Civil Rights Movements & the Law

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.

Listen to this episode from Today, Explained on Spotify. With the wave of protests came waves of arrests and record-breaking donations to bail funds across the US, but reformers hope for a reckoning of one of the only for-profit bail systems in the world. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Listen to this episode from Today, Explained on Spotify. It’s not what you think. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What can we do to ensure that America's justice system is truly delivering justice to its citizens?

The U.S is the only country in the world that allows minors to be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Approximately 2,500 juveniles have been effectively sentenced to die in prison—considered “irredeemable” by the state for crimes committed when they were just teenagers. One of them was David Luis “Suave” Gonzalez, who entered prison at 17 expecting to leave in a coffin. Suave tells the story of what happens when your whole world is a prison cell, and you suddenly get a second chance at life. It’s the story of one man’s incarceration and redemption and an unusual relationship between a journalist and a source.

Fearless, adversarial journalism that holds the powerful accountable.

Guest host Chenjerai Kumanyika speaks with abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore in a special two-part episode.

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Murderville, an investigative podcast hosted by senior Intercept reporters Liliana Segura and Jordan Smith, examines the systemic failures that lead to wrongful convictions.

Listen to this episode from Today, Explained on Spotify. Minneapolis City Council member Alondra Cano explains what the city wants to do and what might get in the way. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From Boston, Massachusetts, this is Mass Exoneration, a new podcast about people convicted of crimes — crimes they never committed — and what happened next, for them, and for the people they had to leave behind. At first, no one believed they were innocent. Now, they're free to tell their stories — and so are their children, their parents, their lawyers. Everyone who lived through it, from arrest to exoneration.

Ear Hustle brings you the daily realities of life inside prison, shared by those living it, and stories from the outside, post-incarceration.

Listen to this episode from Today, Explained on Spotify. The United States has a policing problem and Congress wants to fix it. Vox’s Li Zhou explains whether the Democrats’ new bill will go anywhere. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hosts Kim Wilson and Brian Sonenstein interview activists, artists, scholars, and impacted people about prison abolition and transformative justice.

If You Want To Understand The Conversation Around Abolishing The Police, You Should Start Here. We Can’t Think Of A Better Time For An Encore Presentation Of This 2019 Episode With Mariame Kaba On How To Radically Rethink Our Approach To Public Safety And What It Would Look Like If We Got Rid Of The Criminal Justice System As We Know It. What If We Just Got Rid Of Prisons? The United States Is The Epicenter Of Mass Incarceration – But Exactly What Is It We Hope To Get Out Of Putting People In Prisons? And Whatever Your Answer Is To That – Is It Working? It’s Worthwhile To Stop And Interrogate Our Intentions About Incarceration And Whether It Enacts Justice Or Instead Satisfies Some Urge To Punish. Prison Abolitionist Mariame Kaba Wants Us To Explore Some Truly Radical Notions That Force Us To Inspect Those Instincts Towards Punishment. Hear Her Dismantle What She Calls The Current "Criminal Punishment System" And Instead Employ The Ideology Of Restorative Justice. RELATED LINKS The Color Complex By Kathy Russel, Midge Wilson, And Ronald Hall Locking Up Our Own By James Forman Jr Circles And Ciphers Project NIA

Josie and Clint talk about prison abolition with Mariame Kaba, director of Project NIA, the co-founder of Survived + Punished and a researcher in residence at Barnard Center for Research on Women.

Melissa & Olivia answer the five most common questions when talking about abolishing the police & prison.

History professor Robin D.G. Kelley and Hina Shamsi of the ACLU are this week’s guests.

The Appeal is a nonprofit news organization dedicated to exposing how the U.S. criminal legal system fails to keep people safe and perpetuates harm. Our work shows the human and economic costs of our expansive carceral system, equips people with the tools to make change, and elevates solutions that seek to create a safer society without clinging to punitive responses.

Josie and Clint talk to Sonya Shah, an associate professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, about restorative justice.

Victoria Law, who is familiarly known as Vikki, is an anarchist activist, writer, freelance editor, photographer and mother. Law is of Chinese descent and was born and raised in Queens NY where she had her first brush with the law as an armed robber while still in high school. Her exposure to incar…

For years, some Chicago police officers tortured suspects. Survivors fought for reparations — and got them. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.

The United States imprisons more people than any other country in the world, and a disproportionate number of those prisoners are Black. What are the origins of the U.S. criminal justice system and how did racism shape it? From the creation of the first penitentiaries in the 1800s, to the "tough-on-crime" prosecutors of the 1990s, how America created a culture of mass incarceration.

We talk with ​journalist ​Jamiles Lartey about systemic racism in American policing​. ​He writes about criminal justice, race and policing for the non-profit news organization 'The Marshall Project.' ​"Policing wasn't always this way. It wasn't always this big. It wasn't always this bureaucratic," he says. "Sometimes as a society, you need to rethink institutions."