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Literature for Justice
“For the third and final year, the Literature for Justice Committee presents its annual reading list on the topic of mass incarceration for its nationwide, book-based campaign supported by the Art for Justice Fund. The Committee is thrilled to select seven titles in conversation with one another, and the ten titles that preceded, to further investigate the carceral system. Together, these books build momentum, urge readers along a path forward, and help frame the concept of abolition. From memoir and poetry to nonfiction, the selections centralize the voices of those directly affected by incarceration and expand outwards to offer context and inform a broader understanding of the system’s history with conquest, colonization, and globalization.”
—2020-2021 Literature for Justice Committee
Ossuaries by Dionne Brand
(McClelland & Stewart / Penguin Random House, March 2010)
COMMITTEE’S CITATION:
“’I lived and loved, some might say, / in momentous times, / looking back, my dreams were full of prisons’ opens Dionne Brand’s Ossuaries, a constellation of the bright and brutal ways our United States-ian definitions of ‘human’ have blueprinted and maintained our nation’s carceral dreams. What is any freedom if, for Black women like Yasmine, freedom must be wrested from their nations through fugitivity—stolen in escape or awarded as brief relief from punishment, a grindstone of wastedness and sensual exhaustion, the loneliness of undergrounds, violence received unless it becomes violence given? From within one of many ossuaries of American punishment, these visible and invisible architectures, designed to ravel a body of its flesh and touch, prophesies of an impossibility ‘to live and love at the same time,’ Brand asks, ‘who could have lived, / each day, / who could have lived each day knowing’ and the answer is: All of us—we know, and now, how are we prepared to live, what are we willing to wage and wager to make one another free.”
—Natalie Diaz, author of, most recently, Postcolonial Love Poem
BOOK SYNOPSIS:
Dionne Brand’s Ossuaries is hypnotic and urgent. A long poem, dual voiced—one voice hovers over a future present, describing human zoos in the contemporary world, the living museums of spectacle, and the bones of decaying cultures and toxic ideas. Another voice carries the narrative of Yasmine, a woman living an underground life, fleeing. Cold-eyed and cynical, Yasmine thinks through the periodic crises in which coalesce human aspiration and its antithesis. Solitary and clandestine, the voices cross borders, actual (Algeria, Cuba, Canada) and timeless (jazz and paintings). Always, the urgency and lyric intensity for which Brand is celebrated drives this long poem.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Dionne Brand is a renowned poet, novelist, and essayist known for formal experimentation and the beauty and urgency of her work. A poet engagé, Brand’s award-winning poetry books include Land to Light On (the Governor General’s Literary Award and Trillium Book Award); Ossuaries (the prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize); and thirsty (the Pat Lowther Memorial Award). Her latest, The Blue Clerk, an essay poem, won the Trillium Book Award. Theory, her latest of five novels, won the Toronto Book Award and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature (2019). She is the author of the influential non-fiction work, A Map to the Door of No Return.
GET THE BOOK:
Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarcerationby Nicole R. Fleetwood
(Harvard University Press, April 2020)
COMMITTEE’S CITATION:
“This beautiful book is both personal and moving while also academically rigorous and provocative. It shows the purposes and place of art in the lives of incarcerated people, their families and communities. Fleetwood’s work also makes clear art’s central, irreplaceable role in confronting and dismantling mass incarceration.”
—Piper Kerman, author of Orange Is the New Black: My Time in a Women’s Prison
BOOK SYNOPSIS:
More than two million people are currently behind bars in the United States. Incarceration not only separates the imprisoned from their families and communities; it also exposes them to shocking levels of deprivation and abuse and subjects them to the arbitrary cruelties of the criminal justice system. Yet, as Nicole Fleetwood reveals, America’s prisons are filled with art. Despite the isolation and degradation they experience, the incarcerated are driven to assert their humanity in the face of a system that dehumanizes them.
Based on interviews with currently and formerly incarcerated artists, prison visits, and the author’s own family experiences with the penal system, Marking Time shows how the imprisoned turn ordinary objects into elaborate works of art. Working with meager supplies and in the harshest conditions—including solitary confinement—these artists find ways to resist the brutality and depravity that prisons engender. The impact of their art, Fleetwood observes, can be felt far beyond prison walls. Their bold works, many of which are being published for the first time in this volume, have opened new possibilities in American art. As the movement to transform the country’s criminal justice system grows, art provides the imprisoned with a political voice. Their works testify to the economic and racial injustices that underpin American punishment and offer a new vision of freedom for the twenty-first century.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Nicole R. Fleetwood is Professor of American Studies and Art History at Rutgers University. Her work on art and mass incarceration has been featured at the Aperture Foundation, the Zimmerli Art Museum, the Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site, and the Cleveland Public Library. Her exhibitions received praise by the New York Times, Nation, Village Voice, and The New Yorker. Her book, On Racial Icons and Troubling Vision, won the Lora Romero First Book Prize from the American Studies Association.
GET THE BOOK:
Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California by Ruth Wilson Gilmore
(University of California Press, January 2007)
COMMITTEE’S CITATION:
“Published in 2007, Golden Gulag maps and explains the exponential growth of California prisons starting in the early 1980s. The book rigorously and convincingly argues that the prison industrial complex shadowed, and eventually overshadowed, an inadequate welfare state. As public interest in prison industrial complex abolition has dramatically increased in the past few months, there is no better time to read Golden Gulag as millions demand a radical transformation of society. One of the most influential books of the past decade, Golden Gulag is a must-read for anyone interested in how the carceral state has expanded under global racial capitalism and how we struggle against this.”
—Mariame Kaba, founder of Project NIA
BOOK SYNOPSIS:
Since 1980, the number of people in U.S. prisons has increased more than 450%. Despite a crime rate that has been falling steadily for decades, California has led the way in this explosion, with what a state analyst called, “the biggest prison building project in the history of the world.” Golden Gulag provides the first detailed explanation for that buildup by looking at how political and economic forces, ranging from global to local, conjoined to produce the prison boom.
In an informed and impassioned account, Ruth Wilson Gilmore examines this issue through statewide, rural, and urban perspectives to explain how the expansion developed from surpluses of finance capital, labor, land, and state capacity. Detailing crises that hit California’s economy with particular ferocity, she argues that defeats of radical struggles, weakening of labor, and shifting patterns of capital investment have been key conditions for prison growth. The results—a vast and expensive prison system, a huge number of incarcerated young people of color, and the increase in punitive justice such as the “three strikes” law—pose profound and troubling questions for the future of California, the United States, and the world. Golden Gulag provides a rich context for this complex dilemma, and at the same time challenges many cherished assumptions about who benefits and who suffers from the state’s commitment to prison expansion.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Ruth Wilson Gilmore has co-founded many grassroots organizations including California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network. The Antipode documentary, Racial Capitalism with Ruth Wilson Gilmore features her internationalist political work. Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition (Haymarket) and Abolition Geography (Verso) are forthcoming in 2021. She is Professor of Geography and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center.
GET THE BOOK:
No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity by Sarah Haley
(University of North Carolina Press, February 2016)
COMMITTEE’S CITATION:
“No Mercy Here traces a history of Black women prisoners who were exploited through the convict lease system in Georgia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This meticulously researched book contributes important original information to the field of carceral studies and reshapes how we consider racialized gender violence. Haley excavates the voices and uplifts the lives of Black women who have been invisibilized and in the process she transforms our understanding of the U.S. as a prison nation. This book is already a classic text that will stand the test of time.”
—Mariame Kaba, founder of Project NIA
BOOK SYNOPSIS:
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries imprisoned Black women faced wrenching forms of gendered racial terror and heinous structures of economic exploitation. Subjugated as convict laborers and forced to serve additional time as domestic workers before they were allowed their freedom, Black women faced a pitiless system of violence, terror, and debasement. Drawing upon Black feminist criticism and a diverse array of archival materials, Sarah Haley uncovers imprisoned women’s brutalization in local, county, and state convict labor systems, while also illuminating the prisoners’ acts of resistance and sabotage, challenging ideologies of racial capitalism and patriarchy and offering alternative conceptions of social and political life.
A landmark history of Black women’s imprisonment in the South, this book recovers stories of the captivity and punishment of Black women to demonstrate how the system of incarceration was crucial to organizing the logics of gender and race, and constructing Jim Crow modernity.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Sarah Haley is associate professor of gender studies and African American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she directs UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women/Social Sciences Division Black Feminism Initiative. Her research focuses on abolition and histories and theories of Black feminism, gender, and the carceral state.
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City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771–1965 by Kelly Lytle Hernández
(University of North Carolina Press, April 2017)
COMMITTEE’S CITATION:
“City of Inmates insists that we understand mass incarceration against the backdrop of two centuries of violence (against indigenous people, Mexican and Chinese immigrants, poor white migrants, and Black people) on these shores. ‘Mass incarceration,’ the first sentence of the book declares, ‘is mass elimination.’ This beautifully written history forces readers to pan out and see how the broader logic of settler colonialism has led a city like Los Angeles to lock up more people than any other city in the world.”
—Eddie S. Glaude Jr., author of, most recently, Begin Again: James Baldwin and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own
BOOK SYNOPSIS:
Los Angeles incarcerates more people than any other city in the United States, which imprisons more people than any other nation on Earth. This book explains how the City of Angels became the capital city of the world’s leading incarcerator. Marshaling more than two centuries of evidence, historian Kelly Lytle Hernández unmasks how histories of native elimination, immigrant exclusion, and Black disappearance drove the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles. In this telling, which spans from the Spanish colonial era to the outbreak of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, Hernández documents the persistent historical bond between the racial fantasies of conquest, namely its settler colonial form, and the eliminatory capacities of incarceration.
But City of Inmates is also a chronicle of resilience and rebellion, documenting how targeted peoples and communities have always fought back. They busted out of jail, forced Supreme Court rulings, advanced revolution across bars and borders, and, as in the summer of 1965, set fire to the belly of the city. With these acts those who fought the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles altered the course of history in the city, the borderlands, and beyond. This book recounts how the dynamics of conquest met deep reservoirs of rebellion as Los Angeles became the City of Inmates, the nation’s carceral core. It is a story that is far from over.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Kelly Lytle Hernández is professor of history and African American studies at University of California, Los Angeles. She is also interim director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. Currently, Professor Lytle Hernández is the research lead for the Million Dollar Hoods project, which maps how much is spent on incarceration per neighborhood in Los Angeles County. She is one of the nation’s leading experts on race, immigration, and mass incarceration.
GET THE BOOK:
Assata: An Autobiography by Assata Shakur
(Lawrence Hill Books / Chicago Review Press, November 2001)
COMMITTEE’S CITATION:
“Assata Shakur’s autobiography, Assata, is a memoir must-read. Heartbreaking because there is such a timelessness to the pain—Black women’s pain. The torture and harm done to her almost 50 years ago, is not unlike what is done to so many women—particularly incarcerated Black women—today. But it’s also timeless in that it shows us the power of Black women’s leadership—and everything that this society will do to destroy it. And I want all the women I am able to reach to read it because of all the things that Assata teaches us, most importantly, we are taught to never give up.”
—Susan Burton, author of Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women
BOOK SYNOPSIS:
On May 2, 1973, Black Panther Assata Shakur (aka JoAnne Chesimard) lay in a hospital, close to death, handcuffed to her bed, while local, state, and federal police attempted to question her about the shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike that had claimed the life of a white state trooper. Long a target of J. Edgar Hoover’s campaign to defame, infiltrate, and criminalize Black nationalist organizations and their leaders, Shakur was incarcerated for four years prior to her conviction on flimsy evidence in 1977 as an accomplice to murder. This intensely personal and political autobiography belies the fearsome image of JoAnne Chesimard long projected by the media and the state. With wit and candor, Assata Shakur recounts the experiences that led her to a life of activism and portrays the strengths, weaknesses, and eventual demise of Black and white revolutionary groups at the hand of government officials. The result is a signal contribution to the literature about growing up Black in America that has already taken its place alongside The Autobiography of Malcolm X and the works of Maya Angelou. Two years after her conviction, Assata Shakur escaped from prison. She was given political asylum by Cuba, where she now resides.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Assata Olugbala Shakur, born as JoAnne Deborah Byron, married name Chesimard, is an African American activist and escaped convict who was a member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army. Between 1971 and 1973, Shakur was accused of several crimes and made the subject of a multi-state manhunt. Two years after her conviction, Assata Shakur escaped from prison in 1979. She was given political asylum by Cuba, where she now resides.
GET THE BOOK:
Solitary by Albert Woodfox with Leslie George
(Grove Press / Grove Atlantic, March 2019)
COMMITTEE’S CITATION:
“Albert Woodfox survived more than 40 years buried in solitary confinement in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison, and in this book, illuminates his torturous ordeal and the long fight for his release. Solitary is a memoir that starkly reveals the vicious harms of solitary confinement and its widespread use in American prisons and jails. Solitary units are the jail within the jail, and Woodfox’s story challenges us to question the banishment and exile of prison itself in any society that aspires to be free.”
—Piper Kerman, author of Orange Is the New Black: My Time in a Women’s Prison
BOOK SYNOPSIS:
Known as one of the Angola Three, Albert Woodfox, spent four decades in solitary confinement for a crime he did not commit. In Solitary, he shares not only how he survived his ordeal, but also how he was able to inspire his fellow prisoners, and now all of us, with his humanity and devoted activism. Albert’s ability to emerge whole from his odyssey within America’s prison and judicial systems is a triumph of the human spirit and makes his book a clarion call to reform the inhumanity of solitary confinement in the United States and around the world.
Arrested often as a teenager in New Orleans, inspired behind bars in his early twenties to join the Black Panther Party because of its social commitment and code of living, Albert was serving a 50-year sentence in Angola prison for armed robbery when on April 17, 1972, a white guard was killed. Albert and another member of the Panthers were immediately accused of the crime and put in solitary confinement by the warden. Without a shred of actual evidence against them, their trial was a sham of justice that gave them life sentences in solitary. Decades passed before Albert gained a lawyer of consequence; even so, sixteen more years and multiple appeals were needed before he was finally released in February 2016.
Remarkably self-aware that anger or bitterness would have destroyed him in solitary confinement, sustained by the shared solidarity of two fellow Panthers, Albert turned his anger into activism and resistance. The Angola 3 resolved never to be broken by the grinding inhumanity and corruption that effectively held them for decades as political prisoners. He survived to give us Solitary, a chronicle of rare power and humanity that proves the better spirits of our nature can thrive against any odds.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Leslie George is a long-time journalist and award-winning radio producer. In her years working for WBAI Pacifica Radio in New York City, she was a reporter for “The Evening News,” a producer for the morning news program “Wake Up Call” with Amy Goodman and Bernard White, and the writer and host of the Sunday news program “Week in Review.” She won the Silver Reel Award from the National Federation of Community Broadcasters for her documentaries Drug Mules in 1998 and The Emma Clark Story in 2004. She first interviewed Albert Woodfox in 1998. From those recordings she produced the documentary Freedom Behind Bars, which aired on Democracy Now! in 1999. Over the years she has written for a number of national magazines. She was an editorial director at iVillage, and worked as digital product director for WWD.com. She currently lives in New Orleans.
Albert Woodfox was born in 1947 in New Orleans. A committed activist in prison, he remains so today, speaking to a wide array of audiences, including the Innocence Project; the National Lawyers Guild; Harvard, Yale, and other universities; and at Amnesty International events in London, Paris, Denmark, Sweden, and Belgium. His book Solitary was a Finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction and the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the Stowe Prize and the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Book of the Year. It has been published in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Spain, Germany, and Brazil. He lives in New Orleans.
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Drawing on her personal experiences, Susan Burton founded A New Way of Life Reentry Project (ANWOL) in 1998, dedicating her life to helping other women break the cycle of incarceration. ANWOL provides resources such as housing, case management, employment, legal services, leadership development, and community organizing on behalf of, and with, people who struggle to rebuild their lives after incarceration. Susan was named a Top Ten CNN Hero and received the prestigious Gleitsman Citizen Activist Award from the Harvard Kennedy School. She is a recipient of both the Encore Purpose Prize and the James Irvine Foundation Leadership Award and was named by the Los Angeles Times as one of eighteen new civil rights leaders in the nation. Her memoir, Becoming Ms. Burton, received a 2018 NAACP Image Award and the inaugural Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice.
Natalie Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. She is the author of two poetry collections, When My Brother Was an Aztec and Postcolonial Love Poem. She is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow, as well as a Lannan Literary Fellow and Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Artist Fellow. She was awarded Princeton’s Holmes National Poetry Prize and a Hodder Fellowship. She is a member of the Board of Trustees for United States Artists, where she is an alumna of the Ford Foundation Fellowship. Diaz is the Director of the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands and the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr. is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor and chair of African American Studies at Princeton University. He is the former president of the American Academy of Religion, the largest professional organization of scholars of religion in the world. Glaude is the author of several books including Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul, which has been described as “one of the most imaginative, daring books of the twenty-first century.” Imani Perry described his most recent book, Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own as “precisely the witness we need for our treacherous times.” Glaude is also a columnist for Time magazine and a regular contributor on MSNBC. He hails from Moss Point, Mississippi, a small town on the Gulf Coast, and is a graduate of Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia.
Mariame Kaba is an organizer, educator, and curator who is active in movements for racial, gender, and transformative justice. She is the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots organization with a vision to end youth incarceration. Mariame is currently a researcher at Interrupting Criminalization: Research in Action at the Barnard Center for Research on Women, a project she co-founded with Andrea Ritchie in 2018. Mariame has co-founded multiple organizations and projects including We Charge Genocide, the Chicago Freedom School, the Chicago Taskforce on Violence Against Girls & Young Women, Love & Protect, the Just Practice Collaborative, and Survived & Punished. Mariame serves on the advisory boards of the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, Critical Resistance, and the Chicago Community Bond Fund. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications including the New York Times, The Nation, The Guardian, Washington Post, In These Times, Teen Vogue, The New Inquiry, and more.
Piper Kerman is the author of the memoir Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison, which was adapted into an Emmy Award-winning original series for Netflix. Piper collaborates with nonprofits, philanthropies, and other organizations working in the public interest and serves on the board of directors of the Women’s Prison Association. She has been called as a witness by committees of the United States House of Representatives and Senate and frequently speaks to students and groups about the power of women’s communities, the need for prison reform, and support for people after incarceration. In 2015, the Equal Justice Initiative recognized Piper as a Champion of Justice. Piper is a graduate of Smith College and has taught writing to incarcerated persons in state prisons. She lives in the Bay Area with her family and is working on two books related to social justice and mass incarceration.
The Literature for Justice Committee is honored to select five books that explore the criminal justice system and aim to help advance public understanding of mass incarceration in the United States. In the second year of this initiative, the selection committee deemed it crucial to focus on those often neglected in public conversations on mass incarceration: women and families. The list centers first-person narratives from formerly incarcerated authors, partners of those behind bars, and leaders of prison reform and abolition movements since the 1980s. Similarly to the inaugural year, the committee hoped to provide multiple access points, including research-based nonfiction, memoir, and fiction.
—Literature for Justice Committee
2019-2020 LITERATURE FOR JUSTICE SELECTED READING LIST:
The Prisoner’s Wife: A Memoir by asha bandele (Scribner, Simon & Schuster, May 1999)
COMMITTEE’S CITATION:
“asha bandele is a poetic writer and searing intellect, one of the leading voices in the movement to end mass incarceration. The Prisoner’s Wife is her lyrical memoir of falling in love with an imprisoned man, a journey that takes her deep into an intimate exploration of truth, harm, forgiveness, redemption, and, in the end, the inhumanity of human caging.”
—Kelly Lytle Hernandez, author of City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965
BOOK SYNOPSIS:
As a favor for a friend, a bright and talented young woman volunteered to read her poetry to a group of prisoners during a Black History Month program. It was an encounter that would alter her life forever, because it was there, in the prison, that she would meet Rashid, the man who was to become her friend, her confidant, her husband, her lover, her soul mate. At the time, Rashid was serving a sentence of twenty years to life for his part in a murder. The Prisoner’s Wife is a testimony, for wives and mothers, friends and families. It’s a tribute to anyone who has ever chosen, against the odds, to love.
asha bandele is an award-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author of six books, including the widely acclaimed memoir, The Prisoner’s Wife, and novel, Daughter. Her most recent work is a collaborative effort with Black Lives Matter co-founder, Patrisse Cullors, who courageously shared her story of challenge and triumph with asha in When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir. An advocate for racial justice and prison abolition, asha serves as political and organizational management consultant for foundations, PACs and nonprofits across the field. But of all her work, none has been more central than her role as the single parent of an exquisite daughter, Nisa, and stepmother to a brilliant son, Aundre, who was murdered in 2015.
GET THE BOOK:
Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women by Susan Burton and Cari Lynn (The New Press, May 2017)
COMMITTEE’S CITATION:
“Becoming Ms. Burton tells the extraordinary life story of the renowned activist Susan Burton, recounting her journey through the criminal injustice system and her transformation into a life of advocacy on behalf of formerly incarcerated women who are struggling to heal, survive and thrive. Her award-winning organization, A New Way of Life, has transformed the lives of more than a thousand formerly incarcerated women and is an international model for a more compassionate and effective approach to poverty, abuse, addiction, and other behaviors or harms that have been effectively criminalized.”
— Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
BOOK SYNOPSIS:
In this “stirring and moving tour-de-force” (John Legend), Susan Burton movingly recounts her own journey through the criminal justice system and her transformation into a life of advocacy. After a childhood of immense pain, poverty, and abuse in Los Angeles, the tragic loss of her son led her into addiction, which in turn led to arrests and incarceration. During the War on Drugs, Burton was arrested and would cycle in and out of prison for more than fifteen years. When, by chance, she finally received treatment, her political awakening began and she became a powerful advocate for “a more humane justice system guided by compassion and dignity” (Booklist, starred review). Her award-winning organization, A New Way of Life, has transformed the lives of more than one thousand formerly incarcerated women and is an international model for a less punitive and more effective approach to rehabilitation and reentry.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Susan Burton is the founder and executive director of A New Way of Life, a nonprofit that provides sober housing and other support to formerly incarcerated women. Nationally known as an advocate for restoring basic civil and human rights to those who have served time, Burton was a winner of AARP’s prestigious Purpose Prize and has been a Starbucks “Upstander,” a CNN Top 10 Hero, and a Soros Justice Fellow. The author, with Cari Lynn, of Becoming Ms. Burton, she lives in Los Angeles.
Cari Lynn is a journalist and the author of five books of nonfiction, including Leg the Spread and The Whistleblower (with Kathryn Bolkovac). Lynn has written for O, The Oprah Magazine; Health; the Chicago Tribune; and Deadline Hollywood. The author, with Susan Burton, of Becoming Ms. Burton, she lives in Los Angeles.
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Are Prisons Obsolete?by Angela Y. Davis (Seven Stories Press, April 2003)
COMMITTEE’S CITATION:
“Angela Y. Davis published Are Prisons Obsolete? in 2004. The question is both the question and the answer. We live in a country that takes the incarcerating of millions and millions of its citizens as a given. Davis’s poignant account challenges us, one would hope, out of complacency. It just demands that we ask: what of this madness are we really willing to accept is legitimate in our names?”
—Reginald Dwayne Betts, author of Shahid Reads His Own Palm, a 2018-2019 Literature for Justice title
BOOK SYNOPSIS:
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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
For more than fifty years, Angela Y. Davis has been active in numerous organizations challenging prison-related repression. Born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1944, Davis studied at Brandeis University, the Sorbonne, and with Herbert Marcuse at the Goethe Institute. Her advocacy on behalf of political prisoners, and her alleged connection to the Marin County courthouse incident, led to three capital charges, sixteen months in jail awaiting trial, and a highly publicized acquittal in 1972. In 1998, Davis was one of the twenty-five organizers of the historic Berkeley, California conference “Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex.” She is the author of many books, including Are Prisons Obsolete? and The Meaning of Freedom. She is Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
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The Mars Roomby Rachel Kushner (Scribner, Simon & Schuster, May 2018)
COMMITTEE’S CITATION:
“The portraits of incarcerated women in The Mars Room are as intimate as a diary, as vivid as a hologram, and as diverse and complex as our country. The novel reveals that inside every prison is a universe, populated by individual humans whose souls contain universes.”
—Zachary Lazar, author of Vengeance: A Novel
BOOK SYNOPSIS:
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)—a spectacularly compelling, heart-stopping novel about a life gone off the rails in contemporary America.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Rachel Kushner is the bestselling author of The Flamethrowers, a Finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times Top Ten Book of 2013; Telex from Cuba, a Finalist for the National Book Award; and The Mars Room. She lives in Los Angeles.
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Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair by Danielle Sered (The New Press, March 2019)
COMMITTEE’S CITATION:
“Danielle Sered’s brilliant book Until We Reckon challenges us to rethink the idea that punishment is the only solution to violent crime. As politicians and criminal justice reform activists work on reducing America’s prison population, what’s often glossed over is how to address those convicted of crimes deemed violent. Until We Reckon offers solutions rooted in the tradition of restorative justice that centers victims and perpetrators in the communal healing process. Sered’s wisdom and sharp insights are the guiding lights needed to illuminate a process of restorative justice for those grappling with dismantling the prison industrial complex.”
—Shaka Senghor, author of Writing My Wrongs: Life, Death, and Redemption in an American Prison
BOOK SYNOPSIS:
Although over half the people incarcerated in America today have committed violent offenses, the focus of reformers has been almost entirely on nonviolent and drug offenses. Danielle Sered’s brilliant and groundbreaking Until We Reckon steers directly and unapologetically into the question of violence, offering approaches that will help end mass incarceration and increase safety.
Widely recognized as one of the leading proponents of a restorative approach to violent crime, Sered asks us to reconsider the purposes of incarceration and argues persuasively that the needs of survivors of violent crime are better met by asking people who commit violence to accept responsibility for their actions and make amends in ways that are meaningful to those they have hurt—none of which happens in the context of a criminal trial or a prison sentence.
Critically, Sered argues that the reckoning owed is not only on the part of those who have committed violence, but also by our nation’s overreliance on incarceration to produce safety—at great cost to communities, survivors, racial equity, and the very fabric of our democracy.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Danielle Sered leads the award-winning Brooklyn-based Common Justice, which develops and advances solutions to violence that meet the needs of those harmed and advance racial equity without relying on incarceration. She is the author of Until We Reckon.
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Michelle Alexander is a highly acclaimed civil rights attorney, advocate, legal scholar, and author of The New York Times bestseller, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The New Jim Crow helped spark a national debate about the crisis of mass incarceration in the United States and inspired racial justice organizing and advocacy efforts nationwide. Numerous commentators have dubbed The New Jim Crow, ”the bible of a social movement,” and the book has become a staple of university curriculums, advocacy training, reading groups, and faith-based study circles. Alexander has been featured on national radio and television media outlets, including CNN, MSNBC, NPR, The Bill Moyers Journal, the Tavis Smiley Show, MSNBC, C-SPAN, and Democracy Now. She has also written for numerous publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, the Los Angeles Times, and Huffington Post. Alexander has served as a professor at several universities, including Stanford Law School, where she was an associate professor of Law and where she directed the Civil Rights Clinics. She also taught at Ohio State University where she held a joint appointment with the Moritz College of Law and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. Alexander served as a Soros Justice Fellow in 2005 and was appointed a Senior Fellow for the Ford Foundation in 2015. Prior to entering academia, Alexander served as the Director of the Racial Justice Project for the ACLU of Northern California, where she coordinated the Project’s media advocacy, grassroots organizing, coalition-building, and litigation. The Project’s priority areas were educational equity and criminal justice reform, and it was during those years that she launched a major campaign against racial profiling by law enforcement, known as the “DWB Campaign” or “Driving While Black or Brown Campaign.” In addition to her nonprofit advocacy experience, Alexander has worked as a litigator at private law firms, including at Saperstein, Goldstein, Demchak & Baller, in Oakland, California, where she specialized in plaintiff-side class action lawsuits alleging race and gender discrimination. Currently, Alexander is a visiting professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York City where she is exploring the moral and spiritual dimensions of mass incarceration. She is also an op-ed columnist for The New York Times.
Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet, memoirist, and lawyer. His writing grapples with the central role of incarceration to the American experience. His next collection of poetry, Felon, will be published in October 2019 by W.W.Norton & Company. His previous collection, Bastards of the Reagan Era received the 2016 New England Award in Poetry. His first collection of poems, Shahid Reads His Own Palm, won the Beatrice Hawley Awards and was selected by the National Book Foundation’s Literature for Justice Committee as a 2018-2019 title. Betts’ memoir, A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison, was the recipient of the 2010 NAACP Image Award for nonfiction. He is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2018 Emerson Fellow at New America. He holds a BA from the University of Maryland, an MFA from Warren Wilson College, and a JD from Yale Law School.
Zachary Lazar is the author of five books, including the novels Vengeance, Sway, and I Pity the Poor Immigrant, a New York Times Notable Book. His memoir, Evening’s Empire, an account of his father’s murder, led to a further engagement with incarceration and the criminal justice system through a journalism project at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, the root of his most recent novel, Vengeance. Lazar’s honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, and the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for “a writer in mid-career whose work has demonstrated consistent excellence.” His journalism has appeared in The New York Times, NPR’s All Things Considered, Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. Lazar lives in New Orleans and is on the creative writing faculty at Tulane University, where he teaches an introductory creative writing course that pairs Tulane students with an equal number of students incarcerated at East Baton Rouge Parish Prison. He also serves on the advisory board of the PEN America Writing for Justice Fellowship. Vengeance is the 2019 selection of One Book One New Orleans and the Tulane Reading Project, the shared reading experience for the incoming freshman class.
Kelly Lytle Hernandez is a professor of History, African American Studies, and Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where she holds The Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History and is a recipient of the 2019 MacArthur Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. She is also the Director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. One of the nation’s leading experts on race, immigration, and mass incarceration, she is the author of the award-winning books, Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol and City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles. City of Inmates recently won the 2018 James Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians, 2018 Robert G. Athearn Prize from the Western History Association, the 2018 John Hope Franklin Prize from the American Studies Association, and a 2018 American Book Award. Currently, Professor Lytle Hernandez is the Director and Principal Investigator for Million Dollar Hoods, a university-based, community-drive research project that maps the fiscal and human cost of mass incarceration in Los Angeles. For her leadership on the Million Dollar Hoods team, Professor Lytle Hernandez was awarded the 2018 Local Hero Award from KCET/PBS and the 2019 Catalyst Award from the South LA parent/student advocacy organization, CADRE.
Shaka Senghor is a leading voice in criminal justice reform and proud native of Detroit. His memoir, Writing My Wrongs: Life, Death, and Redemption in an American Prison, was released in March 2016 and debuted on the New York Times and The Washington Post bestseller lists. Shaka is a former MIT Media Lab Director’s Fellow, and a former Fellow in the inaugural class of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Community Leadership Network. Shaka’s 2014 TED Talk was featured in their “Year in Ideas” roundup, a curated collection of the year’s most powerful TED Talks and has over 1.5 million views. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2012 Black Male Engagement Leadership Award, the 2015 Manchester University Innovator of the Year Award, the 2016 Ford Man of Courage Award, and the 2016 NAACP Great Expectations Award. Shaka was recently recognized by OWN (the Oprah Winfrey Network) as a “Soul Igniter” in the inaugural class of the SuperSoul 100, a dynamic group of trailblazers whose vision and life’s work are bringing a higher level of consciousness to the world around them and encouraging others to do the same. He is a 2016 Ebony Magazine Power 100 Honoree. He has taught at the University of Michigan and shares his story of redemption around the world. Shaka was selected as one of 24 icons being featured in the upcoming Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service entitled “Men of Change,” debuting in the fall of 2019. Today, Shaka sits as President of Shaka Senghor, Inc. and his priority is shifting societal narratives by creating content with deep social impact and high entertainment value.
The Literature for Justice Committee is pleased to select five books that shine a necessary light on the American criminal justice system and provide crucial perspectives that help further the nation’s understanding of this massive apparatus that impacts the lives of citizens and non-citizens alike in the United States. In the inaugural year of this initiative, the selection committee chose a body of literature that critically and anecdotally explores our nation’s prisons and the crisis of mass incarceration. The committee felt it essential to select readings that would illuminate myriad elements of this issue—why the United States came to lock up more people than any other, how different groups in our society experience prison, and how this society could build new methods and systems to respond to the myriad social ills that land so many behind bars. Equally important to the committee was selecting readings from various genres, from historical nonfiction and memoir to fiction and poetry. Throughout the selection process the 2018 selectors were also deeply committed to foregrounding the work of formerly incarcerated authors.
—Literature for Justice Committee
Sergio De La Pava is the author of three novels: A Naked Singularity, Personae, and Lost Empress. He is also a lifelong public defender and Legal Director at New York County Defender Services in Manhattan where he represents indigent criminal defendants and advocates for large-scale criminal justice reform. He has taught at Seton Hall Law School and lectured, spoken, and written on criminal justice issues for The Guardian, MoMA PS1, Harvard Law, Public Radio International, Sky News, New York Daily News, and other venues.
Photo credit: Sharon Daniels
James Forman Jr. attended Yale Law School, and after he graduated, worked as a law clerk for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the U.S. Supreme Court. After clerking, he joined the Public Defender Service in Washington, D.C., where for six years he represented juveniles and adults in felony and misdemeanor cases. Professor Forman loved being a public defender, but he quickly became frustrated with the lack of education and job training opportunities for his clients. In 1997, along with David Domenici, he started the Maya Angelou Public Charter School, an alternative school for dropouts and youth who had previously been arrested. The school recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. At Yale Law School, where he has taught since 2011, Professor Forman teaches Criminal Law and a course called Race, Class, and Punishment. He began teaching behind prison walls in 2016, and now regularly offers a seminar called Inside-Out Prison Exchange: Issues in Criminal Justice. The class brings together ten Yale Law students and ten incarcerated students who meet weekly to study side by side in the prison. Professor Forman’s first book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, was called “superb and shattering” in The New York Times, “eloquent” and “sobering” in the London Review of Books, and “moving, nuanced, and candid” in The New York Review of Books. The book was named one of the 10 best books of the year by The New York Times and multiple other outlets, longlisted for the National Book Award, and was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction.
Photo courtesy of James Forman, Jr.
Mitchell S. Jackson’s debut novel The Residue Years was praised by publications including The New York Times, The Paris Review, and The Times of London. Jackson is the winner of a Whiting Award. His novel also won The Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence and was a finalist for the Center for Fiction’s Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Jackson’s honors include fellowships from TED, the Lannan Foundation, the Bread Loaf Conference, and the Center for Fiction. His writing has appeared in publications including The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, and Tin House. Jackson is a Clinical Associate Professor of Writing in the Liberal Studies Program of New York University. A well-regarded speaker, Jackson has delivered lectures and keynote addresses at events and institutions including the annual TED Conference, the Yale Law School RebLaw Conference, the Sydney Writers’ Festival, Brown University, Cornell University, and Columbia University. Jackson is also an advocate for criminal justice reform and visits prisons and youth facilities in the United States and abroad.
Photo credit: John Ricard
Rachel Kushner is the author of the bestselling novel The Flamethrowers, which was a Finalist for the 2013 National Book Award, the 2014 Folio Prize, the James Tait Black Prize, and was chosen as one of the five best novels of the year by The New York Times. Her debut novel, Telex from Cuba, was a Finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, winner of the California Book Award, and a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book. Her new novel, published in 2018, is The Mars Room. Kushner’s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The Paris Review. She has received fellowship awards from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and is on the advisory board of Justice Now, which advocates against human rights abuses in California women’s prisons, and whose leadership is comprised of people currently incarcerated.
Photo credit: Gabby Laurent
Dr. Heather Ann Thompson is a historian at the University of Michigan in the Department of Afro-American and African Studies and the Department of History. She is the Pulitzer Prize– and Bancroft Prize–winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy. Blood in the Water received six additional book awards, was a 2016 Finalist for the National Book Award, The Los Angeles Times Book Award, and The Cundill Book Prize, it received an honorable mention for the Silver Gavel Award, and landed on over 20 best of 2016 book lists including that of The New York Times. Thompson is also a public intellectual who writes regularly on the history of policing, mass incarceration and the current criminal justice system for The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Jacobin, The Atlantic, Salon, Dissent, NBC, New Labor Forum, The Daily Beast, and The Huffington Post, as well as for top scholarly publications. Her award-winning scholarly articles include: “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline and Transformation in the Postwar United States” from The Journal of American History, and “Rethinking Working-Class Struggle through the Lens of the Carceral State: Toward a Labor History of Inmates and Guards” in Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas. On the policy front, Thompson served on a National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel that studied the causes and consequences of mass incarceration in the U.S. Thompson has also served on the boards of several policy organizations and has been appointed to the National Academy of Sciences standing committee, The Committee on Law and Justice. In 2018, Thompson was awarded a Bearing Witness Writing Fellowship from the Art for Justice Fund. Her next book is on the MOVE bombing of 1985.
Photo credit: Graham MacIndoe
Literature for Justice (LFJ) is a nationwide, book-based campaign that seeks to contextualize and humanize the experiences of incarcerated people in the United States.
The program is guided by the Literature for Justice committee, a cohort of well-known authors who are also experts, leaders, and advocates within the space of mass incarceration. This committee is tasked with the creation and selection of a reading list of five books annually to guide readers through this complex issue, with the hope that these texts will help shift public perception and understanding of mass incarceration through the power of storytelling. Collectively, the selected books tell a story about America’s carceral system and what it means for all Americans.
In addition to publicizing and promoting the LFJ reading list, the National Book Foundation will present several large-scale public events featuring authors and experts on mass incarceration, accompanied by digital assets like supplemental reading recommendations and further commentary from the LFJ committee.
Literature for Justice is made possible from the Art for Justice Fund, a sponsored project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, in partnership with the Ford Foundation.
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