Free Them All

Free Them All
Author: Gwenola Ricordeau
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2023-08-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1839762748

An indispensable guide to the feminist case for prison abolition How does the criminal justice system affect women’s lives? Do prisons keep women safe? Should feminists rely on policing and the law to achieve women’s liberation? The mainstream feminist movement has proposed "locking up the bad men," and called on prisons, the legal system, and the state to protect women from misogynist violence. This carceral approach to feminism, activist and scholar Gwenola Ricordeau argues, does not make women safer: it harms women, including victims of violence, and in particular people of color, poor people, and LGBTQ people. In this scintillating, comprehensive study, Ricordeau draws from two decades as an abolitionist activist and scholar of the penal justice system to describe how the criminal justice system hurts women. Considering the position of survivors of violence, criminalized women, and women with criminalized relatives, Ricordeau charts a new path to emancipation without incarceration. WWith a new foreword by Silvia Federici. Translated from the French by Tom Roberge and Emma Ramadan.

Migrating to Prison

Migrating to Prison
Author: César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández
Publisher: The New Press
Total Pages: 152
Release: 2023-10-03
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1620978350

NATIONAL BESTSELLER A powerful, in-depth look at the imprisonment of immigrants, addressing the intersection of immigration and the criminal justice system, with a new epilogue by the author “Argues compellingly that immigrant advocates shouldn’t content themselves with debates about how many thousands of immigrants to lock up, or other minor tweaks.” —Gus Bova, Texas Observer For most of America’s history, we simply did not lock people up for migrating here. Yet over the last thirty years, the federal and state governments have increasingly tapped their powers to incarcerate people accused of violating immigration laws. Migrating to Prison takes a hard look at the immigration prison system’s origins, how it currently operates, and why. A leading voice for immigration reform, César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández explores the emergence of immigration imprisonment in the mid-1980s and looks at both the outsized presence of private prisons and how those on the political right continue, disingenuously, to link immigration imprisonment with national security risks and threats to the rule of law. Now with an epilogue that brings it into the Biden administration, Migrating to Prison is an urgent call for the abolition of immigration prisons and a radical reimagining of who belongs in the United States.

Are Prisons Obsolete?

Are Prisons Obsolete?
Author: Angela Y. Davis
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Total Pages: 128
Release: 2011-01-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1609801040

With her characteristic brilliance, grace and radical audacity, Angela Y. Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of the prison. As she quite correctly notes, American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. For generations of Americans, the abolition of slavery was sheerest illusion. Similarly,the entrenched system of racial segregation seemed to last forever, and generations lived in the midst of the practice, with few predicting its passage from custom. The brutal, exploitative (dare one say lucrative?) convict-lease system that succeeded formal slavery reaped millions to southern jurisdictions (and untold miseries for tens of thousands of men, and women). Few predicted its passing from the American penal landscape. Davis expertly argues how social movements transformed these social, political and cultural institutions, and made such practices untenable. In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Professor Davis seeks to illustrate that the time for the prison is approaching an end. She argues forthrightly for "decarceration", and argues for the transformation of the society as a whole.

The Mars Room

The Mars Room
Author: Rachel Kushner
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2018-05-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1476756600

TIME’S #1 FICTION TITLE OF THE YEAR • NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018 FINALIST for the MAN BOOKER PRIZE and the NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD LONGLISTED for the ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL An instant New York Times bestseller from two-time National Book Award finalist Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room earned tweets from Margaret Atwood—“gritty, empathic, finely rendered, no sugar toppings, and a lot of punches, none of them pulled”—and from Stephen King—“The Mars Room is the real deal, jarring, horrible, compassionate, funny.” It’s 2003 and Romy Hall, named after a German actress, is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility, deep in California’s Central Valley. Outside is the world from which she has been severed: her young son, Jackson, and the San Francisco of her youth. Inside is a new reality: thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive; the bluffing and pageantry and casual acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike; and the deadpan absurdities of institutional living, portrayed with great humor and precision. Stunning and unsentimental, The Mars Room is “wholly authentic…profound…luminous” (The Wall Street Journal), “one of those books that enrage you even as they break your heart” (The New York Times Book Review, cover review)—a spectacularly compelling, heart-stopping novel about a life gone off the rails in contemporary America. It is audacious and tragic, propulsive and yet beautifully refined and “affirms Rachel Kushner as one of our best novelists” (Entertainment Weekly).

All Our Trials

All Our Trials
Author: Emily L Thuma
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2019-03-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0252051173

During the 1970s, grassroots women activists in and outside of prisons forged a radical politics against gender violence and incarceration. Emily L. Thuma traces the making of this anticarceral feminism at the intersections of struggles for racial and economic justice, prisoners’ and psychiatric patients’ rights, and gender and sexual liberation. All Our Trials explores the organizing, ideas, and influence of those who placed criminalized and marginalized women at the heart of their antiviolence mobilizations. This activism confronted a "tough on crime" political agenda and clashed with the mainstream women’s movement’s strategy of resorting to the criminal legal system as a solution to sexual and domestic violence. Drawing on extensive archival research and first-person narratives, Thuma weaves together the stories of mass defense campaigns, prisoner uprisings, broad-based local coalitions, national gatherings, and radical print cultures that cut through prison walls. In the process, she illuminates a crucial chapter in an unfinished struggle––one that continues in today’s movements against mass incarceration and in support of transformative justice.

Teachings from the Medicine Buddha Retreat

Teachings from the Medicine Buddha Retreat
Author: Lama Zopa Rinpoche
Publisher: Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2009-01-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1891868381

Kyabje Lama Zopa Rinpoche gave these teachings during a Medicine Buddha retreat held at Land of Medicine Buddha in Soquel, California, from October 26 to November 17, 2001. Edited by Ailsa Cameron, this book covers an amazing range of topics. From a review in BuddhaDharma magazine: Teachings From the Medicine Buddha Retreat is a nearly complete record of the teachings given by Lama Zopa Rinpoche during a twenty-five day Medicine Buddha retreat in the fall of 2001. The sections are short, on topics such as making offerings to the buddhas and the nature of mind. The retreat was held less than two months after the 9/11 attacks, and Lama Zopa's teachings are full of references to terrorism, war, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The book is not meant as a coherent presentation on any particular topic; however, one is rewarded by just opening it and reading anywhere. Lama Zopa is a clear and effective teacher, and his stories are endlessly entertaining and inspiring. This book is made possible by kind supporters of the Archive who, like you, appreciate how we make these teachings freely available in so many ways, including in our website for instant reading, listening or downloading, and as printed and electronic books. Our website offers immediate access to thousands of pages of teachings and hundreds of audio recordings by some of the greatest lamas of our time. Our photo gallery and our ever-popular books are also freely accessible there. Please help us increase our efforts to spread the Dharma for the happiness and benefit of all beings. You can find out more about becoming a supporter of the Archive and see all we have to offer by visiting our website. Thank you so much, and please enjoy this ebook.

American Political Rhetoric

American Political Rhetoric
Author: Peter Augustine Lawler
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 444
Release: 2005
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780742542037

American Political Rhetoric is the only reader designed for introductory classes in American politics and government that is both focused on fundamental political principles and includes nothing but classic examples of our nation's political rhetoric. The fourth edition of this book is completely reorganized, with material both contemporary and classic added to each chapter. The most noteworthy innovations include a separate chapter on gender and the latest Supreme Court opinions on school prayer and abortion.

All of Us or None

All of Us or None
Author: Monisha Das Gupta
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 157
Release: 2024-08-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1478059893

In All of Us or None, Monisha Das Gupta tells the story of contemporary antideportation organizing in the United States by migrants and refugees labeled as criminal aliens. These activists, who live daily with criminalization, work against forms of deportation that Das Gupta calls settler carcerality—the United States’ use of deportation to exert territorial control in the face of Indigenous self-determination. Drawing on fieldwork with antideportation organizing groups in New York, Los Angeles, Long Beach, and Honolulu, Das Gupta documents the inventive methods of struggle against settler carcerality. Das Gupta shows how the organizers’ actions and visions depart from the settler colonial nature of the mainstream demands for a pathway to citizenship and civil rights. Through direct action, storytelling, political education, and youth and queer leadership, these organizations and collectives conceptualize an abolitionist vision of migration justice that rejects the settler state and encompasses all those who are disavowed. By highlighting this work, Das Gupta demonstrates the transformative promise offered by a dissident migrant-led politics working toward dismantling settler structures and logics.

The Portable Abraham Lincoln

The Portable Abraham Lincoln
Author: Abraham Lincoln
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2009-01-27
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780143105640

Celebrate the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth with this new edition of his greatest speeches and writings Abraham Lincoln endowed the American language with a vigor and moral energy that has all but disappeared from today's public rhetoric. Lincoln's writings are testaments of our history, windows into his enigmatic personality, and resonant examples of the writer's art. The Portable Abraham Lincoln contains the great public speeches - the first debate with Stephen Douglas, the "House Divided" speech, the Gettysburg Address, the Second Inaugural Address - along with less familiar letters and memoranda that chart Lincoln's political career, his evolving stand against slavery, and his day-to-day conduct of the Civil War. This edition includes a revised introduction, updated notes on the text, a chronology of Lincoln's life, and four new selections of his writing. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.