Here are some links to readings on mass incarceration and racial justice. More readings, including PDFs, are available to those with CWU Canvas accounts, at the "Mass Incarceration and Racial Justice" Canvas course at: https://canvas.cwu.edu/courses/19293/modules

War on Drugs

• Clemency for Non Violent Drug Offenders (New York Times) 
• Racial Disparity Project (drug offense issues) 
• As Heroin Use by Whites Soars, Parents Seek Gentler War on Drugs (NYT)

Arts, Literature, Performance

• Body Count: Coates Book Review & others (New Yorker)
• Coates  Interview--Advice on Writing (Atlantic with video)
• US Prison Culture blog (with poetry)
• Rene Denfeld THE ENCHANTED (novel, website)
• Youth Uprising's Poetry and Prison Project
• Angola Prison Art (abstract)
• Anathema Art: using Art to help inmates
• Prison Inmates write their own obituaries (video, LA Times)
• Truthworker Theatre Company: Youth Voices Against the School to Prison Pipeline (OF NOTE magazine)
• Morley: A Song for Women in Prison, Shackled in Childbirth (OF NOTE magazine)
• Mary DeWitt: Portraits of Women Serving Life (OF NOTE magazine)
• Randall Horton: From Prison, to Poet, to Professor (OF NOTE magazine)
• Guantanamo Art
• Lori Waselchuk: "Grace Before Dying" For An Aging Prison Population (OF NOTE magazine)
• Girl Time: Literacy, Justice, and the School-to-Prison Pipeline. Teaching for Social Justice
• The Arpilleras of Chile (Remembering the Disappeared)
• Prison Creative Arts Project (University of Michigan)

Poems for Discussion

• Jericho Brown,"Hustle"

Video for Discussion

• Video: Prison as Inherited Trait. (The Atlantic)
• Myth of Black Criminality (Ta-Nehisi Coates, in The Atlantic)
• PBS Video: America's Incarcerated (selections)

Historical Perspectives

• Michelle Alexander THE NEW JIM CROW (book website)
• Michelle Alexander interviewed on her book (video: one hour)
• Douglas Blackmon, SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME (book website)
• The Carcareal State issue, Journal of American History
• Ken Burns 2015 commencement address, on racism in US History (Washington U)

Women, Gender, Sexuality

• Gender and the Politics of Prison Labor (SIGNS, abstract)
• Lawston RAZOR WIRE WOMEN (google books)
• Mary DeWitt: Portraits of Women Serving Life (OF NOTE magazine)
• Women's Prisons as Sites of Resistance: Interview with Victoria Law
• #Say her Name: Resisting Police Violence against Black Women

Legal and Political

• Russell Berman, Moment for Criminal Justice Reform (The Atlantic)
• San Francisco Called a Model for Ending Mass Incarceration (The Crime Report)
• Five Things to Know about the History of Prisons before President Obama Visits El Reno (American Historical Association)
• Mass Incarceration Readings (The American Friends Service Committee)
• President Obama's NAACP address on incarceration (7/14/15)
• Equal Justice Initiative
• Mitch Ryals, Perpetual Payments
• Jeffrey Toobin, The Milwaukee Experiment
• Leah Sottile, Unforgiven 
• The Economist: Jailhouse Nation.

Imprisonment: Suggested Books (list submitted by Prof. Michael Harrod)

    Bruce Western’s Punishment and Inequality in America
    Katherine Beckett’s Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics
    Johnathan Simon’s Governing Through Crime
    David Garland’s The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society
    Todd R. Clear’s Imprisoning Communities
    Todd R. Clear and Natasha A. Frost’s The Punishment Imperative
    Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen’s Locked Out
    Matt Taibbi: The Divide
    Michael Tonry’s Thinking about Crime
    Amy E. Lerman’s The Modern Prison Paradox

Family, Children and Community

• Children of the Prison Boom: Mass Incarceration and the Future of American Inequality
• -The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Ta-Nehisi Coates; The Atlantic)
• Who Pays? The Cost of Mass Incarceration on Families (Ellen Baker Center report)

Business and Economics

• Chris Hedges THE PRISON STATE OF AMERICA
• 23 cents an hour: The perfectly legal slavery happening in modern-day America (Salon/Alternet)
•  

Education

• Education Under Arrest -Tavis Smiley Episode
• Rethinking Schools Editorial
• Teaching Tolerance
• Implicit Bias and School Discipline Report
• Pell Grants for Prisoners
• Why We Should Care About Boys and Young Men of Color by Tyrone C. Howard
• Decriminalizing School Discipline: Why Black Males Matter by Tyrone Howard
• Shutting down the school to prison pipeline      by Mary Ellen Flannery

Ethnographic Perspectives

• The Curious Eclipse of Prison Ethnography in the Age of Mass Incarceration by Loïc Wacquan
• Prison Ethnography special issue in Criminal Justice Issues

Policing

• Mark  Auslander, “We Can’t Breathe”: Performing Subjection in African American Protest Traditions. Centre for Imaginative Ethnography.
• Syllabus project on racial violence
• Policing Reform:Toolkit

Immigration and Detention

• Deportability and the Carcareal State by Torrie Hester in Journal of American History
• America's no 'land of the free' if we send kids fleeing violence to for-profit prisons | Congressman Raúl M Grijalva
• The Immigration-Industrial Complex: Blurring the Lines of Private Enterprise and Public Interest, Douglas Epps (video)
• Voices from Detention: Lissett Pineda in the Karnes Detention Center
• Voices from Detention: Oscar Quintero at the Etowah Detention Center
• Voices from Detention: Maxi Sopo at the Stewart Detention Center
• Judge condemns for profit family immigration detention (Democracy Now)
• CIVIC (End Isolation Now)--works on immigration detention issues
• Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention (graphic novel)

Restorative Justice and Alternatives to Incarceration

• Restorative Justice and the School to Prison Pipeline (abstract, URL)
• Critical Resistance (prison abolition movement)

• Racial Disparity Project (alternatives to imprisonment)
• Families against Mandatory Minimums

Background on 2015-16 Speakers

Michael Eric Dyson

• On Digital Black Intelligentsia (New Republic)