Themes

Los Angeles operates the largest jail system on earth Kelly Lytle Hernandez Yoh Kawano Albert Kochaphum At a cost quickly approaching $1 billion annually, more than 17,000 people are incarcerated every night in county jails and city lockups. But not every neighborhood within Los Angeles is equally impacted by L.A.’s massive jail system. Enter the… Read More »Million Dollar Hoods

Sara Matthiesen Brown University Discipline(s): American Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Crime and Justice Studies, History Syllabus Last Updated: September, 2016 Growing interest in mass incarceration has brought new attention to longstanding critiques of the criminal justice system. This course looks beyond failings such as “tough on crime” sentencing and racist policing to examine criminal justice… Read More »Crimes of Gender and Sex: Producing and Imprisoning Criminals In the Age of Mass Incarceration

Rev. Jason Lydon Black and Pink Org. Ed Rodman Episcopal Divinity School Syllabus Last Updated: July, 2011 The following is a syllabus for a course on Prison Abolition that was co-taught by the founder of Black and Pink, Jason Lydon. This collection of readings is intended as a primer for readers on the creation and function… Read More »Prison Abolition Class

The Justice Initiative at Columbia University Beth Richie May 30, 2014 Beth Richie Keynote address at the 2014 Beyond the Bars: Breaking Through Conference at Columbia University organized by the Criminal Justice Caucus, The Justice Initiative at Columbia University, the Criminal Justice Initiative: Supporting Children, Families and Communities in collaboration with students, faculty and community… Read More »Beyond the Bars: Breaking Through

Karin Shapiro Duke University Jackson Skeen Duke University Discipline(s): History, African & African American Studies Syllabus Last Updated: January, 2017 This independent study examines the convict labor system that emerged in the post-Civil War South. The student will explore the political and economic contexts in which convict leasing developed, analyze the demographics of those ensnared in… Read More »Convict Labor in the American South from the Civil War to the Great Depression

UNC-Chapel Hill, American Studies Elijah Gaddis and Seth Kotch direct this project. Student historians include Jennifer Davidowitz, Sarah Dwyer, Dallas Ellis, Jared Feeny, Ava Gruchacz, Robert Haisfield, Jennifer Hausler, Harry Heyworth, Kara Kochek, Daniel Lee, Landon Mays, George Pancio Inspired by the Equal Justice Initiative’s report on lynchings in the American South, this project seeks to locate… Read More »The Red Record: Revealing Lynching in North Carolina

Joe Lockard Arizona State Universtiy Discipline(s): English Last Updated: January, 2014 Course Level: undergraduate Assignment Summary: Paper assignment comparing military prison memoirs of Ethan Allen and John McCain. Learning Outcomes: Critical writing on prison literature english345prisonliteraturepaper1assignment

Yale University Press Keramet Reiter Originally meant to be brief and exceptional, solitary confinement in U.S. prisons has become long-term and common. Prisoners spend twenty-three hours a day in featureless cells, with no visitors or human contact for years on end, and they are held entirely at administrators’ discretion. Keramet Reiter tells the history of… Read More »23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and Rise of Long-Term Solitary Confinement

African American Intellectual History Society Dan Berger October 22, 2016 Critical review of Ava DuVernay’s documentary The 13th  More Information

Nonprofit journalism about criminal justice Various authors August 2, 2016 The Marshall Project is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization that seeks to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the U.S. criminal justice system. We achieve this through award-winning journalism, partnerships with other news outlets and public forums. In all of our work… Read More »The Marshall Project

Jess Issacharoff Duke University Discipline(s): English, Media Studies, American Studies Syllabus Last Updated: February, 2017 This course will examine common constructions of the female criminal in popular culture, using examples from literature, film and court cases that have captured the public imagination. We will read fiction by Toni Morrison and Oscar Wilde. We will watch films… Read More »Narratives of Female Criminality

The School to Prison Pipeline Rasha Vision Films Rahiem Shabazz July 6, 2013 Elementary Genocide is a documentary executive produced by award winning journalist/filmmaker Rahiem Shabazz. The documentary appeals to a wide general viewership by addressing the social, cultural, political and personal ramifications of how the federal government allots money to each state, to build prisons based on the failure rate… Read More »Elementary Genocide

Lori Gruen’s 2015 course, Wesleyan There are a variety of forms of captivity and a wide array of individuals who are kept in captivity. In this blog, we will explore the conditions of captivity (including prisons, zoos, sanctuaries, and others), and explore the variety of ethical and political issues that captivity raises for humans and… Read More »The Ethics of Captivity

Michel Foucault In this important work, Foucault suggests that such vaunted reforms as the abolition of torture and the emergence of the modern penitentiary have merely shifted the focus of punishment from the prisoner’s body to his soul. A classic work of theory on the birth of the modern prison. More Information

NPR Fresh Air May 11, 2016 Interview with Nancy Fishman, a project manager at the Vera Institute for Justice director, about the high number of people being imprisoned in America because of their inability to pay fines for low-level offenses. More Information

Daniel LaChance Emory University Discipline(s): History Syllabus Last Updated: March, 2016 This class aims to help students understand the ideological, economic, and cultural sources of the punitive turn, the ratcheting up of incarceration and other forms of harsh punishment since the 1970s. It gives equal attention to the  popular representations and imaginings of punishment and the lived experience of… Read More »Crime and Punishment in American Culture: Power and Poetics

Exploring gaols, bridewells and other forms of detention, 1500-1800 Rachel Weil Richard Bell Early Modern Prisons is a collective effort to find out what it was like to be locked up in the early modern period. We are interested in the economics and government of the prison, the fees, the food, how alcohol was sold, how… Read More »Early Modern Prisons

Angela Y. Davis With her characteristic brilliance, grace and radical audacity, Angela Y. Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of the prison. As she quite correctly notes, American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success… Read More »Are Prisons Obsolete?