Ruth Wilson Gilmore: Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence

The Economy of Incarceration: Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Robin D.G. Kelley and Angela Davis: Freedom Dreams, Freedom Now!

Angela Davis on Prison Abolition, the War on Drugs and Why Social Movements Shouldn’t Wait on Obama

Bryan Stevenson: We need to talk about an injustice

Cornel West: Obama’s Response to Trayvon Martin Case Belies Failure to Challenge "New Jim Crow"

Dr Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Prison abolitionist

Ruth Wilson Gilmore: The World We Want is the World We Need

The World We Want is the World We Need: Ruth Wilson Gilmore Speaks from Critical Resistance on Vimeo.

Punishing Youth

by Henry Giroux, CounterPunch, 11 August 2012

There is by now an overwhelming catalogue of evidence revealing the depth and breadth of the state sponsored assault being waged against young people across the globe, and especially in the United States. What is no longer a hidden order of politics is that American  society is at war with its children, and that the use of such violence against young people is a disturbing index of a society in the midst of a deep moral and political crisis.  Beyond exposing the moral depravity of a nation that fails to protect its youth, the violence used against American youth speaks to nothing less than a perverse death-wish, especially in light of the fact that As Alain Badiou argues, we live in an era in which there is zero tolerance for poor minority youth and youthful protesters and “infinite tolerance for the crimes of bankers and government embezzlers which affect the lives of millions.” 

The Small Matter of a Horse: The Life of 'Nongoloza' Mathebula, 1867-1948

by Charles van Onselen (Ravan Press, Johannesburg, 1984)

Introduction

Modern South Africa's industrial achievements are often pointed to with considerable pride — sometimes by outsiders, but more frequently by the powerful or privileged within the country. Viewed from the heights of the cabinet room, the company boardroom, the stock exchange or the bank, there is no doubt some justification for this pride. A country which in 1981 had a gross national product of approximately R70,000 million, a private consumption expenditure bill of almost R 38,000 million and a wage bill of close on R35,000 million is indeed, as a recent edition of the Official Yearbook of the Republic of South Africa put it, 'the economic workshop of the African Continent'¹ Yet common sense as much as class analysis would lead one to believe that the view from the lower terrain of the township house, the mine compound or the farm hut would be more critical.

The LA rebellion, 20 years later

by Nigel C. Gibson

Paper presented at the conference on 'The LA Riots, Twenty Years Later', Harvard, April 2012, Published at Truthout

1. Letter From a Friend

I asked a friend who lives in South Central to send me his thoughts about Los Angeles 20 years after the rebellion. The following is part of what he had to say:

Twenty years after the L.A. rebellion finds most of the Black community in a state of shock because conditions are not better and the conditions which created the rebellion have only become more invisible to the outside world. The strait jacket of economics confines us all. The rock bottom conditions of poverty are suffocating the voice of protest in South Central L.A. Even the name South Central was changed to South L.A. by the politicians in an attempt to forget in their view the "negative" impact of the revolt.

The Prison: A Sign of Democracy?

Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex

From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: Rethinking the ‘race question’ in the US

by Loïc Wacquant, New Left Review, 2002

Not one but several ‘peculiar institutions’ have successively operated to define, confine, and control African-Americans in the history of the United States. The first is chattel slavery as the pivot of the plantation economy and inceptive matrix of racial division from the colonial era to the Civil War. The second is the Jim Crow system of legally enforced discrimination and segregation from cradle to grave that anchored the predominantly agrarian society of the South from the close of Reconstruction to the Civil Rights revolution which toppled it a full century after abolition. America’s third special device for containing the descendants of slaves in the Northern industrial metropolis is the ghetto, corresponding to the conjoint urbanization and proletarianization of African-Americans from the Great Migration of 1914–30 to the 1960s, when it was rendered partially obsolete by the concurrent transformation of economy and state and by the mounting protest of blacks against continued caste exclusion, climaxing with the explosive urban riots chronicled in the Kerner Commission Report. [1]

Angela Davis Discusses the Prison Industrial Complex

Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex

by Angela Davis, History is a Weapon

Imprisonment has become the response of first resort to far too many of the social problems that burden people who are ensconced in poverty. These problems often are veiled by being conveniently grouped together under the category "crime" and by the automatic attribution of criminal behavior to people of color. Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages.

The punitive regulation of poverty in the neoliberal age

Loïc Wacquant, Open Democracy

How and why has the prison returned to the institutional forefront of the advanced societies, when four decades ago analysts of the penal scene were convinced it was on the decline, if not on the path toward extinction? In my book Punishing the Poor, I make three arguments to resolve this historical conundrum. First, the expansion and glorification of the police, the courts and the penitentiary are a response not to criminal insecurity but to the social insecurity caused by the casualisation of wage labor and the disruption of ethno-racial hierarchy. Second, we need to reconnect social and penal policies and treat them as two variants of poverty policy to grasp the new punitive politics of marginality. Third, the simultaneous and converging deployment of restrictive “workfare” and expansive “prison fare” partake of the forging of the neoliberal state.

Remembering the Real Dragon- An Interview with George Jackson May 16 and June 29, 1971

Interview by Karen Wald and published in Cages of Steel: The Politics Of Imprisonment In The United States (Edited by Ward Churchill and J.J. Vander Wall), History is a Weapon

Karen Wald: George, could you comment on your conception of revolution?

George Jackson: The principle contradiction between the oppressor and oppressed can be reduced to the fact that the only way the oppressor can maintain his position is by fostering, nurturing, building contempt for the oppressed. That thing gets out of hand after a while. It leads to excesses that we see and the excesses are growing within the totalitarian state here. The excesses breed resistance; resistance is growing. The thing grows in a spiral. It can only end one way. The excesses lead to resistance, resistance leads to brutality, the brutality leads to more resistance, and finally the question will be resolved with either the uneconomic destruction of the oppressed, or the end of oppression. These are the workings of revolution. It grows in spirals, confrontations, and I mean on all levels. The institutions of society have buttressed the establishment, so I mean all levels have to be assaulted.