While the fact of prisons simmers behind innumerable news stories – from the West Memphis 3 to the Lockerbie bomber to the Miami football scandal -- the enormity of the system remains weirdly invisible. Prison is framed as a sort of conclusion; it’s where the bad guys go before vanishing into the ether and allowing our attention to move onto the next story. But more than two million lives are lived in U.S. prisons these days. And not only is the day-to-day reality of that worthy of more attention, but so are the consequences of our economic and political dependence on a punitive system that incarcerates 25 percent of the entire world’s inmates. Five percent of the world population is locked up in U.S. prisons. Both inside and outside the walls, much is stake.
Here are ten of the best books – contemporary and classic, fiction and nonfiction – about prisons. They are listed in no particular order, as all of them deserve your attention. Because incarceration isn’t an end to our stories: it’s just another beginning.
1. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander
Michelle Alexander puts her sharp legal mind to work in examining how criminal records are used to define what opportunities are and are not available to certain U.S. citizens -- in a way that dangerously mirrors Jim Crow laws. People of color are disproportionately represented in U.S. prisons, which means that the legality of denying former inmates the right to vote, access to food stamps, fair housing, employment opportunities, and exclusion from jury duty supports a society that is effectively not different than the segregation era. Alexander, a longtime civil rights advocate, says in the preface that “this book is not for everyone. I have a specific audience in mind – people who care deeply about racial justice but who, for any number of reasons, do not yet appreciate the magnitude of the crisis faced by communities of color as a result of mass incarceration.”
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