Provides an up-to-date and comprehensive overview of efforts in the state and the federal systems to make sentencing fairer, reduce overuse of imprisonment, and help offenders live law-abiding lives. It addresses a variety of topics and themes related to sentencing and reform, including racial disparities, violence prediction, plea negotiation, case processing, federal and state guidelines, California's historic "realignment," and more. This volume covers what students, scholars, practitioners, and policy makers need to know about how sentencing really works, what a half century's "reforms" have and have not accomplished, how sentencing processes can be made fairer, and how sentencing outcomes can be made more just. Its writers are among America's leading scholarly specialists--often the leading specialist--in their fields.

The first expert and comprehensive analysis of the surprising impact of body-worn cameras Following the tragic deaths of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and others at the hands of police, interest in body-worn cameras for local, state, and federal law enforcement has skyrocketed. In Cops, Cameras, and Crisis, Michael D. White and Aili Malm provide an up-to-date analysis of this promising technology, evaluating whether it can address today's crisis in police legitimacy. Drawing on the latest research and insights from experts with field experience with police-worn body cameras, White and Malm show the benefits and drawbacks of this technology for police departments, police officers, and members of the public. Ultimately, they identify--and assess--each claim, weighing in on whether the specter of being "caught on tape" is capable of changing a criminal justice system desperately in need of reform. Cops, Cameras, and Crisis is a must-read for policymakers, police leaders, and activists interested in twenty-first-century policing.

When Harvard-trained sociologist Peter Moskos left the classroom to become a cop in Baltimore's Eastern District, he was thrust deep into police culture and the ways of the street--the nerve-rattling patrols, the thriving drug corners, and a world of poverty and violence that outsiders never see. In Cop in the Hood, Moskos reveals the truths he learned on the midnight shift. Through Moskos's eyes, we see police academy graduates unprepared for the realities of the street, success measured by number of arrests, and the ultimate failure of the war on drugs. In addition to telling an explosive insider's story of what it is really like to be a police officer, he makes a passionate argument for drug legalization as the only realistic way to end drug violence--and let cops once again protect and serve. In a new afterword, Moskos describes the many benefits of foot patrol--or, as he calls it, "policing green."

"Every day, innocent men across America are thrown into prison, betrayed by a faulty justice system, and robbed of their lives--either by decades-long sentences or the death penalty itself. Injustice tarnishes our legal process from start to finish. From the racial discrimination and violence used by backwards law enforcement officers, to a prison culture that breeds inmate conflict, there is opportunity for error at every turn. Award-winning journalist Stanley Cohen chronicles more than one hundred of these cases from the 1973 case of one of the first death row exonerees, David Keaton, to multiple cases as of 2015 that resulted from the corrupt practices of NYPD Detective Louis Scarcella (with nearly seventy Brooklyn cases under review for wrongful conviction)."--Jacket

"Plea negotiation is rife with due process concerns, including a heightened risk of coerced pleas, ignoring mens rea, serious questions about assistance of counsel, limited discovery and little litigation of the evidence, the conviction of innocent defendants and significant questions about fairness and equity. Plea negotiation is also the fast track to criminal conviction, tough punishment, and mass incarceration. From the perspective of public policy, plea negotiation perpetuates a harm based, retribution focused system of crime and punishment. Because of the failures of public health, the justice system has become a dumping ground for hundreds of thousands of mentally ill, substance addicted and abusing, and neurocognitively impaired offenders. And because of a tough on crime mentality and lack of information and options, the justice system routinely prosecutes and punishes these offenders. The evidence is quite clear that punishment does nothing to improve these circumstances and often exacerbates them. The result, as one would predict, is extraordinarily high rates of reoffending, propelling the revolving door of the justice system. [This book] takes a close look at plea negotiation, criminal prosecution, public defense, and pretrial justice systems and identifies a wide variety of problems and concerns with each. [The authors] provide key decision makers with the tools to make better, more informed decisions regarding pre-trial detention, prosecution and plea deals, criminal defense, and diversion to treatment. Critical to this effort is redefining roles, responsibilities and the culture of criminal justice by prosecutors, judges and defense counsel accepting responsibility for reducing recidivism and embracing problem solving as a primary decision making strategy" --Back cover.

Politicians, citizens, and police agencies have long embraced community policing, hoping to reduce crime and disorder by strengthening the ties between urban residents and the officers entrusted with their protection.  That strategy seems to make sense, but in Citizens, Cops, and Power, Steve Herbert reveals the reasons why it rarely, if ever, works. Drawing on data he collected in diverse Seattle neighborhoods from interviews with residents, observation of police officers, and attendance at community-police meetings, Herbert identifies the many obstacles that make effective collaboration between city dwellers and the police so unlikely to succeed. At the same time, he shows that residents' pragmatic ideas about the role of community differ dramatically from those held by social theorists. Surprising and provocative, Citizens, Cops, and Power provides a critical perspective not only on the future of community policing, but on the nature of state-society relations as well.

"Cops, politicians, and ordinary people are afraid of black men. The result is the Chokehold: laws and practices that treat every African American man like a thug. In this explosive new book, an African American former federal prosecutor shows that the system is working exactly the way it's supposed to. Black men are always under watch, and police violence is widespread--all with the support of judges and politicians. In his no-holds-barred style, Butler, whose scholarship has been featured on 60 Minutes, uses new data to demonstrate that white men commit the majority of violent crime in the United States. For example, a white woman is ten times more likely to be raped by a white male acquaintance than be the victim of a violent crime perpetrated by a black man. Butler also frankly discusses the problem of black on black violence and how to keep communities safer--without relying as much on police. Chokehold powerfully demonstrates why current efforts to reform law enforcement will not create lasting change. Butler's controversial recommendations about how to crash the system, and when it's better for a black man to plead guilty--even if he's innocent--are sure to be game-changers in the national debate about policing, criminal justice, and race relations"--

"A renowned investigative journalist exposes the unchecked power of the prosecutor as a driving force in America's mass incarceration crisis, and also offers a way out. The American criminal justice system is supposed to be a contest between two equal adversaries, the prosecution and the defense, with judges ensuring a fair fight. But in fact, it is prosecutors who have the upper hand, in a contest that is far from equal. More than anyone else, prosecutors decide who goes free and who goes to prison, and even who lives and who dies. The system wasn't designed for this kind of unchecked power, and in Charged, Emily Bazelon shows that it is an underreported cause of enormous injustice--and the missing piece in the mass incarceration puzzle. But that's only half the story. Prosecution in America is at a crossroads. The power of prosecutors makes them the actors in the system--the only actors--who can fix what's broken without changing a single law. They can end mass incarceration, protect against coercive plea bargains and convicting the innocent, and tackle racial bias. And because in almost every state we, the people, elect prosecutors, it is within our power to reshape the choices they make. In the last few years, for the first time in American history, a wave of reform-minded prosecutors has taken office in major cities throughout the country. Bazelon follows them, showing the difference they make for people caught in the system and how they are coming together as a new kind of lobby for justice and mercy. In Charged, Emily Bazelon mounts a major critique of the American criminal justice system--and charts the movement for change"--;"The American criminal justice system is supposed to be a contest between two equal adversaries, the prosecution and the defense, with judges ensuring a fair fight. But in fact, it is prosecutors who have the upper hand, in a contest that is far from equal. More than anyone else, prosecutors decide who goes free and who goes to prison, and even who lives and who dies. The system wasn't designed for this kind of unchecked power, and in Charged, Emily Bazelon shows that it is an underreported cause of enormous injustice--and the missing piece in the mass incarceration puzzle. But that's only half the story. Prosecution in America is at a crossroads. The power of prosecutors makes them the actors in the system--the only actors--who can fix what's broken without changing a single law. They can end mass incarceration, protect against coercive plea bargains and convicting the innocent, and tackle racial bias. And because in almost every state we, the people, elect prosecutors, it is within our power to reshape the choices they make. In the last few years, for the first time in American history, a wave of reform-minded prosecutors has taken office in major cities throughout the country. Bazelon follows them, showing the difference they make for people caught in the system and how they are coming together as a new kind of lobby for justice and mercy. In Charged, Emily Bazelon mounts a major critique of the American criminal justice system--and charts the movement for change"--

"Does the criminal justice system actually help victims and offenders? What does justice look like for those who have been harmed? For those who have done harm? Twenty-five years after it was first published, Changing Lenses by Howard Zehr remains the classic text of the restorative justice field."--Amazon.com.

Pathologized, terrorized, and confined, trans/gender non-conforming and queer folks have always struggled against the prison industrial complex. Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith bring together current and former prisoners, activists, and academics for a new understanding of how race, gender, ability, and sexuality are lived under the crushing weight of captivity. Through a politic of gender self-determination, this collection argues that trans/ queer liberation and prison abolition must be growntogether. From rioting against police violence and critiquing hate crimes legislation, to prisoners demanding access to HIV medications, and far beyond, Captive Genders is a challenge for us all to join the struggle. This expanded second edition includes a new foreword from CeCe McDonald and essays by Chelsea Manning, Kalaniopua Young, and Janetta Louise Johnson and Toshio Meronek. "Captive Genders is an exciting assemblage of writings--analyses, manifestos, stories, interviews--that traverse the complicated entanglements of surveillance, policing, imprisonment, and the production of gender normativity. Focusing discerningly on the encounter of transpersons with the apparatuses that constitute the prison industrial complex, the contributors to this volume create new frameworks and new vocabularies that surely will have a transformative impact on the theories and practices of twenty-first century abolition." --Angela Y. Davis, professor emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz "The contributors to Captive Genders brilliantly shatter the assumption that the antidote to danger is human sacrifice. In other words, for these thinkers: where life is precious life is precious." --Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author ofGolden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California "Captive Genders is at once a scathing and necessary analysis of the prison industrial complex and a history of queer resistance to state tyranny. By analyzing the root causes of anti-queer and anti-trans violence, this book exposes the brutality of state control over queer/trans bodies inside and outside prison walls, and proposes an analytical framework for undoing not just the prison system, but its mechanisms of surveillance, dehumanization and containment. --Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? Eric Stanleyis a postdoctoral fellow at UCSD. His writings appear inSocial Text, American Quarterly, andWomen and Performance, as well as various collections. Nat Smithworks with Critical Resistance and the Trans/Variant and Intersex Justice Project. CeCe McDonaldwas unjustly incarcerated after fatally stabbing a transphobic attacker in 2011. She was released in 2014 after serving nineteen months for second-degree manslaughter.

What motivates someone to make a career out of defending some of the worst suspected killers of our time? In 'Capital Defense', Jon B. Gould and Maya Pagni Barak give us a glimpse into the lives of lawyers who choose to work in the darkest corner of our criminal justice system: death penalty cases. Based on in-depth personal interviews with a cross-section of the nation's top capital defense teams, the book explores the unusual few who voluntarily represent society's "worst of the worst." With a compassionate and careful eye, Gould and Barak chronicle the experiences of American lawyers, who-like soldiers or surgeons-operate under the highest of stakes, where verdicts have the power to either "take death off the table" or put clients on "the conveyor belt towards death." These lawyers are a rare breed in a field that is otherwise seen as dirty work and in a system that is overburdened, under-resourced, and overshadowed by social, cultural, and political pressures. Examining the ugliest side of our criminal justice system, 'Capital Defense' offers an up-close perspective on the capital litigation process and its impact on the people who participate in it.

"A paradigm-shifting investigation of Jim Crow-era violence, the legal apparatus that sustained it, and its enduring legacy, from a renowned legal scholar. If the law cannot protect a person from a lynching, then isn't lynching the law? In By Hands Now Known, Margaret A. Burnham, director of Northeastern University's Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, challenges our understanding of the Jim Crow era by exploring the relationship between formal law and background legal norms in a series of harrowing cases from 1920 to 1960. From rendition, the legal process by which states make claims to other states for the return of their citizens, to battles over state and federal jurisdiction and the outsize role of local sheriffs in enforcing racial hierarchy, Burnham maps the criminal legal system in the mid-twentieth-century South, and traces the unremitting line from slavery to the legal structures of this period and through to today. Drawing on an extensive database, collected over more than a decade and exceeding 1,000 cases of racial violence, she reveals the true legal system of Jim Crow, and captures the memories of those whose stories have not yet been heard"--

"This book analyzes the everyday actions of ordinary people in the context of extreme political and cultural polarization, distort the criminal justice system and betray the lofty ideals expressed in American founding documents and centuries of Anglo-American articulations of basic human rights"--

"Matthew Horace was a law enforcement officer at the federal and local levels for twenty-eight years, working in nearly every state in the country. Yet it was after seven years of service, when Horace found himself with a gun pointed at his head by a white fellow officer, that he fully understood the racism seething within America's police departments. Using gut-wrenching reportage, on-the-ground research, and personal accounts garnered by interviews with police, government officials, and law experts around the country, Horace presents an insider's examination of America's police culture and policies, which he concludes is an "archaic system" built on "a toxic brotherhood." In this deeply revelatory book, Horace dissects some of the nation's most highly publicized police shootings and provides fresh analysis of issues that drive disproportionate numbers of black men to be killed by police and incarcerated in cities such as Ferguson, Baltimore, Cleveland, New York City, Tulsa, and Chicago. Horace uncovers what has sown the seeds of rage and violence. Timely and provocative, [this book] sheds light on what truly goes on behind the blue line."--Jacket.

"The American legal system is experiencing a period of extreme stress, if not crisis, as it seems to be losing its legitimacy with at least some segments of its constituency. Nowhere is this legitimacy deficit more apparent than in a portion of the African American community in the United States, as incidents of police killing black suspects - whether legally justified or not - have become almost routine. Regrettably, this legitimacy deficit has largely been documented through anecdotal evidence and a steady drumbeat of journalistic reports, not rigorous scientific research. This book offers an all-inclusive account of how and why African Americans differ in their willingness to ascribe legitimacy to legal institutions, as well as in their willingness to accept the policy decisions those institutions promulgate" --

This Brief provides specific recommendations for police professionals to reduce the influence of implicit bias on police practice, which will improve both effectiveness (in a shift towards evidence-based, rather than bias-based) practices and police legitimacy. The author is donating her proceeds from this book to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund (nleomf.org).

Behind the razor wire : portrait of a contemporary American prison system-book

"Since the dawn of the digital age, decision-making in finance, employment, politics, health and human services has undergone revolutionary change. Today, automated systems - rather than humans - control which neighborhoods get policed, which families attain needed resources, and who is investigated for fraud. While we all live under this new regime of data, the most invasive and punitive systems are aimed at the poor. In Automating Inequality, Virginia Eubanks systematically investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America. The book is full of heart-wrenching and eye-opening stories, from a woman in Indiana whose benefits are literally cut off as she lays dying to a family in Pennsylvania in daily fear of losing their daughter because they fit a certain statistical profile"--Publisher's website.

From the Publisher: 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.

" 'If you want to understand the massive antiracist protests of 2020, put down the navel-gazing books about racial healing and read America on Fire.' -Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Library Journal "Books and Authors to Know: Titles to Watch 2021" From one of our top historians, a groundbreaking story of policing and "riots" that shatters our understanding of the post-civil rights era. What began in spring 2020 as local protests in response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police quickly exploded into a massive nationwide movement. Millions of mostly young people defiantly flooded into the nation's streets, demanding an end to police brutality and to the broader, systemic repression of Black people and other people of color. To many observers, the protests appeared to be without precedent in their scale and persistence. Yet, as the acclaimed historian Elizabeth Hinton demonstrates in America on Fire, the events of 2020 had c lear precursors-and any attempt to understand our current crisis requires a reckoning with the recent past. Even in the aftermath of Donald Trump, many Americans consider the decades since the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s as a story of progress toward greater inclusiveness and equality. Hinton's sweeping narrative uncovers an altogether different history, taking us on a troubling journey from Detroit in 1967 and Miami in 1980 to Los Angeles in 1992 and beyond to chart the persistence of structural racism and one of its primary consequences, the so-called urban riot. Hinton offers a critical corrective: the word riot was nothing less than a racist trope applied to events that can only be properly understood as rebellions-explosions of collective resistance to an unequal and violent order. As she suggests, if rebellion and the conditions that precipitated it never disappeared, the optimistic story of a post-Jim Crow United States no longer holds. Black rebellion, America on Fir e powerfully illustrates, was born in response to poverty and exclusion, but most immediately in reaction to police violence. In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson launched the "War on Crime," sending militarized police forces into impoverished Black neighborhoods. Facing increasing surveillance and brutality, residents threw rocks and Molotov cocktails at officers, plundered local businesses, and vandalized exploitative institutions. Hinton draws on exclusive sources to uncover a previously hidden geography of violence in smaller American cities, from York, Pennsylvania, to Cairo, Illinois, to Stockton, California. The central lesson from these eruptions-that police violence invariably leads to community violence-continues to escape policymakers, who respond by further criminalizing entire groups instead of addressing underlying socioeconomic causes. The results are the hugely expanded policing and prison regimes that shape the lives of so many Americans today. Presenting a new framework for understanding our nation's enduring strife, America on Fire is also a warning: rebellions will surely continue unless police are no longer called on to manage the consequences of dismal conditions beyond their control, and until an oppressive system is finally remade on the principles of justice and equality"--;What began in spring 2020 as local protests in response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police quickly exploded into a massive nationwide movement. To many observers, the protests appeared to be without precedent in their scale and persistence. Hinton shows that the events of 2020 had clear precursors-- and any attempt to understand our current crisis requires a reckoning with the recent past. She takes us on a troubling journey from Detroit in 1967 and Miami in 1980 to Los Angeles in 1992, charting the persistence of structural racism and one of its primary consequences, the so-called urban riot. Hinton warns that rebellions will continue until an oppressive system is finally remade on the principles of justice and equality. -- adapted from jacket

"As the death penalty clings stubbornly to life in many states and dies off in others, this first-of-its kind ethnography of capital trials offers a fresh analysis of the inner workings of American death penalty. Sarah Beth Kaufman draws on years of ethnographic and documentary research, including hundreds of hours of courtroom observation in seven states, interviews with prosecutors, and analyses of newspaper coverage of death penalty cases. Her research exposes the logic of a system that is not explained by morality or justice and does not make sense fiscally, emotionally, or as a crime-control strategy, but instead depends on a series of social logics that go beyond the previously acknowledged problems with race and class discrimination. Taking readers inside capital courtrooms across the country, American Roulette contends that the ideals of criminal punishment have been replaced by logics of performance and politics. The result is a network that assembles the power to decide between life and death, all while suggesting that jurors take ultimate responsibility"--

"In a series of interviews given in the wake of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, Angela Y. Davis explores how historical systems of oppression like slavery and lynching continue to influence and undermine democracy today. Davis builds on W.E.B. DuBois's view that when people were released from slavery in this country, they were denied the full privileges of other citizens. This denial of full rights and the creation of a U.S. prison system emerged as a way of maintaining dominance and control over entire populations. Davis explores the notion of "Abolition Democracy" as the democracy to come, a set of social relations free of oppression and injustice."--Jacket.

A memoir by the co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement explains the movement's position of love, humanity, and justice, challenging perspectives that have negatively labeled the movement's activists while calling for essential political changes

The essential guide to understanding how racism works and how racial inequality shapes black lives, ultimately offering a road-map for resistance for racial justice advocates and antiracists When #BlackLivesMatter went viral in 2013, it shed a light on the urgent, daily struggles of black Americans to combat racial injustice. The message resonated with millions across the country. Yet many of our political, social, and economic institutions are still embedded with racist policies and practices that devalue black lives. Stay Woke directly addresses these stark injustices and builds on the lessons of racial inequality and intersectionality the Black Lives Matter movement has challenged its fellow citizens to learn. In this essential primer, Tehama Lopez Bunyasi and Candis Watts Smith inspire readers to address the pressing issues of racial inequality, and provide a basic toolkit that will equip readers to become knowledgeable participants in public debate, activism, and politics. This book offers a clear vision of a racially just society, and shows just how far we still need to go to achieve this reality. From activists to students to the average citizen, Stay Woke empowers all readers to work toward a better future for black Americans.

"Coupled with the speed and networking capacities of social media, #blacklivesmatter was the hashtag heard round the world. But Alicia Garza well knew that the distance between a hashtag and real change would take more than a single facebook to cover. It would take a movement. Garza was a lifelong activist who had spent the previous decades educating herself on the hard lessons of organizing. She started as a kid, working on sexual education for her peers, and then moved on to major campaigns around housing, policing, and immigrant and labor rights in California and then nationally. The lessons she extracted were different from the "rules for radicals" that animated earlier generations of lefitists; they were also different than the charismatic, patriarchal model of the American Civil Rights Movement. She instead developed a mode of organizing based on creating deep connections with communities, forging multiracial, intersectional coalitions, and, most of all, calling in all sorts of people to join the fight for the world we all deserve. This is the story of an activist's education on the streets and in the homes of regular people around the country who found ways to come together to create change. And it's also a guide for anyone who wants to share in that education and help build sustainable movements for the 21st century at any level, whether you're fighting for housing justice in your community or advocating for a political candidate or marching in the streets or just voting. It's a new paradigm for change for a new generation of changemakers, from the mind and heart behind one of the most important movements of our time"--

"A probing collection of essays and interviews addressing police brutality and racial injustice Policing has become one of the urgent issues of our time, the target of dramatic movements and front-page coverage from coast to coast in the United States and across the world. Now a wide-ranging collection of writers and activists offers a global response, describing ongoing struggles from New York to Ferguson to Los Angeles, as well as London, San Juan, San Salvador, and beyond. This book, combining first-hand accounts from organizers with the interventions of scholars and contributions by leading artists, traces the global rise of the "broken-windows" strategy of policing, first established in New York City under Police Commissioner William Bratton, a doctrine that has vastly broadened police power and contributed to the contemporary crisis of policing that has been sparked by notorious incidents of police brutality and killings. With contributions from #BlackLivesMatter cofounder Patrisse Cullors, Ferguson activist and St. Louis University law professor Justin Hansford, poet Mart��n Espada, scholars Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Robin D.G. Kelley, Naomi Murakawa, Vijay Prashad, and many more"--

"A comprehensive, readable analysis of the key issues of the Black Lives Matter movement, this thought-provoking and compelling anthology features essays by some of the nation's most influential and respected criminal justice experts and legal scholars. Policing the Black Man explores and critiques the many ways the criminal justice system impacts the lives of African American boys and men at every stage of the criminal process, from arrest through sentencing. Essays range from an explication of the historical roots of racism in the criminal justice system to an examination of modern-day police killings of unarmed black men. The contributors discuss and explain racial profiling, the power and discretion of police and prosecutors, the role of implicit bias, the racial impact of police and prosecutorial decisions, the disproportionate imprisonment of black men, the collateral consequences of mass incarceration, and the Supreme Court's failure to provide meaningful remedies for the injustices in the criminal justice system. Policing the Black Man is an enlightening must-read for anyone interested in the critical issues of race and justice in America."--Jacket

"Started in the wake of George Zimmerman's 2013 acquittal in the death of Trayvon Martin, the #BlackLivesMatter movement has become a powerful and uncompromising campaign demanding redress for the brutal and unjustified treatment of black bodies by law enforcement in the United States. The movement is only a few years old, but as Christopher J. Lebron argues in this book, the sentiment behind it is not; the plea and demand that "Black Lives Matter" comes out of a much older and richer tradition arguing for the equal dignity--and not just equal rights--of black people. The Making of Black Lives Matter presents a condensed and accessible intellectual history that traces the genesis of the ideas that have built into the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Drawing on the work of revolutionary black public intellectuals, including Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Langston Hughes, Zora Neal Hurston, Anna Julia Cooper, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, and Martin Luther King, Jr., Lebron clarifies what it means to assert that "Black Lives Matter" when faced with contemporary instances of anti-black law enforcement. He also illuminates the crucial difference between the problem signaled by the social media hashtag and how we think that we ought to address the problem. As Lebron states, police body cameras, or even the exhortation for civil rights mean nothing in the absence of equality and dignity. To upset dominant practices of abuse, oppression and disregard, we must reach instead for radical sensibility. Radical sensibility requires that we become cognizant of the history of black thought and activism in order to make sense of the emotions, demands, and argument of present-day activists and public thinkers. Only in this way can we truly embrace and pursue the idea of racial progress in America."--Jacket.

"In the wake of the murder of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012 and the exoneration of his killer, three black women activists launched a hashtag and social-media platform, Black Lives Matter, which would become the rubric for a larger movement. To many, especially those in the media, Black Lives Matter appeared to burst onto the national political landscape out of thin air. But as Barbara Ransby shows in Making All Black Lives Matter, the movement has roots in prison abolition, anti-police violence, black youth movements, and radical mobilizations across the country dating back at least a decade. Ransby interviewed more than a dozen of the movement's principal organizers and activists, and she provides a detailed review of its extensive coverage in mainstream and social media. Making All Black Lives Matter offers one of the first overviews of Black Lives Matter and explores the challenges and possible future for this growing and influential movement"--Provided by publisher.

"As a leader of the Black Lives Matter movement, Shaun King has become one of the most recognizable and powerful voices on the front lines of civil rights in our time. His commitment to reforming the justice system and making America a more equitable place has brought challenges and triumphs, soaring victories and crushing defeats. Throughout his wide-ranging activism, King's commentary remains rooted in both exhaustive research and abundant passion. In Make Change, King offers an inspiring look at the moments that have shaped his life and considers the ways social movements can grow and evolve in this hyper-connected era. He shares stories from his efforts leading the Raise the Age campaign and his work fighting police brutality, while providing a roadmap for how to stay sane, safe, and motivated even in the worst of political climates. By turns infuriating, inspiring, and educational, Make Change will resonate with those who believe that America can-and must-do better"--