Resources | States of Incarceration

The following resources support discussions around histories and current issues in mass incarceration, whether in the classroom or other settings.

Curricula includes a curated list of readings around a variety of themes in incarceration history. Each theme includes a sample selection that would be appropriate for one week in a university course.

States of Incarceration Toolkit

A group of participants sitting in chairs look on as a man standing at a mic is speaking.

Interested in bringing States of Incarceration to your community? This toolkit includes everything you need. It contains research guides, curatorial specifications, teaching resources, best practices for community partnerships, and discussion guides for classrooms and community organizations. This is a living document that is updated regularly with new tools and best practices from our partners as States of Incarceration continues to grow. Click here to access the toolkit and make sure to reach out to us at humanitiesactionlab@gmail.com if you are interested in becoming a partner!

Table of Contents

Overview
Researching Incarceration
Creating Community Partnerships
Course Outline and Syllabus Checklist
Style Guide
Curatorial Specifications
Classroom and Community Dialogues

Sample Syllabus

This syllabus is as a broad overview of mass incarceration. It could be used by a community group or a university in the interest of preparing participants to contribute to a public exhibit that would serve as a vehicle for public dialogue or advocacy. Each week is divided into themes including race, immigration, mental health, and juvenile justice.

For a sample syllabus with a focus on immigration, see the accompanying section.

SOI Sample Syllabus.pdf

History of Incarceration

These texts include both primary and secondary sources that represent different perspectives on the origins of punishment and the exploration of particular historical moments through the lens of punishment/incarceration. This is in no way a comprehensive list. Instead, it is composed of selected texts that have proved useful and/or accessible for participants in the States of Incarceration project.

Books

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975)
Jennifer Graber, Furnace of Affliction: Prisoners and Religion in Antebellum America (2011)
Michael Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia 1760-1835 (1996)

Films

Black Power Mixtape (2011)
- Discussion guide

Fiction

Malcolm Braly, On the Yard (1967)

Memoir

Donald Lawrie, My Life in Prison (1912)

Mass Incarceration and Race

The publication of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow in 2010 marked an important turning point in a longstanding discourse on race and incarceration that posits the transatlantic slave trade as the origin of the American carceral system. These resources specifically consider the way that the prison industrial complex has targeted people of African descent in the United States.

Books

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (2010)
Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to WWII (2008)
Khalil Muhammad, Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (2011)

Articles

Jeffrey S. Adler, “Less Crime, More Punishment: Violence, Race, and Criminal Justice in Early Twentieth-Century America”
Matthew Lassiter, “Impossible Criminals: The Suburban Imperatives of America’s War on Drugs” (2015)
Donna Murch, “Crack in Los Angeles: Crisis, Militarization, and Black Response to the Late Twentieth-Century War on Drugs” (2015)
Loic Wacquant, “The New Peculiar Institution: On the Prison as Surrogate Ghetto”

Films

13th (2016)
Herman’s House (2013)
In the Land of the Free… (2010)
Slavery by Another Name (2012)

Memoir

George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (1970)
Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)

Fiction

Jesmyn Ward, Sing Unburied Sing (2017)

Immigration, US Imperialism, and Mass Incarceration

The States of Incarceration project argues that mass incarceration, immigrant detention, and mass deportation are inextricably linked. The history of that connection is an integral part of the processes of colonization, American expansion, and the formation of a national identity. The selected resources listed here explore the relationships between mass incarceration and citizenship.

Books

Aviva Chomsky, Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal (2014)
Nicholas de Genova and Nathalie Peutz eds., The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom Movement (2010)
Mark Dow, American Gulag (2004)
Alfonso Gonzalez, Reform Without Justice: Latino Migrant Policies and the Homeland Security State (2013)
Laleh Khalili, Time in the Shadows (2013)
Luana Ross, Inventing the Savage: The Social Construction of Native American Criminality (1998)

Articles

Mark Dow, “Designed to Punish: Immigration Detention and Deportation” (2007)
Torrie Hester, “Deportability and the Carceral State” (2015)
Walter A. Ewing, “Opportunity and Exclusion: A Brief History of US Immigration Policy” (2012)
Stephanie J. Silverman, “Immigration Detention in America:A History of Its Expansion and a Study of Its Significance” (2010)
Juliet Stumpf, “The Crimmigration Crisis: Immigrants, Crime, and Sovereign Power” (2006)

Films

Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (2007)
Resistance at Tule Lake (2017)

Sample Syllabus

Sample Syllabus (Immigration).pdf

Gender, Sexuality, and Mass Incarceration

The development of prisons for women and the specific treatment of queer and trans people in prison must be considered when undertaking an analysis of the prison industrial complex. Both of these contexts reveal a great deal about the gendered contexts of violence and punishment. These texts provide some grounding for a conversation about the intersections of mass incarceration, gender, and sexuality.

Books

Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie, Kay Whitlock, Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States (2011)
Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith, eds. Captive Genders, Trans Embodiment, and the Prison Industrial Complex (2015)

Articles

Susie Day, “Cruel but Not Unusual--The Punishment of Women in U.S. Prisons: An Interview with Marilyn Buck and Laura Whitehorn” (2001)
Kali Nicole Gross, “African American Women, Mass Incarceration, and the Politics of Protection” (2015)
Jody Marksamer and Harper Jean Tobin, “Standing with LGBT Prisoners: An Advocate’s Guide to Ending Abuse and Combating Imprisonment”
Beth Richie, “Queering antiprison work African American lesbians in the juvenile justice system.” In Global Lockdown: Race, Gender, and the Prison-Industrial Complex (pp. 73-85).
Timothy Stewart-Winter, “Queer Law and Order: Sex, Criminality, and Policing in the Late Twentieth-Century United States” (2015)

Film

Mothers of Bedford (2010)

Memoir

Piper Kerman, Orange is the New Black:My Year in a Women’s Prison (2011)

Youth Incarceration

For the last several years the term “school-to-prison pipeline” has been a popular and important talking point for understanding the relationship between the expansion of mass incarceration and its impact on young people, particularly young people of color. These texts, which include recent books and articles, works of fiction, and multimedia (both recent and historical), consider that discourse in relation to the origins and history of juvenile justice.

Books

Nell Bernstein, Burning Down the House: The End of Juvenile Prison (2014)

Articles

Miroslava Chavez-Garcia, “Youth of Color and California’s Carceral State: The Fred C. Nelles Youth Correctional Facility” (2015)
Mariame Kaba and Erica R. Meiners, “Arresting the Carceral State: Educators must work to end the school-to-prison pipeline” (2014)
Damien M. Sojoyner, “Black Radicals Make for Bad Citizens: Undoing the Myth of the School to Prison Pipeline,” (2013)
Amber Wiley, “Schools and Prisons” (2015)

Films

Tattooed Tears (1979)
Time: The Kalief Browder Story (2017)

Fiction

Kekla Magoon, How It Went Down (2014)

Web Resources

American Bar Association, “The History of Juvenile Justice”
University of Minnesota, “Boarding Schools and the School to Prison Pipeline”

Resistance to Mass Incarceration

It is important to note that much of the resistance to mass incarceration, conditions of confinement, and criminal justice policies that target specific demographics has been organized and carried out from inside prison walls rather than outside. These books and articles examine prisons as sites of political organizing and consciousness raising.

Books

Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003)
Ernest Drucker, ed., Decarcerating America: From Mass Punishment to Public Health (2018)
Marie Gottschalk, The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (2006)
Dylan Rodriguez, Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime (2006)
Heather Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 (2017)

Articles

Robert Chase, “We Are Not Slaves: Rethinking the Rise of the Carceral State through the Lens of the Prisoners’ Rights Movement” (2015)
Edward J. Escobar, “The Unintended Consequences of the Carceral State: Chicana/o Political Mobilization in Post–World War II America” (2015)

Mental Health, Disability, and Medical Care

Mass incarceration is not just about crime. There is also a long history of detaining people based on mental health related diagnoses and disability. These texts explore that history alongside the availability of medical and mental health services in prison.

Books

Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1964)
Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situations of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (1961)
David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (1971)

Articles

David Cloud, “On Life Support: Public Health in the Age of Mass Incarceration” (2014)
Rebecca Vallas, “Disabled Behind Bars: The Mass Incarceration of People With Disabilities in America’s Jails and Prisons” (2016)

Film

Prison Terminal (2013)

Web Resources

The Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights

Primary Sources/First-Person Accounts

The voices and perspectives of those who are most impacted are deeply embedded in each narrative that is a part of States of Incarceration. It is imperative that any history and contemporary discourse on mass incarceration be centered on those voices. These resources are representative of the vast number of ways that people who are directly impacted tell their stories. It includes memoirs, documentaries, podcasts, video series, and fiction. A number of these are included elsewhere in the resources section of this site.

Books

Mumia Abu-Jamal, Life from Death Row (1996)
Jean Casella, James Ridgeway, and Sarah Shourd, eds., Hell is a Very Small Place: Voices from Solitary Confinement (2016)
George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (1970)
Piper Kerman, Orange is the New Black:My Year in a Women’s Prison (2011)
Donald Lawrie, My Life in Prison (1912)
Leonard Peltier, Prison Writings: My Life is My Sundance (1999)
Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)

Films

Rikers: An American Jail (2016)

Multimedia

Decarcerated Podcast
Ear Hustle
Mass Incarceration: An Animated Series (ACLU)
Minutes Before Six
On the Count
We Are Witnesses (Marshall Project)

Fiction

Arthur Longworth, Zek: An American Prison Story (2016)

Public Policy and the Carceral State

While the creation of correctional facilities dates back to the early 19th century, the expansion of the US prison system into what we now call the “prison industrial complex” or the “carceral state” is relatively new. The rapid expansion of the American carceral state was achieved through a series of criminal justice policies, such as mandatory minimums. These resources examine the relationship between mass incarceration and the law.

Books

Colin Dayan, Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons (2011)
Marie Gottschalk, Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics (2015)
Barry Friedman, Unwarranted: Policing Without Permission (2017)
James Foreman, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (2017)
Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (2016)
Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (2014)
Christian Parenti, Lockdown in America: Police and Prisons in an Age of Crisis (1999)
Jonathan Simon, Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear (2007)

Articles

James Forman, “Racial Critiques of Mass Incarceration: Beyond the New Jim Crow” (2012)
Kelly Lytle Hernández, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, and Heather Ann Thompson, “Introduction: Constructing the Carceral State” (2015)
Heather Thompson, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar America” (2010)

Film

The Return (2016) (Discussion Guide)

Memoir

Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy (2014)

Mass Incarceration and Political Economy

The expansion and privatization of the prison industrial complex warrant a critical conversation about the economic contexts within which the American prison system operates, which might be called a political economy of mass incarceration. While this public dialogue has been dominated by conversations about prison labor and, more recently, the exploitative nature of bail, there is a much bigger conversation to be had about the relationship between mass incarceration and capitalism. These resources help to ground that important discourse.

Books

Erika Camplin, Prison Food in America (2016)
Rebecca McLennan, The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the Making of the American Penal State (2008)
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (2007)

Articles

Alex Lichtenstein, “Flocatex and the Fiscal Limits of Mass Incarceration: Toward a New Political Economy of the Postwar Carceral State” (2015)

Films

The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016)

Public History and Prisons

These texts explore the complex and sometimes contradictory discourses related to prisons as sites of tourism specifically and the relationship between public history and prisons more broadly.

Teresa Bergman and Cynthia Duquette Smith, “You were on Indian Land: Alcatraz Island as Recalcitrant Memory Space” (2010)
Seth Bruggeman, “Reforming the Carceral Past: Eastern State Penitentiary and the Challenge of Twenty-First Century Prison Museums” (2012)
Michael Kempa and Carol Strange, “Shades of Dark Tourism: Alcatraz and Robben Island” (2003)
Kris Morrissey and Marjorie Schwarzer, eds., “Rethinking Incarceration,” (2011)
Sarah Shannon and Chris Uggen, “Visualizing Punishment” (2013)
Michael Welch, Escape to Prison: Penal Tourism and the Pull of Punishment (2015)
Jacqueline Wilson, Prison: Public Memory and Dark Tourism (2008)
Special issue of Museums and Social Issues on States of Incarceration (2017)

Doing Public History

Ensuring that history is put to work out in the world in the interest of better understanding our present cultural, social, and political contexts is a core value of States of Incarceration. These texts provide some context and general guidelines for using history and memory as a vehicle for civic engagement and advocacy.

Gregory Jay, “The Engaged Humanities: Principles and Practices for Public Scholarship and Teaching” (2012)
James Oliver Horton, Louis E. Horton, eds. Slavery and Public History The Tough Stuff of American Memory (2006)
Edward T. Linenthal, Tom Engelhardt, eds. History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past (1996)
Liz Sevcenko and Maggie Russell-Ciardi, “Sites of Conscience: Opening Historic Sites for Civic Dialogue” (2008)
Liz Sevcenko, “Sites of Conscience: Heritage of and for Human Rights,” in Helmut K. Anheier and Yudhishthir Raj Isar (eds), Cultures and Globalization: Heritage, Memory, and Identity (2011)