The number of ‘origin stories’ for mass incarceration has exploded in recent years. These are mostly books. Here are some:
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, 2010.
Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America, 2014. [interview with author linked]
Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America, 2016. [interview with author linked]
Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, 2010. [interview with author linked]
Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, 2003.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California [interview with author linked]
Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity, 2019.
Heather Ann Thompson, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History,” 2010.
James Forman, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, 2017, [interview with author linked]
Charlotte Rosen, “Abolition or Bust: Liberal Police Reform as an Engine of Carceral Violence,” 2020.
micah herskind 