Theories and Origins of Punishment

 Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments (Cambridge

University Press, 1995).
 Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon and Other Prison
Writings (Verso, 1995).
 Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (Seven Stories Press, 2003).
 Colin Dayan, The Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make
and Unmake Persons (Princeton University Press, 2011).
 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the
Prison (Pantheon, 1977).
 Caleb Smith, The Prison and the American Imagination (Yale
University Press, 2011).
 Patrick Alexander, From Slave Ship to Supermax: Mass
Incarceration, Prisoner Abuse and the New Neo-Slave Novel (Temple,
2018).

Race, Sex, Labor, and Prisons in the Early

Republic
 Regina Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History
of Modern American Sexuality(University of Chicago Press, 2008).
 Jen Manion, Liberty’s Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early
America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).
 Kelly Lytle Hernández, City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and
the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 (University of
North Caroline Press, 2017).

The Prison Rebellion Years

 Mumia Abu-Jamal, Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending
Prisoners v. the U.S.A. (City Lights Books, 2009).
 Malcolm X and Alex Haley,The Autobiography of Malcolm
X (Random House, 1965).
 Bettina Aptheker, The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela
Davis (International Publishers, 1975).
 Bettina Aptheker and Angela Davis, eds., If They Come in the
Morning: Voices of Resistance (Third Press, 1971).
 Dan Berger, Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil
Rights Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2014).
 Jamie Bissonette, When the Prisoners Ran Walpole: A True Story
in the Movement for Prison Abolition(South End Press, 2008)
 Daniel Burton-Rose, Guerrilla USA: The George Jackson Brigade
and the Anticapitalist Underground of the 1970s (University of
California Press, 2010).
 Alan Eladio Gómez, “Feminism, Torture, and the Politics of
Chicana/Third World Solidarity: An Interview with Olga
Talamante,” Radical History Review 101 (2008): 160–78.
 Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (L. Hill, 1987).
 Heather Ann Thompson, Blood is in the Water: The Attica Prison
Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy(Pantheon, 2016).
 Erik Olin Wright, The Politics of Punishment: A Critical Analysis of
Prisons in America (Harper Colophon, 1973).
 Dan Berger and Toussaint Losier, Rethinking the American Prison
Movement (Routledge, 2018).
Anticarceral Feminism
 Hazel V. Carby. “Policing the Black Woman’s Body in an Urban
Context.” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 4 (1992): 738-55.
 INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, ed., The Color of
Violence: The Incite! Anthology (South End Press, 2006).
 Joy James, ed., The Angela Y. Davis Reader (Blackwell, 1998).
 Laura McTighe, with Deon Haywood. “Front Porch Revolution:
Resilience Space, Demonic Grounds, and the Horizons of a Black
Feminist Otherwise.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society 44, no. 1 (2018): 25-52.
 Lena Carla Palacios, “Challenging Convictions: Indigenous and
Black Race-Radical Feminists Theorizing the Carceral State and
Abolitionist Praxis in the United States and Canada.” Meridians 15
(2016): 137-165.
 Emily Thuma, All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist
Fight to End Violence (University of Illinois Press, 2019).

Expanding the Prison Industrial Complex

 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the
Age of Colorblindness (New Press, 2010).
 Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime:
The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Harvard University Press,
2016).
 Joy James, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and
Prisons (St. Martin’s Press, 2000).
 Deborah McDowell, Claudrena Harold, and Juan Battle, eds., The
Punitive Turn: New Approaches to Race and Incarceration (University of
Virginia Press, 2013).
 Christian Parenti, Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the
Age of Crisis (Verso, 2001).
 Mary Pattillo, David Weiman, and Bruce Western,
eds., Imprisoning America: The Social Effects of Mass
Incarceration (Russell Sage Foundation, 2004).
 Robert Perkinson, Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison
Empire (Metropolitan Books, 2010).
 Henry Ruth and Kevin R. Reitz, The Challenge of Crime:
Rethinking Our Response (Harvard University Press, 2003).
 Jacqueline Wang, Carceral Capitalism (MIT Semiotext[e], 2018).
 Keramet Reiter, 23/7: Pelican Bay and the Rise of Long-Term
Solitary Confinement (Yale University Press, 2016)
 “Prisons and Class Warfare,” an interview with Ruth Wilson
Gilmore, Historical Materialism.

Health, Justice, and Resistance in the

Neoliberal Order
 Safiya Bukhari,  The War Before: The True Life Story of Becoming
a Black Panther (Feminist Press, 2010).
 Staughton Lynd,  Lucasville: The Untold Story of a Prison
Uprising (PM Press, 2011).

The End of Policing

 Angela J. Davis, ed. Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution,
and Imprisonment (Vintage, 2017).
 Micol Seigel, Violence Work: State Power and the Limits of
Police (Duke University Press, 2018).
 Marc Neocleous, The Fabrication of Social Order: A Critical
Theory of Police Power (Pluto Press, 2000).
 Marisol Lebron, Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and
Resistance in Puerto Rico (UC Press, 2019).
 Stuart Schrader, “More Than Cosmetic Changes: The Challenges
of Experiments with Police Demilitarization in the 1960s and
1970s,” Journal of Urban History (April 2017).
 Carceral Intersections
 Eric Stanley and Nat Smith, eds.,  Captive Genders: Trans
Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (AK Press, 2011).
 Eric Stanley, Dean Spade, and Queer (In)Justice, “Queering
Prison Abolition, Now?” American Quarterly64,1 (2012): 115–27.

Voices from Inside

 Jack Henry Abbott, In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from
Prison (Random House, 1981).
 Mumia Abu Jamal, Live From Death Row (Harper Perennial,
1996).
 Mumia Abu Jamal, Writings on the Wall: Selected Prison
Writings (City Lights, 2014).
 Joy James, ed., Imprisoned Intellectuals: America’s Political
Prisoners Write on Life, Liberation, and Rebellion (Rowman and
Littlefield, 2003).
 Dylan Rodríguez, Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical
Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime(University of Minnesota Press,
2006).
 James Yaki Sayles, Meditations on Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the
Earth: New Afrikan Revolutionary Writings (Kersplebedeb, 2010).
 Shaka Senghor, Writing My Wrongs: Life, Death, and Redemption
in an American Prison (Convergent Books, 2016).
 Yusef Shakur, The Window 2 My Soul: My Transformation from a
Zone 8 Thug to a Father and Freedom Fighter (Urban Guerilla
Publishing, 2008).
 Colton Simpson, Inside the Crips: Life Inside L.A.’s Most
Notorious Gang (St. Martin’s Press, 2005).
 Raul R. Salinas, edited by Louis Mendoza, raulrsalinas and the Jail
Machine: My Weapon is My Pen(University of Texas Press, 2006).

The Future of Prison Activism

 Hadar Aviram, Cheap on Crime: Recession-Era Politics and the
Transformation of American Punishment (University of California Press,
2015).
 Dan Berger, “Social Movements and Mass Incarceration: What is
to be Done?” Souls 15, 1-2 (2013), 3–18.
 CR10 Publications Collective, Abolition Now: Ten Years of
Strategy and Struggle Against the Prison Industrial Complex (AK Press,
2008).
 Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “The Worrying State of the Anti-Prison
Movement,” Social Justice Journal, February 23, 2015.
Ernest Drucker, ed. Decarcerating America: From Mass Punishment to
Public Health (New Press, 2018).
 Kelly Lytle Hernández, “Amnesty or Abolition: Felons, Illegals,
and the Case for a New Abolition Movement,” Boom: A Journal of
California 1,4 (Winter 2011): 54–68.
 Keramet Reiter, “The Pelican Bay Hunger Strike: Resistance
within the Structural Constraints of a US Supermax Prison,” South
Atlantic Quarterly 113,3 (Summer 2014): 579–611.
 Julia Sudbury, “Reform or Abolition?: Using Popular Mobilizations
to Dismantle the Prison-Industrial Complex,” Criminal Justice
Matters 77,1 (2009): 17–19.
 Mariame Kaba, David Stein, Dan Berger, “What Abolitionists
Do,” Jacobin, August 24, 2017.
 “Towards the Horizon of Abolition: A Conversation with Mariame
Kaba,” The Next System Project, November 9, 2017.