Civil Rights Movements & the Law

"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.

Three law schools have managed to comply with the American Bar Association’s (ABA) accreditation standard requiring a two-year bar passage rate of at least 75%. The ABA’s Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar recently announced that Ave Maria School of Law, the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School […]

"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.

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.

Bringing the voices of incarcerated people into the public debate Support our work: Donate Shop Join Us

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