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The Culture of Punishment: Prison, Society and Spectacle
It is impossible to come in contact with commercial media and not be exposed to the specter of criminal justice as entertainment. Turn on the news and you can see car chases. Turn on afternoon fare and it is syndicated reality shows featuring people being chased down by police.
Continue reading...Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice
29. November 2009
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Incidents such as that of activist Brandon Darby informing on fellow activists, and the Tulia, Texas drug arrests scandal are but two examples of a trend that law enforcement has increasingly relied on as a method for policing, but which is increasingly returning disastrous results.
Continue reading...Humiliation, Abu Ghraib and the Failed Peace in Iraq
20. September 2009
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Victoria Fontan offers a fascinating perspective on the Iraq War and War on Terror, arguing that humiliation plays a key role in both. She starts with the premise that humiliation was instrumental in the shift from liberation to counterinsurgency in Iraq and, more generally, serves as the central rallying cry for fundamentalist terrorism across the globe.
Continue reading...The Guantanamo Files
29. August 2009
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Andy Worthington's hard-hitting new book shines a stark light into the black hole that is Guantanamo Bay prison, describing the process and consequences of a US intelligence project which is at the same time both ruthless and cackhanded; all the while failing to achieve its intentions.
Continue reading...Sacco and Vanzetti
12. August 2009
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As I watched Sacco and Vanzetti, an 80-minute-long documentary by Peter Miller, it drew me to the point of grabbing my pen, and paper and rewinding the film over and over again so not to miss an important fact, interview, or scene about one of the most famous political trials in U.S. history.
Continue reading...The Jena 6
6. July 2009
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"The DA's pen has replaced the lynching noose" -Mumia Abu Jamal Barely noticed In the midst of the hullabaloo and media hype over the death of Michael Jackson, a notorious case of racial injustice against six working-class African-American youths came to a quiet conclusion in the LaSalle Parish courthouse on June 25, 2009, in the parish (county) seat of Jena, state of Louisiana.
Continue reading...The Angola 3: Black Panthers and the Last Slave Plantation
20. June 2009
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It is no secret that the United States does not hesitate to incarcerate. While the US only represents 5% of the global population, it cages nearly 25% of the world's prisoners-approximately 2.3 million people. Of these 2.3 million people, approximately half are African American (13% of US population). Of course, the vastly disproportionate caging and state coercion of African Americans in the US has a long and brutal history. This bloody legacy is made manifest in prisons like Angola, named for the country from which many southern plantation slaves were abducted.
Continue reading...An Expen$ive Way to Make Bad People Worse: An Essay on Prison Reform from an Insider’s Perspective
10. June 2009
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In this short book, author Jens Soering outlines several prison myths that he says obscure our ability to take a rational, informed, and effective approach to incarceration in the U.S. Using the introductory chapter to highlight recent trends in crime, incarceration, recidivism, and prison expenditures (data from 2001 were the most recently available during the time of this writing) Soering dedicates the remaining chapters to discuss six prison myths that he argues cloud our understanding, judgment, and ultimately practices of incarceration.
Continue reading...From the Bottom of the Heap: The Autobiography of Black Panther Robert Hillary King
22. April 2009
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Presenting one's memoir consciously as that of a former Black Panther Party member, even as simply a factual statement, is bound to bring any such book into some heady company. Think Assata Shakur's Assata, George Jackson's Blood in My Eye, Bobby Seale's Seize the Time and nearly a dozen other autobiographies and biographies. And though From the Bottom of the Heap: The Autobiography Of Black Panther Robert Hillary King (nee Robert King Wilkerson) is no Soul On Ice (Eldridge Cleaver's bubbling personal manifesto), King's words percolate with the urgency and determination that made the Panthers once one of North America's most revolutionary units.
Continue reading...Let Freedom Ring: A Collection of Documents from the Movements to Free U.S. Political Prisoners
13. April 2009
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The Sixties presented social movements with some of recent history's most spectacular schisms, many of which continue to be debated. Assimilation versus revolutionary nationalism versus cultural nationalism; and Old Left aesthetics versus New Left rejection of convention were among them. But none so clearly defined the troubles of that period like the verbal and other skirmishes over militancy.
Continue reading...Become A Friend
2. December 2009
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