The United States accounts for only 5% of the world’s population and yet it locks up 25% of the world’s prisoners. As the number of incarcerated Americans rises every year, it becomes clearer and clearer that prisons do not solve the problems the criminal justice system is supposed to address. Instead, prisons traumatize prisoners, destabilize families and communities, and exacerbate racism, gender oppression, and economic inequality–social conditions that affect everyone inside and outside prison walls.
Sending free books is one way of showing solidarity with people trapped in the system and pushing back against the Prison Industrial Complex. As we engage in this work, it is important to educate ourselves and our communities about the complexities of the PIC, historical and current forms of resistance, and alternatives that offer the possibility of a world without prisons.
This list is by no means comprehensive. It is a small collection of readings, videos, and other organizations that have informed our work and that we think are worth sharing.
Books
Are Prisons Obsolete?, by Angela Davis
Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women, by Victoria Law
Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, by Alexander Berkman
Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis, by Christian Parenti
The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander
Abolition Now! Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle Against the Prison Industrial Complex, by the CR10 Publications Collective
Resurrection, by Leo Tolstoy
Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Reports and Articles
Land of the Free: The Best Investigative Reporting on U.S. Prisons, roundup by ProPublica
The Abolitionist, a news publication by Critical Resistance
Banking on Bondage: Private Prisons and Mass Incarceration, report by The American Civil Liberties Union
Films
The House I Live In, documentary by Eugene Jarecki
Midnight Express, drama based on a true story, directed by Alan Parker
Transformative Justice
Restorative and Transformative Justice Resources, compiled by the Geschke Center at The University of San Francisco
Toward Transformative Justice, by Generation Five
Organizations and Projects
The Real Cost of Prisons Project
