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Books on Prisons and Punishment

Are Prisons Obsolete?
Angela Davis, Seven Stories Press, 2003

"In this extraordinary book, Angela Davis challenges us to confront the human rights catastrophe in our jails and prisons. As she so convincingly argues, the contemporary U.S. practice of super-incarceration is closer to new age slavery than to any recognizable system of 'criminal justice'."--Mike Davis

The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society
Norval Morris and David J. Rothman, Editors, Oxford, 1997

A team of scholars trace the rise and development of the prison and the changes that have occurred over the centuries. Describes how penalties other than incarceration were once much more common.

Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison
Michel Foucault, Vintage, 1995, 2nd ed.

Traces the shifts in culture that led to the dominance prisons, focusing on the body and questions of power. Describes how disciplinary power conditions society.

The New Jim Crow
Michelle Alexander, New Press, 2012, reprint, introduction by Cornel West

More African Americans are under correctional control today than were enslaved in 1850. Alexander reviews American racial history from the colonies to the Clinton administration, delineating its transformation into the war on drugs. She offers an acute analysis of the effect of this mass incarceration upon former inmates who will be discriminated against, legally, for the rest of their lives, denied employment, housing, education, and public benefits.

Life After Death
Damien Echols, Blue Rider Press, 2012

“Damien Echols spent eighteen years on death row for murders he did not commit. Somehow, in the depths of his nightmare, he found the courage and strength not only to survive, but to grow, to create, to forgive, and to understand. Life After Death is a brilliant, haunting, painful, and uplifting narrative of a hopeless childhood, a wrongful conviction, a brutal incarceration, and the beginning of a new life.” — John Grisham

Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment
Edited by Meda Chesney-Lind, New Press, 2003

Over a quarter of the adult population in America has criminal records on file with federal or state criminal justice agencies. Invisible Punishment "makes clear that this epidemic of imprisonment is dramatically weakening the survival structures of the African American community." —Salim Muwakkil, Chicago Tribune

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, NAL Trade, 2009, reprint

Solzhenitsyn's first book tells the story of a typical, grueling day in a labor camp in Siberia

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