Elevate Difference

Reviews tagged prison

Challenging the Prison-Industrial Complex: Activism, Arts, and Educational Alternatives

As a feminist concerned with social justice, in the past year or so I’ve become convinced that dismantling the prison-industrial complex should be a top priority amongst feminists.

Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States

In their near-exhaustive catalogue of violence, discrimination, and systematic abuse of LGBT people in the United States, Joey Mogul, Andrea Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock outline the specific ways that the criminalization of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgendered people has perpetuated inequalities not only based on sexual identity but also within the complex interplay of race, class, and gender.

So Much Wasted: Hunger, Performance, and the Morbidity of Resistance

Traversing critical theory, body studies, psychoanalysis, philosophy, political theory, cultural studies, and performance studies, Patrick Anderson’s So Much Wasted captures the “politics of morbidity” embedded in the act of self-starvation.

Sin by Silence

There are not many US citizens who do not recognize a pink ribbon as the rallying fight against breast cancer. Even more so for the red ribbon, as it raises the voices of the AIDS epidemic. However, most faces would not correctly identify the cause of the purple ribbon: domestic violence.

Death to the Dictator!: A Young Man Casts a Vote in Iran’s 2009 Election and Pays a Devastating Price

Less than one year after Iranian demonstrators took to the streets to protest the fraudulent re-election of hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as President of the Islamic Republic, writer Afsaneh Moqadam tells the true story of Mohsen Abbaspour, a man in his early twenties who votes for the Reformist party and its leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi. Swept up in the euphoria of possible change, the once politically apathetic Mohsen finds himself alongside his friends and fellow reformists in the streets posing the greatest challenge to Iranian authorities since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Troubled Water

Last night, I watched a really great film by Norwegian director Erik Poppe: Troubled Water. I don't really like movies and I don't watch them a lot. And now I know why. The simple reason is that very few movies are as good as this one. This is definitely not one of those sad Hollywood monstrosities that aim to prevent you from having a single thought by any means possible.

Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison

Piper Kerman recounts the nightmare that is the judicial system in her memoir Orange Is the New Black. This is a gentle introduction to life behind bars compared to the stories of other less fortunate prisoners. Kerman spent one year of her life in a minimum-security federal women's prison in Connecticut for money laundering. Surprisingly, the worst events didn't even happen within the prison itself.

Interrupted Life: Experiences of Incarcerated Women in the United States

Surprise—it’s a real downer to read about prison. That glaringly obvious statement aside, Interrupted Life is quite an achievement. The book comprises eighty-seven pieces, which are written by scholars, activists, incarcerated women, and formerly incarcerated women and span breadth of generic types.

Reading Is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women’s Prisons

“Sometimes, I think they forget the women.” One seemingly simple statement at the start of this book—spoken by the chief librarian for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction—serves to explain the importance of a text like Reading Is My Window.

Offending Women: Power, Punishment, and the Regulation of Desire

In Offending Women, ethnographer and sociologist Lynne Haney takes readers on a journey into “a world that few people would otherwise have access to”: the everyday reality of the lives of incarcerated women. She introduces readers to incarcerated mothers who are housed together with their children and serving terms in community-based prisons, a type of facility that is becoming increasingly widespread in the US.

Resistance Through Writing: An Interview with Victoria Law

Feminist Review recently interviewed writer and activist Victoria Law on her book Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women.

From May to December

From May to December is the story of four women, sisters Lolly and Jen and inmates Nicole and Sonya, whose lives intersect at a women’s correctional facility. As the title suggests, the timeline of the book spans from May to December and each chapter focuses on a different woman’s point of view. Lolly teaches classes to women in prison.

Capital Punishment: An Indictment by a Death-Row Survivor

In 1965, Billy Wayne Sinclair accidentally killed a store clerk with a shot fired aimlessly into the dark after a robbery he had committed. One year later, at the age of twenty-one, he was sentenced to die in the electric chair for his crime, however unintentional. Sinclair initially dealt with his death sentence through denial, swallowing the tranquilizers the guards on death row dispensed to keep the inmates pacified.

The Dhamma Brothers: East Meets West in the Deep South

What would happen if the American prison system was based on a treatment model versus a punitive model? The administrators at the W. E. Donaldson Correctional Facility wondered what would happen if they introduced the ancient Vipassana meditation techniques to prisoners. The Vipassana program is modeled after a program in India. The administrators hoped that the Vipassana meditation program would have a calming effect on the prison population. Donaldson Correctional Facility is a maximum security prison located in the countryside southwest of Birmingham, Alabama.

The Real Cost of Prisons Comix

As activists know all too well, crafting a political message and effectively mobilizing an audience is an elusive task. In The Real Cost Of Prisons, Lois Ahrens and her contributors beautifully stage a difficult dialogue—about mass incarceration, mandatory sentencing, and the “war on drugs”—with comics. Comics are an accessible, popular form of education, and most importantly, addictive, and hence become a subversive way to raise awareness.

Dreams from the Monster Factory: A Tale of Prison, Redemption, and One Woman’s Fight to Restore Justice to All

I have been in a fairly low-key battle with my landlord over him not fixing the gutter that fell of the house in a windstorm a month ago. Before that, I was engaged in a fight against the post office for delivering our mail to the apartment below us. I’ve realized that I have a hair trigger for injustice; though, up until now, my causes have been a bit, shall we say, unimportant.

When the Prisoners Ran Walpole: A True Story in the Movement for Prison Abolition

Those of us who spend a lot of time lollygagging in the distant pass frequently encounter scenes of horror — people being tortured for their religious beliefs or identities, for example - and find ample evidence of our capacity for cruelty and inhumanity littering the landscape of human history.

Blue Rage, Black Redemption

In the midst of our current pop culture’s street gang glamorization and mafia worship, the Nobel Prize-nominated work of late Crips gang founder Stanley “Tookie” Williams is a flash of clarity and a voice of reason. Executed in 2005 for the murder of four people, Williams claimed his innocence until the end. Perhaps even more importantly—and certainly the legacy we hope he is remembered for—Williams was believed to have been reformed as he spent much of his sentence in California’s San Quentin prison writing and working on peace plans for our badly torn nation.

Freeing Tammy: Women, Drugs, and Incarceration

Meet Tammara Johnson, an ex-19 year heroin addict, ex-prisoner and now a job development trainer for an in-patient drug treatment program. Freeing Tammy is the final book of a trilogy that discusses women, poverty and violence.

American Furies: Crime, Punishment, and Vengeance in the Age of Mass Imprisonment

"When the annals of our era are written, the United States will… come to be defined as a prison state." Not to spoil the ending, but this is the last, haunting sentence of American Furies, Sasha Abramsky's scathing indictment of the U.S. prison system. If you still believe that America is a just democracy where everyone is treated equal, then you really have to read this book.

The Mark of Cain

Although prison life is a dreary subject and Russian prison life even more so, The Mark of Cain is a film anyone interested in post-communist Russia must see. The documentary features interviews with Russian prison inmates.

I’jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody

Sinan Antoon’s novel I’jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody brilliantly portrays the complex impacts of political repression on humanity. It takes the form of a fictionalized compilation of interpreted handwritten prose of an Iraqi college student as he is held and tortured in a prison during the reign of the Ba’th regime in the 1980s.

Girls in Trouble with the Law

“I was like four or six when my babysitter molested me... I would just freeze... Like I thought if I froze it would not have happened.” This 16-year-old girl’s memory is an all too familiar one for Laurie Schaffner.

Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan

Usually when I read a memoir, I don’t really expect to learn anything. I might laugh or cry at the writer’s personal tragedies, but my expectations for experiencing some profound level of enlightenment is absent. After reading Kabul in Winter, I will now only read memoirs that are as thoughtfully written, educational and eye-opening as Ann Jones’s account of her time spent in Afghanistan. Even though this book will probably be found in the “Current Events” or “Politics” section of any radical bookstore, Jones’s account of her travels is better written than most memoirs.