administration. Using a unique collection of archival documents, this article closely examines the complaints, criticisms, fears, hopes, and frustrations of the incarcerated, whose demands and goals are crucial for understanding how and why the prisoner revolt unfolded as it did. I argue that the prisoners at Kingston Penitentiary, by striking and organizing to assert their dignity, democratically organized their lives and ensured a “fair deal” should be considered part of the Depression-era protests of the unemployed, imprisoned, and marginalized.
Over the past decade, the political landscape in the realm of criminal justice policy has shifted towards broad support for prison reform. Recent calls for defunding as a solution to the problems of ...mass incarceration are gaining traction from a diverse group of political actors. The case of prison reform in Mississippi provides important insight on the effects of a reform model that prioritizes cutting costs. This article examines the consequences of pursuing penal reforms in the broader context of fiscal austerity. First, the case of Mississippi shows how local context shapes austerity driven reforms in ways that make them particularly unsuited to address mass incarceration. The development of the carceral state in Mississippi created labor and public-sector dependencies on the correctional system and overcoming these interests will require public investments. Second, the article shows how austerity driven reforms fail to adequately staff and support public sector correctional workers which has rendered prisons in Mississippi even more dangerous and deadly. The Mississippi case indicates that until there are more significant drops in incarceration rates and robust alternatives to the functions of the carceral state, reductions in correctional budgets do not signal downsizing, but rather mass incarceration on the cheap.
Setting all the captives free Steele, Ian K
Setting all the captives free,
2013, 20131101, 2013, 2013-10-24, 2013-11-01, Volume:
71., 71
eBook
Among the many upheavals in North America caused by the French and Indian War was a commonplace practice that affected the lives of thousands of men, women, and children: being taken captive by rival ...forces. Most previous studies of captivity in early America are content to generalize from a small selection of sources, often centuries apart. In Setting All the Captives Free, Ian Steele presents, from a mountain of data, the differences rather than generalities as well as how these differences show the variety of circumstances that affected captives’ experiences. The product of a herculean effort to identify and analyze the captives taken on the Allegheny frontier during the era of the French and Indian War, Setting All the Captives Free is the most complete study of this topic. Steele explores genuine, doctored, and fictitious accounts in an innovative challenge to many prevailing assumptions and arguments, revealing that Indians demonstrated humanity and compassion by continuing to take numerous captives when their opponents took none, by adopting and converting captives into kin during the war, and by returning captives even though doing so was a humiliating act that betrayed their societies' values. A fascinating and comprehensive work by an acclaimed scholar, Setting All the Captives Free takes the study of the French and Indian War in America to an exciting new level.
Modeling conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calculates that as many as 160to214millionpeopleinthe United States could become infected by the 2019 novel coronavirus ...(SARS-CoV-2, which causes the disease COVID-19) and that as many as 200 000 to 1.7 million may die from COVID19.1 Prisons and jails are amplifiers of infectious diseases because of overcrowding and unsanitary living conditions and will most certainly contribute to these estimates. COVID-19 outbreaks have already been identified in New York City and Cook County, Illinois, jails, with infection rates at the Rikers Island jail complex far exceeding community rates. In response, correctional systems are implementing changes to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, including reducingjail and prison admissions and releasing people from facilities. In tandem, jails and prisons must also initiate facility-level policies to help stop the spread of COVID-19.Although some correctional entities have embraced the need for temporary reforms, many others remain opposed. This crisis reiterates the need for progressive criminal justice policy reforms- in particular, the wider adoption of compassionate release and the elimination of cash bail-and has shown that policy change is possible. Immediate action will have a positive impact on slowing the spread of COVID-19 and should become standard practice to alleviate the health harms caused by mass incarceration.
Le présent article propose une discussion autour des milieux de réclusion français et roumain et, de surcroit, lance quelques perspectives de recherche sociolinguistique. En envisageant la personne ...détenue comme acteur social et comme sujet parlant, notre étude va développer des notions comme « terrain » et « corpus ». Notre objectif est donc la multiplication des regards en ce qui concerne la compréhension de l’intimité carcérale à partir du vécu de nos répondants et la manifestation des facettes de l’identité carcérale, identité exprimée dans un milieu uni-/ multilingue et mono-/multiculturel. This article proposes a discussion of French and Romanian prison environments and, in addition, launches a few sociolinguistic research perspectives. Considering the detained person as a social actor and as a speaking subject, our study will develop the concepts like “field” and “corpus”. Our goal is the multiplication of the regards for understanding of the prison privacy from the experiences of our respondents and the manifestation of the facets of prison identity, expressed in a uni-/multilingual and mono/multicultural medium.
Hostage taking in prisons in England and Wales presents risks to both staff and prisoners and understanding such incidents is important to inform the development of appropriate management tactics and ...strategies. There has been no published data on this topic in over 30 years, moreover current explanations for prison hostage taking inadequately account for the behaviour observed by prison staff. This thesis aims to fill the gap by addressing three main areas, i) exploring the situational and participant characteristics of prison hostage incidents, ii) considering prison hostage incidents as a type of prison indiscipline influenced by prison strain and iii) examining the phenomenon of collaboration (collusion) between participants, framing it as a form of co-offending. Using secondary data from Her Majesty's Prison and Probation Service* (HMPPS) incident recording system, all hostage incidents in prisons in England and Wales were analysed, using descriptive and inferential statistics. The results revealed strong parallels between community and prison incidents and systematic differences between perpetrators, hostages and those who collude. Furthermore, there are associations between variables linked to prison strain and the incidence of hostage takings. The study concludes that prison hostage takings and collusion can be thought of as a response to prison strain, providing an explanation consistent with the instrumental/expressive continuum used to explain community incidents. Implications for professional practice are discussed and recommendations for further research are made.
In Argentina, more than half of the public universities carry out some kind of academic activity inside prisons. Together with their remarkable extension, these heterogenous programs have emerged in ...a context that could be considered adverse: alarming increases in incarceration rates, overcrowding, budget cuts and a wider socio-political climate prone to hardening penal responses. This article focuses on three programmes and their potential to build academic communities and alternative modalities of citizenship--both inside prison and postrelease, through diverse collective social, political, productive and/or cultural projects. In so doing, it engages in dialogue with the notion of carceral citizenship, which originated in the United States. In Argentina, I contend, this modality of citizenship is not defined so much by top-down formal processes of subjectivation and exclusion, but rather constructed from below and from the outside-in, through the work of in-prison university programmes and their students. Keywords: Citizenship, prison, university, Argentina. La mitad de las universidades publicas en Argentina desarrolla algun tipo de actividad academica dentro de las prisiones. Junto a su notable extension, estos programas heterogeneos surgieron en contextos adversos: entre el alarmante incremento en las tasas de encarcelamiento, el hacinamiento, los recortes presupuestarios y el clima sociopolitico proclive al endurecimiento de las respuestas penales. Este articulo se centra en tres programas concretos y su potencial para construir comunidades academicas y ejercicios de ciudania--tanto dentro de la prision como a traves de proyectos colectivos sociales, politicos, productivos y culturales una vez recuperada la libertad. A traves de una descripcion de estas experiencias, se busca dialogar con la nocion de ciudadania carcelaria, construida originalmente en Estados Unidos. En Argentina, demuestro, esta modalidad de ciudadania no se define tanto por procesos de subjetivizacion y exclusion formales, impuestos desde arriba, sino que se ejerce y define "desde abajo" por los estudiantes privados de libertad y "desde afuera" por la labor de los programas academicos dentro de la prision. Palabras clave: Ciudadania, prision, universidad, Argentina.
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