Leslie Bary
Modern Languages
P.O. Box 43331
University of
Louisiana
Lafayette, LA 70504
lbary@louisiana.edu
This paper engages the interlocking issues of mass incarceration, race, human rights, transnational capitalism ("globalization") and grass-roots activism. I address (1) the simultaneous ubiquity and invisibility of prisons and of the work they do (a) to reproduce the United States' economic and social order and (b) on behalf of transnational capital; (2) the need for new forms of activism to dismantle the law and order regime and the prison industrial complex. Since the 1970s, the United States has constructed a racially marked law and order regime, initially in response to social rebellion, but more recently as a way to staunch the damage done by neoliberal economic restructuring and, even more importantly, to manage both the "underclass" created by this restructuring and the anxiety of the middle classes. The law and order regime, which involves a severe abridgment of both civil and human rights, is also one of the managerial techniques of "globalization" or transnational capitalism. Its ultimate target is the idea of democracy itself, both here and abroad. We must work for decarceration (not merely for alternatives to incarceration)--for the sake of the incarcerated and their families, for the sake of democratic principle, and also because in doing so, we help to dislodge both the effects and the underpinnings of "globalization." Additionally, this activity can begin to breach the racial and class barriers that separate the "progressive" middle classes and the poor.
[President Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to. --H.R. Haldeman, qtd. in Parenti (12).
The fourth piece [of globalization's puzzle] . . . [is] an ongoing exchange between the commercial banks and the world racketeers, for crime, too, has been globalized. . . . The fifth piece . . . consists of physical repression. The nation states . . . have lost their economic independence, their political initiative and their sovereignty. . . . [Their] new task . . . is to manage what is allotted to them, to protect the interests of the market's mega-enterprises and, above all, to control and police the redundant. --John Berger (2-3), paraphrasing the Subcomandante Marcos
No functioning democracy has ever governed itself with as large a percentage of adults incarcerated as the United States. . . . [The] racially disproportionate nature of the war on drugs is not just devastating to black Americans . . . [it is] a crisis for the American nation. --Human Rights Watch Report "Punishment and Prejudice," June 8, 2000.
But California's prison expansion has to be situated in the political-economic geography of globalisation if its full significance is to be understood. A new kind of state is being built on prison foundations in the world's seventh or eighth largest economy. The importance of California is not that it represents the average case of current conditions throughout the US but, rather, that the State stands in as a plausible future for polities within and outside national borders: California has long served as an activist exemplar that others keenly emulate. --Ruth Gilmore (172)
[N]ot only the worst of the young are sent to prison but the best-that is the proudest, the bravest, the most daring, the most enterprising, the most undefeated of the poor. --Norman Mailer, In the Belly of the Beast (introduction), qtd. in Parenti (170).
A few months ago I attended the parole hearing of Percy Tate at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Situated on the grounds of an old plantation known as Angola because its original corps of slaves was said to have embarked for the Americas at Luanda, the prison is still a working farm. On a weekday morning it offers a vista that seems to come from another century: long lines of dark men in straw hats, hoes and shovels held upright against their shoulders, walk out to the fields to work under the watchful eyes of mostly lighter-skinned men, who ride horses and carry guns.
Percy Tate is a friend I met through my work with other Angola prisoners. He drew a life sentence almost thirty years ago for a minor heroin deal. After being checked through prison security procedures, waiting in a series of reception rooms, answering the questions put to me by the parole board, and listening to their negative ruling on the matter, I made the drive home, stopping to eat in Baton Rouge. The owner of the restaurant could see that I was traveling. "What brings you here today?" he asked. "I went up to Angola for a hearing," I replied. "Oh yes, a hearing at Angola," said the restaurant owner. "I went last year, for my uncle."
We might as well have been discussing something as banal as a bad traffic jam or a heavy rain. Too tired to handle a lot of questions, I had only told the restaurant owner where I'd been because I guessed he wouldn't find the idea of spending a day at Angola unusual. I was in a black-owned diner in a poor neighborhood, and there were only a handful of whites in the room. The ordinariness, for large sectors of this country's population, of Saturdays spent in prison visiting sheds, of attending pardon and parole hearings, of receiving collect calls from, as the recording puts it, "an inmate at a state penitentiary," and of everything else having close relatives in jail means, is my point with this anecdote.
Widespread and ordinary as incarceration is, it is also largely invisible to the middle and upper classes. It is invisible because so much ideological work that has been done to justify mass incarceration while also hiding it from view. Hidden from view is the sheer size of the criminal justice system and the prison industrial complex, as well as their connections to both racism and exploitation for and by capital. My most basic aims in this paper are to emphasize that the United States has a racialized policy of mass incarceration and to challenge the invisibility of this fact. That is, I hope to bring to light the simultaneous ubiquity and invisibility of prisons and the law and order regime, and of the work they do. I want to call attention to the gulag that has been created by the law and order regime- a regime originally built to contain the social rebellion and racial upheaval of the 1960s (Gilmore, Parenti) and which now functions to contain the "underclass" or surplus population created by the neoliberal economic restructuring begun under Reagan (Parenti).
The law and order regime reduces citizens to crime victims (Reguillo, Mongin) and scapegoats the poor. It thus distracts the gaze of the middle classes from the actual (economic) roots of their own, and the country's problems. The perception of increasing danger from crime justifies state surveillance, police repression, and the militarization of public space. Police occupation and mass incarceration fragment poor communities so they cannot rebel, and prisons create a predator class that frightens and disorganizes poor communities (Parenti). The law and order regime encodes what social rebellion does take place as criminal (Dutton). It (re)produces apolitical forms of criminal "deviance," and it reproduces the United States economic and social order by incarcerating the poor (Parenti).
Through its imbrication with the economic structures of neoliberalism and globalization, the US prison industrial complex also does important work on behalf of transnational capital (Avery/Davis, Gilmore). The naturalization of persons of color as criminals, furthermore, "creates an ideological barrier to understanding the connections between structural racism and the globalization of capital" (Avery/Davis 148). (Gordon Avery and Angela Davis' incomplete but not invalid example is that of the corporations which move overseas or offshore leaving unemployed persons of color here-some of whom become "criminals" and are put in jail. This process stimulates the US economy and provides jobs for unemployed persons of color who do not yet have "criminal" records. Thus the mass incarceration of United States residents is directly connected to the globalization of capital, and also helps to shield the problems of transnational capitalism from public view.) These issues, and the fact that the expansion of the prison system is "solving" social problems by disappearing people (Avery/Davis), are what I want to sketch out here. I also wish to underscore the increasing abridgment of the rights of the incarcerated, and the inadequacy of reformist strategies such as alternative sentencing and self-help or therapy programs for criminals and the criminalized. I will end by calling attention to the need for new forms of activism in support of the incarcerated and of dismantling of the prison industrial complex and the law and order regime.
I work against the death penalty and in support of post-conviction relief for both capital and non-capital cases. I do this in the state of Louisiana, which has the highest rate of incarceration in the United States, a country which, in turn, has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. I do this work for three reasons: (1) because too few people are doing it, (2) because I am convinced that the dismantling of the law and order regime is one of the greatest social and political urgencies of our time, and (3) because it is refreshing: the prisoners I work with and the people who work on their behalf are among the most lucid, most courageous people I have ever met.
I became involved in prison activism about ten years ago, when I was asked to help form a committee to free Hayes Williams, a Louisiana lifer known for his role in Williams vs. McKeithen, the federal lawsuit which at last brought to an end the conditions that earned the state penitentiary at Angola its reputation as "the bloodiest prison in the country." I worked with that committee until Williams was freed, by which time I had also become involved with the Committee to Free Gary Tyler as well as two groups working against the death penalty. In the mid 1990s I worked as part of the Louisiana Incarceration Review, a small organization dedicated to post-conviction relief that is currently dormant though not disbanded. At present I work on my own in support of Death Row prisoners and lifers, and in conjunction with the Angels of Mercy (based in Monroe, LA), an organization which supports Death Row prisoners and their families, particularly their children.
I won't go into the details of these groups' different agendas and strategies here. There are, as you may imagine, a great variety of points of view within this activist community. On whom should we focus? On the innocent? On Death Row? On non-capital cases? If we work on behalf of the guilty, in what terms should we justify this? Should we advocate alternative sentencing? If so, what kind? If we are interested in abolishing the death penalty, is the push for a moratorium a good first step towards our goal? Should we concentrate our efforts on just a few "winnable" cases or "exemplary" cases, in an effort to set a precedent? Or is it more useful to focus on public opinion and education? Or, on the other hand, should we push for sentencing reform, and propose model legislation? If so, do we need to hire a lobbyist? When does it help to march in the streets, and when is this just a futile "feel-good" gesture?
How one positions oneself in relation to the people upon whose behalf one is working is another important and often difficult issue. All of these questions, and the strategies to which they allude, are "reformist" in that they address concrete problems in the limited ways afforded by the "system." What work at this level reveals, however, is the extent to which the dismantling of the law and order regime can work to expose, and I truly believe help turn the tide upon the emerging international order. That is why I am writing this paper, and why I am making these remarks here today. Because it involves so much direct work with prisoners, activism of the type in which I am now engaged is inconvenient. It makes heavy, often impromptu demands of time and energy, and its very nature interdicts any facile distancing (for instance, via idealizations, either positive or negative) from the people on whose behalf you work. As you begin to develop the kinds of connections to the prison system that the friends and families of indigent felons have, you also start to see and feel (not just understand and imagine) how the world looks from their point(s) of view.
These experiences are, in my view, salutary, since if we are to decarcerate our society we must break down the practical, as well as the theoretical barriers between ourselves (constructed, for instance, as middle-class victims of potential violence who must seek "safe" neighborhoods and "good" schools for our children, or as volunteers for a just cause) and the growing group of people (constructed, for instance, as predators and parasites, or, alternatively, as "victims of the system") for whom the globalized economy has no place outside the criminal justice system and the prison industrial complex.
The single most important thing I've learned from doing prison work is, as I have already indicated, how very large the criminal justice system and the prison industrial complex are in this country, and how very many of our peoples' lives are imbricated with these institutions and with their severe abridgment of human rights. Importantly, a huge proportion of those incarcerated are people of color (70% in the United States). 50% of all U.S. prisoners are black, and 1 of 10 black men are in jail. Many more are under some form of supervision by the Department of Corrections (DOC) or the Department of Justice (DOJ). Over half the Native American male population between the ages of 20 and 45 is incarcerated.
Figures like these are familiar enough, in an abstract way, to anyone who reads the news. But it is when you start receiving mail stamped "State Penitentiary" and therefore have the mail carrier tell you about his brother who is in jail, or tell your restauranteur you've been up to Angola and therefore have him tell you about his uncle who is there, or stand in a visitors' line waiting to get processed into the prison and see entire family groups going in to visit not one but two or three relatives, that you start to really understand how large the system is and how far it reaches. And these experiences are racially marked, as the statistics cited above indicate. Contact with the DOC is an unusual experience for most white people. But for very many people of color (whose rate of incarceration, but not of criminality, is much higher than that of whites), contact with the DOC is an everyday experience. This is in many ways the dividing line between white and nonwhite, rich and poor. The other issue my contact with to the criminal justice system has thrown into relief for me is the degree of its imbrication with capital and the globalized world system, topics to which I now turn.
An important reason why contact with the criminal justice system, with people who are under surveillance by it, and with people who work for it directly or indirectly has become so common is that we have now eight times as many people in prison now as we did three decades ago (Avery/Davis 145-46). This situation has, as is well known, given rise to a boom in the criminal justice industry, which includes but is not limited to economic and commercial activity related to the prison system, the courts, and construction, service and support to prison towns. The only Fortune 500 company with more people working for it than working in corrections is General Motors. Prisoners are also increasingly used to perform low-wage work for private industry (see Avery and Davis' list of companies using prison labor).
Much of the current critique of the prison industrial complex relies on showing its direct imbrication with specific economic interests. As Angela Davis and Gordon Avery put it, we are "generating income for a number of large corporations by stripping people of color of their rights, thus materially and morally impoverishing this population while also devouring the social wealth needed to address the very problems that have led to spiraling numbers of prisoners" (147). This point, although valid, in fact minimizes the issues by both overdramatizing and oversimplifying the connection between corrections and private industry. Parenti points out that the prison industrial complex, large as it is and much as it staunches economic damage, does not in fact create prosperity or provide a Keynesian economic stimulus in the way that the military industrial complex has done for the past fifty-odd years. The primary functions of prisons and the prison industrial complex are, rather, to manage the contradictions of late capitalism by (a) terrorizing the poor, (b) warehousing social wreckage, and (c) focusing the attention of the middle classes on the problem of "crime" and away from the economy. Prison labor, though cheap, cannot make enough to hold the interest of corporations and is not part of the prison industrial complex. Its function, as Parenti points out, is mainly ideological: to make prisons look useful. This is to say that the idea of a gulag state providing colored bodies to work is inaccurate, or incomplete. We have a gulag state, but its function in the national and the world economy is broader, more basic, and less immediately visible.
The rise in incarceration, as both Gilmore and Parenti remind us, is a result of the criminal justice buildup started in the late 1960s in response the social rebellion of that era, and intensified in the 1980s with the so-called "war on drugs." At present, it is a response to the economic restructuring that was begun under Reagan and is now being intensified under George W. Bush. Jobs and wages have been drastically cut to boost business profits, there has been massive deindustrialization, and the welfare state has been dismantled. At same time, and despite actual decreases in both crime rates and drug use, the fear of "crime" has been promoted and marketed. Meanwhile "three strikes" laws and mandatory minimum sentences have proliferated, and the Federal death penalty has been expanded. Depressed communities-which have also suffered from the economic policies of the last twenty years-have built prisons, often as a last resort. Parenti observes that prisons in these contexts function, like colonial masters: they appear from elsewhere as the biggest, or sometimes the only game in town; their size and economic power permits them to usurp local decision-making processes; they have money for everything and the law on their side. Economic survival in these communities is the emerging American police state, and yet the prison industrial complex is not a Keynesian economic stimulus in the way the older military industrial complex was (Gilmore, Parenti).
Despite the fact that the prison industrial complex does provide economic survival to workers marginalized by economic restructuring, it is not a new industrial policy, and its function is not primarily to make money. Even if there were no economic benefits at all to prisons, we would need to repress and warehouse people of color and the poor- especially that "underclass" that has been created since the 1940s through deindustrialization, urban renewal, and suburbanization (Dutton), and over the past two decades economic restructuring and the dismantling of the welfare state (Parenti). There is a prison-business nexus, but the current law and order regime is, more importantly, a class struggle from above (Parenti). In this capacity, it does the same sort of work that is accomplished by the "social cleansing" of the poor and undesirable in Latin America via, for instance, the mass murder of street children, the roundup of homeless persons for medical experimentation, and so on (Robinson 122). It is also, as Gilmore explains, the economic activity that is allotted to certain geographical areas under the uneven development produced by globalization (174).
Mass incarceration in the United States is taking place in the context of a world situation characterized by globalization, "savage capitalism," and polyarchy. Since 1989, the United States has had to fabricate new enemies to replace the role of the Soviet Union in our production schema and our national phantasmagoria. Many of these new enemies have been found at home. We have made war on immigrants, on the poor, and on drugs and "crime." The connections among these three "wars," and especially between the last two, are important: as we dismantle health, education, and welfare programs, we create racialized and also gendered paths to jail (Avery/Davis 155). Prisons, as we know, also contribute to the hegemony of transnational capitalism in several ways. Abroad, the United States is fomenting actual wars (a good current example of this is Plan Colombia), exporting arms, and managing financial markets so as to keep as good a grip as it can on the neoliberal regime. The "war on drugs" works abroad as well as at home to increase militarization and the investment in counterinsurgency (Lazare). "Globalization" (really transnational capitalism) means, among other things, globalized poverty and repression. Through privatization and other neoliberal policies, U.S. elites now "colonize" and exploit their own territory as blatantly as they has long done in "Third World" countries. That is, transnational capitalism does not only maintain and update old hierarchies (although it does that as well); it also seeks out new groups to exploit and oppress.
In this climate of internal colonialism (as the job market, the healthcare system, education and housing collapse; as structural racism deepens), prisons are expanding, and the prison industrial complex has come to supplement (but not replace) the military industrial complex. Mass incarceration of the "dangerous classes," for whom the economy cannot provide jobs, is justified by the fear of crime. This situation has created a concentration camp mentality--a phenomenon that is important to note as our society takes on more and more totalitarian features, and as public discourse becomes more and more reactionary. Prisons and the prison industrial complex are a key component of repression and social control in the current post-Communist, neoliberal, globalized world system.
It must be emphasized that you go to prison not as much because you have committed a crime as because you are poor and/or a person of color-since these are the populations who, by and large, are actually accused, indicted, tried, and jailed (with alternatives to incarceration such as probation, house arrest, and so on used more liberally in the cases of middle-class convicts). Construction and equipment for prisons are major industries, and Corrections is a larger and larger employer. Prisoners, who traditionally work for the state but who have also been leased out to private industry since the nineteenth century, are now used as cheap labor for large corporations such as IBM, Compaq, and Prison Blues (an Oregon jeans company whose line of apparel is marketed at Nordstrom's), and many more. It is commonly observed that the prison system closely replicates slavery (see Boyd; I made such an allusion myself in the first section of this paper), but it is, at the same time, important to recognize that it is not merely a residue of slavery or even slavery's continuation. The present day prison industrial complex is part of an old tradition, but it is also something new-much in the way that transnational capitalism, with its many familiar characteristics, is at the same time "new" in its ability to penetrate even more space and even more aspects of life than it did in its earlier stages.
Over the past two decades, prosecutors have come to enjoy nearly unbridled authority, and they have no incentive to disclose exculpatory evidence (Herbert). The result of this is the incarceration of innocent people, as well as the overly zealous incarceration of the guilty. The new "three strikes" laws and mandatory minimum sentences interdict the discretion of judges in individual cases, so that the prisons fill with people that criminal justice professionals would not necessarily incarcerate. And increased restrictions on the activities of former prisoners function to permanently eject an increasingly large group of people from every aspect of public life. It is often pointed out, for instance, that the loss of voting rights by felons, coupled with heavy increases in felony convictions, primarily of persons of color, in practice works to disenfranchise large groups of non-white voters. This is true and it is a serious problem, but it is only one of the ways in which ex-felons--who in some localities cannot even get library cards--are converted into non-persons by current laws and policies.
Prisons, we must remember, do not work, in terms of reducing crime and making society safer. People in corrections are often quicker to recognize this than are politicians and the general public. The policy of mass incarceration does, however, work very well to terrorize, fragment, and warehouse persons of color and the poor. My own experience working closely with prisoners and prisoners suggests that the true function of incarceration and the prison industrial complex is to "solve" (or better, jettison) social problems by disappearing people (into multiple life sentences) and by expelling them from public life, by making them into non-persons. This is no unfortunate error or unlucky coincidence--it is policy. It is how the United States is managing its surplus population-a surplus population added to daily through globalization and neoliberal economic restructuring.
Prison-related industries are also, increasingly, the economic role allotted many communities by neoliberalism and globalization. The law and order regime cements the prison industrial complex into place and makes those who are not (yet) incarcerated grateful for the work and the protection against "crime" it affords them. The changes in the legal system that have been made in support of the law and order regime constitute a major abridgment of both human and civil rights in this country, and this hemisphere, and the real target of the "war on crime" and the "war on drugs," is, as Daniel Lazare says, political democracy (16). We ignore these facts and this situation at our great, collective peril.
In order to begin dismantling the law and order regime which, I am convinced, can turn this country and the countries it controls into fully totalitarian states more quickly than we would like to think, we must:
1) Make decarceration (not just alternatives to incarceration) our goal. To do so, we must challenge the myth of the crime wave and stop classifying so many people as criminals. We also need shorter sentences and less policing, and we should eliminate "three strikes" laws, mandatory minimum sentences, and, of course, the death penalty.
2) Change public discourse on crime, criminals, and prisons. Our worst problem is not crime, it's the economy. Criminals, including at-risk youths and ex-cons, need jobs that pay a living wage. Public discourse on crime currently requires that criminals "take responsibility for their crimes," "feel remorse," "rely on their higher power," and so on. But therapy and religion are not and cannot be substitutes for viable jobs. Finally, alternatives to incarceration exist and are part of the system already. We would do well to make greater use of these alternatives. But the amount of time currently spent discussing the need "find an alternative" would be much better spent organizing to stop the criminalization of so many people (Parenti).
3) Roll back recent repressive laws expanding the authority of prosecutors, abridging defendants' right of access to exculpatory evidence, and limiting prisoners' rights (a) to appeal their convictions, and (b) as prisoners. Two important pieces of legislation, both in place since 1996, are the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) and the Prison Legal Reform Act (PLRA). The AEDPA increases the number of crimes eligible to for the federal death penalty to over 50, and severely curtails the possibility of federal habeas corpus review-a safeguard that has been central to protecting the constitutional rights of defendants, especially in capital cases where there is a higher rate of error. The PRLA limits "frivolous" prisoner suits. Public support for this legislation was garnered by wide publicity about prisoner who filed a suit in Federal court because he was served a broken cookie. Some important things to know here are (a) that most Federal suits by prisoners are filed on real issues, and are filed in Federal court because there is no other venue in which to take recourse; (b) the PLRA law has made it prohibitively expensive to file these suits; (c) one provision of the PRLA is that you cannot sue for physical injury unless the injury you sustain is permanent (this means, for instance, that if the guards decide to break your knees, you cannot complain).
4) Roll back restrictions on the civil rights of ex-convicts (which amount, as Graham Boyd shows, to a rearticulation of Jim Crow for the 21st century).
5) Change public discourse on the value of trading in civil rights for "public safety," and roll back the restrictions on the civil rights of everyone put in place for the waging of the so-called drug war.
6) Listen to the recommendations of people who actually work in Corrections. Prison officials, in contrast to politicians, typically recommend the expansion of educational and recreational programs, shorter sentences, and greater contact with the community outside prison. They recommend these things for practical (and often "conservative") reasons, based on direct experience with prisoners and the criminal justice system.
As we work towards these goals, we must:
1) Challenge the invisibility of prisons (and of women and foreign prisoners), and expose the (ultimately ineffective) "magic" trick of locking our problems away and masking the connections between prisons, race, and transnational capitalism.
2) Promote firsthand interaction between prisoners and free people (Avery/Davis 156), since this works against the objectification (in either positive or negative terms) of convicts, prisoners, and the "underclass."
3) Create a material support system for families of the incarcerated.
4) Keep in mind that, easy though it is to show why the criminal justice system as it exists today is a travesty and that the "real criminals" are the transnationals and the government, there are still concrete "common" criminals and crime victims, and a large portion of victims are also persons of color and the poor. Victims and their families need real support, not just the nominal support of death sentences and life without parole for those convicted of crimes.
5) Remember that what we are doing is not charity. Charity glorifies s/he who performs it and does not promote real change. As activist academics, we will also increase our effectiveness if we resist our (by now almost "natural") tendencies to theorize and to lead. Instead, we should act as organic intellectuals working in service of the incarcerated and their families (Avery/Davis).
Berger, John. "Against the great defeat of the world." Race and Class 40: 2-3 (October 1998-March 1999): 1-4.
Boyd, Graham. "The Drug War is the New Jim Crow." NACLA
Report on the Americas XXXV:1 (July/August 2001): 18-22.
Dutton, Thomas A. "'Violence' in Cincinnatti." The
Nation 272:4 (2001): 6-7, 23.
Gilmore, Ruth.
"Globalisation and US prison growth: from military Keynesianism to post-Keynsian
militarism." Race and Class 40: 2-3 (October 1998-March 1999): 145-57.
Gordon, Avery. "Globalism and the prison industrial
complex: an interview with Angela Davis." Race and Class 40: 2-3
(October 1998-March 1999): 145-57.
Herbert, Bob. "The
Truth About Justice." The New York Times. 18 September 2000, Op-Ed.
Human Rights Watch. "Punishment and Prejudice." Report
on race and the war on drugs." June 8, 2000. Archived at http://www.hrw.org/reports/2000/usa.
Lazare, Daniel. "A Battle Against Reason, Democracy, and
Drugs. The Drug War Deciphered." NACLA Report on the Americas XXXV:1
(July/August 2001): 13-17.
Mongin, Olivier. El
miedo al vacío. Ensayo sobre las pasiones democráticas. Buenos Aires: Fondo
de Cultura Económica, 1993. Cited in Reguillo.
Parenti,
Christian. Lockdown America. New York: Verso, 1999.
Reguillo, Rossana. "¿Guerreros o ciudadanos?
Violencia(s). Una cartografía de las interacciones urbanas." Unpublished mss.
Segunda conferencia internacional de estudios culturales. Espacio urbano,
comunicación y violencia en América Latina. Department of Hispanic Languages and
Literatures, University of Pittsburgh. March 31-April 1, 2000.
Robinson, William I. "Latin America and global
capitalism." Race and Class 40: 2-3 (October 1998-March 1999): 1-4.
A = article B = book N = Newsletter P = periodical W = web site F = film or
video C = Catalogue
R = especially recommended by me
P The Angolite (Editor, The Angolite - Louisiana State Penitentiary - Angola, LA 70712). Written and produced by Angola inmates. R
B Bergner, Daniel. God of the Rodeo. The Search for Hope, Faith, and a Six-Second Ride in Louisiana's Angola Prison. New York: Crown Books, 1998. R
A Bright, Stephen. "Is fairness irrelevant? The evisceration of federal habeas corpus review and limits on the ability of state courts to protect fundamental rights." Washington and Lee Law Review 1 (1997).
B Bunker, Edward. Education of a Felon: A Memoir. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000.
A Burnham, David, and Long, Susan. "The Clinton Era by the Numbers." The Nation 272:4 (29 January 2001): 20-22. On the expansion of the law and order regime under Clinton. R
N California Prison Focus (2940 16th St., Room 307 - San Francisco, CA 94103). Tel. 415.252.9211, http://www.prisons.org. Issue 14 (Spring 2001) includes a list of allied California organizations (e.g. Families With a Future, Families to Amend California's Three Strikes, Barrios Unidos, California Coalition for Women Prisoners, Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, and more). R
B California Prison Focus (comp. and ed.). Donny, Life of a Lifer. Contact: CPF/Book, 655 Llewelling Blvd. Box 113, San Leandro, CA 94579. Memoir of a life spent in California's "supermax" prisons.
B Christianson, Scott. With Liberty for Some: 500 Years of Imprisonment in America (1998). W Coalition for Jubilee Clemency. Focus: reform of long mandatory sentences for drug violations and other nonviolent offenses.
N Coalition for Prisoners' Rights Newsletter. P.O. Box 1911, Santa Fe, NM 87504-1911. Focus: civil rights.
C Corrections. A catalogue of books, videos, CD-ROMS, etc., for corrections personnel and offenders, from Cambridge Educational, http://www.cambridgeeducational.com.
BCurrie, Elliot. Crime and Punishment in America: Why the Solutions to America's Most Stubbon Social Crisis Have Not Worked-and What Will.
F Dead Man Walking. Based on the book by Sr. Helen Prejean.
F The Farm. Documentary on the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, co-directed by Wilbert Rideau. R
F Final Judgment: The Execution of Antonio James. Discovery Channel documentary. Screenplay by Wilbert Rideau. Thurgood Marshall Justice Award; CINE Golden Eagle Award for excellence in documentary film.
N Freedomways. Newsletter of the Prison and Jail Project (P.O. Box 6749, Americus, GA 31709). Tel. 912.928.2080, fax 912.924-7080.
B Gray, Ian and Stanley, Moira. A Punishment in Search of a Crime. Americans Speak Out Against the Death Penalty. New York: Avon Books, 1989.
B Jackson, Jesse, Jackson, Jesse Jr., and Shapiro, Bruce. Legal Lynching: The Death Penalty and America's Future (August 2001).
B James, Joy. States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000.
B Johnson, Robert. Death Work: A Study of the Modern Execution Process. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing, 1998.
B Jones, Hettie (comp. and ed.). Aliens at the Border. Segue Books. Anthology of poetry written by The Writing Workshop, Bedford Hills Correctional Facility (New York).
A Jones, Robert. "An Emerging Crisis: The Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act." The Moratorium Campaign Newsletter (Summer 2001): 7-8.
W The Justice Project, http://www.TheJusticeProject.org/direct. Focus: executions of innocent people. 50 F Street N.W., Suite 1070 - Washington, DC 20001.
N The Moratorium Campaign (P.O. Box 13727, New Orleans, LA 70185-3727, tel. 504.864.1071, fax 504.864.1654, email info@MoratoriumCampaign.org, http://www.MoratoriumCampaign.org.
W The National Criminal Justice Reference Service http://www.ncjrs.org. Comprehensive databases, full citations, abstracts, full-text online publications, excellent guide to research in the field of criminal justice.
B Nelson, Lane, and Foster, Burk. Death Watch: A Death Penalty Anthology (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2001). Lane Nelson is an inmate at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Burk Foster teaches in Criminal Justice at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. R
N The Pilgrimage. Newsletter of Pilgrimage for Life/Louisiana Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. P.O. Box 64635, Baton Rouge, LA 70896. Tel. 225.344.5843, web site
B Prejean, Sr. Helen. Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.
W Project Metamorphosis. Effort by Louisiana DOC to enhance
education and training of state adult inmates, http://www.leeric.lsu.edu/slrc/proj_meta/meta.htm
B Rideau, Wilbert, and Wikberg, Ron. Life Sentences: Rage and Survival Behind Bars. New York: Times Books, 1992. Essays by the longtime editors of The Angolite . R
W The Sentencing Project. Website of the organization by the same name. 1516 P Street NW, Washington, DC 20005, http://www.sentencingproject.org. Conducts research on criminal justice policy issues. Primary focus: sentencing options. Secondary focuses: challenging felon disenfranchisement, critique of "war on drugs." Many of their very useful, highly informative publications are posted to their website. R
W The Southern Center for Human Rights. A project of Stephen Bright, http:// www.schr.org. R
A Tabak, Ronald J. "Dead man walking without due process?" New York University Review of Law and Social Change 163 (1997).
N The Trumpet. Newsletter of the Angels of Mercy. Focus: Support for families and children of Death Row inmates. AOM address: P.O. Box 762, Monroe, LA 71210. Tel. 318.325.1253, email kaseyhall@aol.com. Correspondence on the newsletter should be sent to The Trumpet, attn. Jan Macdonald, 4911 Dockweiler St., Los Angeles, CA 90019.
B Winters, Paul A. (ed.), The Death Penalty: Opposing Viewpoints. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1997.