Emptying Cages: Reading List

Emptying Cages: From Animal Abolition to Prison Abolition
Suggested Reading

Jenna McDavid, Living Opposed to Violence and Exploitation [L.O.V.E]
Contact Jenna

Anderson, David C.
Sensible Justice: Alternatives to Prison
New York: The New Press, 1998
A journalist and former editor for the “Wall Street Journal” and “New York Times” spent a year researching the alternative sanctions that US cities and states have imposed on convicts in order to relieve crowned prison space. He reports the benefits and drawbacks of electronic surveillance and house arrest, military-style boot camps, drug and sex offender treatment, restitution to crime victims, and community service.

Butler, Paul
Let’s Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice
New York: The New Press, 2009
Drawing on his personal fascinating story as a prosecutor, a defendant, and an observer of the legal process, Paul Butler offers a sharp and engaging critique of our criminal justice system. He argues against discriminatory drug laws and excessive police power and shows how our policy of mass incarceration erodes communities and perpetuates crime. Controversially, he supports jury nullification—or voting “not guilty” out of principle—as a way for everyday people to take a stand against unfair laws, and he joins with the “Stop Snitching” movement, arguing that the reliance on informants leads to shoddy police work and distrust within communities. Butler offers instead a “hip hop theory of justice,” parsing the messages about crime and punishment found in urban music and culture. Butler’s argument is powerful, edgy, and incisive.

The CR10 Publications Collective
Abolition Now!: Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle Against the Prison-Industrial Complex
AK Press, 2008
Published in honor of Critical Resistance’s tenth anniversary, Abolition Now! reflects the organization’s themes: Dismantle, Change, and Build. It presents bold strategies to create a stronger movement of people committed to PIC abolition and building stronger, safer, healthier communities, not more elaborate forms of repression.

Davis, Angela
Are Prisons Obsolete?
New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003
Amid rising public concern about the proliferation and privatization of prisons, and their promise of enormous profits, world-renowned author and activist Angela Y. Davis argues for the abolition of the prison system as the dominant way of responding to America’s social ills. “In thinking about the possible obsolescence of the prison,” Davis writes, “we should ask how it is that so many people could end up in prison without major debates regarding the efficacy of incarceration.” Whereas Reagan-era politicians with “tough on crime” stances argued that imprisonment and longer sentences would keep communities free of crime, history has shown that the practice of mass incarceration during that period has had little or no effect on official crime rates: in fact, larger prison populations led not to safer communities but to even larger prison populations. As we make our way into the twenty-first century-two hundred years after the invention of the penitentiary -the question of prison abolition has acquired an unprecedented urgency. Backed by growing numbers of prisons and prisoners, Davis analyzes these institutions in the U.S., arguing that the very future of democracy depends on our ability to develop radical theories and practices that make it possible to plan and fight for a world beyond the prison industrial complex.

Herivel, Tara
Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration
New York: The New Press, 2007
Locking up 2.3 million people isn’t cheap. Each year federal, state, and local governments spend over $185 billion annually in tax dollars to ensure that one out of every 137 Americans is imprisoned. Prison Profiteers looks at the private prison companies, investment banks, churches, guard unions, medical corporations, and other industries and individuals that benefit from this country’s experiment with mass imprisonment. It lets us follow the money from public to private hands and exposes how monies formerly designated for the public good are diverted to prisons and their maintenance. Find out where your tax dollars are going as you help to bankroll the biggest prison machine the world has ever seen.

Jackson, Jesse L.
Legal Lynching: The Death Penalty and America’s Future
New York: The New Press, 2001
Legal Lynching offers a succinct, accessible introduction to the debate over the death penalty’s history and future, exposing a chilling frequency of legal error, systemic racial and economic discrimination, and pervasive government misconduct. This is an essential book for readers across the political spectrum who wish to cut through the common myths and assumptions about the efficacy and morality of state-sanctioned killing.

Mauer, Marc
Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment
New York: The New Press, 2002
Per capita, there are more Americans in jail than in any other country in the world that is not experiencing civil war. That this situation has major social and economic consequences for the imprisoned and their families should be obvious, but it also has major intended and unintended (or “collateral”) consequences for the society as a whole. Mauer (assistant director of The Sentencing Project, a criminal justice reform organization) and Chesney-Lind (women’s studies, U. of Hawaii) present 16 contributions exploring the entire range of these consequences, from the impact of imprisonment on the individual’s life history to the impact of American mass imprisonment on the international stage. The essays approach the topic from an array of ideological and theoretical viewpoints, but all are extremely critical of the mass imprisonment regime.

Nibert, David
Animal Rights/Human Rights: Entanglements of Oppression and Liberation
Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2002
This accessible and cutting-edge work offers a new look at the history of western civilization, one that brings into focus the interrelated suffering of oppressed humans and other animals. Nibert argues that the oppression both of humans and of other species of animals is inextricably tangled within the structure of social arrangements. Nibert asserts that human use and mistreatment of other animals are not natural and do little to further the human condition.

Reiman, Jeffrey
Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison, The
Allyn & Bacon, 2006
This best-selling text examines the premise that the criminal justice system is biased against the poor from start to finish, from the definition of what constitutes a crime through the process of arrest, trial, and sentencing.

Shakur, Assata
Assata: An Autobiography
Lawrence Hill Books, 2001
This presents the life story of African American revolutionary Shakur, previously known as JoAnne Chesimard.

Solinger, Rickie
Interrupted Life: Experiences of Incarcerated Women in the United States
California: University of California Press, 2010
Interrupted Life is a gripping collection of writings by and about imprisoned women in the United States, a country that jails a larger percentage of its population than any other nation in the world. This eye-opening work brings together scores of voices from both inside and outside the prison system including those of incarcerated and previously incarcerated women, their advocates and allies, abolitionists, academics, and others. These vivid often highly personal essays, poems, stories, reports, and manifestos offer an unprecedented view of the realities of women’s experiences behind bars, and, taken together, they underscore the failures of imagination and policy that have too often underwritten our current prison system.

Talvi, Silja J.A.
Women Behind Bars: The Crisis of Women in the U.S. Prison System
Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2007
More and more women—mothers, grandmothers, wives, daughters, and sisters—are doing hard prison time all across the United States. Many of them are facing the prospect of years, decades, even lifetimes behind bars. Oddly, there’s been little public discussion about the dramatic increase of women in the prison system. What exactly is happening here, and why? The answers are in Women Behind Bars, in which investigative journalist Silja Talvi sheds light on why American girls and women are being locked up at such unprecedented rates.