View or download a PDF copy of Joseph Parampathu’s C4SS Study here: Prison Labor: Capitalism Without Markets, Understanding the Economics of Totalitarian Institutions Abstract Prison labor remains a paradox in many ways. Simultaneously sparsely studied or recorded, and ubiquitous; derided by labor unions and free workers as unfair competition and lauded by businesses as…

Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women di Victoria Law Quando si parla di prigioni solitamente si pensa a detenuti uomini. Comprensibile, perché i detenuti sono in gran parte uomini. Secondo Victoria Law, però, la popolazione carceraria femminile cresce a ritmi allarmanti. Tra il 1990 e il 2000 le detenute sono aumentate del 108%,…

Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women by Victoria Law Conversations about prison typically focus on male prisoners. This is understandable, given that the vast majority of prisoners are men. But according to Victoria Law, the population of women in prison has been growing at an alarming rate. The number of women incarcerated grew…

Presidential contender and “progressive” hero Bernie Sanders has been rightfully criticized for his support of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. The act, also known as the “Biden Crime Bill,” dramatically increased police presence and funding, banned “assault weapons,” and created strict new sentencing guidelines. Somehow Sanders has managed to escape criticism for…

It’s election day in the USA. The mass incarceration nation is deciding which political opportunists will rule. On the state and local level, citizens are casting their votes on ballot initiatives that will determine the structure, specifics, or application of state coercion. Some of these ballot initiatives probably deserve support from prison abolitionists, specifically initiatives…

It’s well known that the United States has the largest prison population on Earth. It’s less obvious why this is the case. To truly understand mass incarceration, we should examine what caused America’s prison population to grow so dramatically over the last several decades. The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and…

Mandatory minimum sentences have been receiving a fair bit of scrutiny lately, largely due to the efforts of Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM). And rightly so. Mandatory minimums remove discretion and context from sentencing, resulting in grossly unjust and wildly disproportionate sentences for minor offenses. Moreover, they’ve caused some troubling shifts in who has discretionary…

On July 7th, Molly Knefel published a great piece on jury nullification in The Nation. Knefel opens by discussing the trial of Cecily McMillan, an Occupy Wall Street protester who was convicted of “assaulting” a police officer who had assaulted her, and sentenced to a prison term that most of the jurors who convicted her…

Neste Natal, peço encarecidamente a você que mantenha as famílias juntas. Rogo que você se articule contra o complexo industrial prisional e o aparato do estado que já fizeram em pedaços tantas famílias.

This Christmas, I urge you to keep families together. I urge you to organize against the prison industrial complex and the state apparatus that have broken so many families apart.

The conversation on prison profiteering and the American state’s slave trade hits the radio!

When “progressive” Democrats profit from caging and abusing immigrants, the poor, people of color, transgender women, and LGBT youth, it’s time to leave the party.