PRISONS, POLICING, & ABOLITION

BOOKS

• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander — Michelle Alexander, a legal scholar, outlines how the Reagan government exploited 1980s hysteria over crack cocaine to demonize the Black population so that 'black' and 'crime' became interchangeable. A timely guide to the labyrinth of propaganda, discrimination, and racist policies masquerading under other names that comprises what we call justice in America.

• Code of Silence by Jamie Kalven, a four-part investigation of a far-reaching criminal enterprise within the Chicago Police Department

• Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Edited by Joe Macaré, Maya Schenwar, et al. — This collection of reports and essays explores police violence against Black, brown, indigenous and other marginalized communities, miscarriages of justice, and failures of token accountability and reform measures. It also makes a compelling and provocative argument against calling the police.

• From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America by Elizabeth Hinton — explains the policy shift soon after passage of landmark Civil Rights legislation during the 1960s from social welfare to criminal justice as a framework for understanding racial inequities, poverty, and unrest. That shift led to the militarization of police departments and the over-policing of urban communities — especially those filled with young, black men — and the destructive, fatal consequences that we see today.

• White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson — this book plainly shows us that whenever African Americans started to make any strides (in education, voting, employment, home ownership), those gains were a threat to the status quo of inequality — those strides sparked incredibly intense and well-organized blowback — all of which leads me to appreciate just how insidious and persistent racial hatred is in the U.S. 

• PDF: A Tale of Two Countries: Racially Targeted Arrests in the Era of Marijuana Reform — With detailed recommendations for governments and law enforcement agencies, this comprehensive report by the ACLU provides a detailed road map for ending the War on Marijuana and ensuring legalization efforts center racial justice.

• PDF: The Mark of a Criminal Record by Devah Prager — With over 2 million individuals currently incarcerated, and over half a million prisoners released each year, the growing number of men being processed through the criminal justice system raises important questions about the consequences of this massive institutional intervention. This article focuses on the consequences of incarceration for the employment outcomes of black and white job seekers. 

ARTICLES

• Is Prison Necessary? a New York Times Magazine interview with abolitionist, activist and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore 

• “Who Gets to Be Afraid in America?” by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi

• A Brief History of Community Policing: Whose Community? by MPD150

• 10 Action Ideas for Building a Police-Free Future by MPD150

• Police “Reforms” You Should Always Oppose by Mariame Kaba

• The Death of George Floyd, In Context by Jelani Cobb

• Of Course There Are Protests. The State Is Failing Black People by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

• In Defense of Looting by Vicky Osterweil

• Thinking about how to abolish prisons with Mariame Kaba: podcast & transcript 

• The answer to police violence is not 'reform'. It's defunding. Here's why by Alex S Vitale

BOOKS

• A compilation of Black revolutionary texts available in PDF format here. (Big big thanks to Burn All Books for these resources!)

• BecauseWe’veRead’s digital library on prisons and policing

• The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale

• Abolition Now! (CR10 Collective)

• End of the Line: Tracing Racial Inequality from School to Prison by Lizbet Simmons

• From Slavery to Prisons: A Historical Delineation of the Criminalization of African Americans by Deborah Burris-Kitchen and Paul Burris

• Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Y. Davis (PDF available here, and additional readings by Angela Y. Davis available here)

• Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced and Underprotected from the African American Policy Forum & Columbia Law School’s Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies

• The Torture Machine by Flint Taylor

• Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson

• The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America by Khalil Gibran Muhammad 

• Police Unbound: Corruption, Abuse, and Heroism by the Boys in Blue by Anthony V. Bouza

• Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics by Marie Gottschalk

• No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Sarah Haley)

• Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color (Andrea Ritchie)

• Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence (Kellie Carter Jackson)

• Understanding Mass Incarceration: A People’s Guide to the Key Civil Rights Struggle of Our Time (James Kilgore)

• Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (Talitha L. LeFlouria)

• We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom by Bettina L. Love

• The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein (LISTEN to the NPR interview here)

• Our Enemies in Blue: Police & Power in America by Kristian Williams

• Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California by Ruth Wilson Gilmore

• Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire by Robert Perkinson

• Repair: Redeeming the Promise of Abolition (Katherine Franke)

• Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power Across Neoliberal America (Brett Story)

• Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power (Simon Balto)

• The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson

• Slavery by Another Name: The Reenslavement of Black Americans from Civl War to World War II (Douglas Blackmon)

• Carceral Capitalism (Jackie Wang)

• Writing on the Wall: Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Mumia Abu-Jamal)

• Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners V. The U.S.A (Mumia Abu-Jamal and Angela Y Davis)

• Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico (Marisol Lebron)

• The Trouble with Black Boys: ...and Other Reflections on Race, Equity, and the Future of Public Education by Pedro A Noguera

• Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity by Ann Arnett Ferguson

• How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood by P E Moskowitz

• Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys by Victor Rios

ARTICLES

• Major U.S. Cities Spend Millions More On Policing Than On Social Programs by Sean Collins

• What Abolitionists Do, by Dan Berger, Mariame Kaba, and David Stein

• Reformist reforms vs. abolitionist steps in policing: Infographic by CriticalResistance.org

• No More Money for the Police by Philip V. McHarris and Thenjiwe McHarris

• The Only Solution Is to Defund the Police by Alex S. Vitale

• A Jailbreak of the Imagination: Seeing Prisons for What They Are and Demanding Transformation by Mariame Kaba & Kelly Hayes

• The Myth of Liberal Policing by Alex S. Vitale

• “Who Gets to Be Afraid in America?” by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi

• The Stoop Isn’t the Jungle by Dwayne Betts

• The Abolitionist Toolkit by CriticalResistance.org

• A World Without Police Study Guide 

• Abolitionist Futures reading list

• The Minneapolis Uprising in Context by Elizabeth Hinton

• George Floyd Could Have Been My Brother by Rita Omokha

• This Is How Loved Ones Want Us To Remember George Floyd by Alisha Ebrahimji 

• Building a Police-Free Future by MPD150 (Foldable zine available here for print)

• You shouldn’t need a Harvard degree to survive birdwatching while black by Samuel Getachew, a 17-year-old and the 2019 Oakland youth poet laureate

• It’s exhausting. How many hashtags will it take for all of America to see Black people as more than their skin color? by Rita Omokha

• America’s Racial Contract Is Killing Us by Adam Serwer

• The Police Don’t Change by Joel Anderson

• The Subtle Linguistics of Polite White Supremacy by Yawo Brown

• Defund the Police Now by Justin Brooks

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