Golden Gulag
Golden Gulag

Author: Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2007-01-08

Total Pages: 413

ISBN-13: 0520938038

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Since 1980, the number of people in U.S. prisons has increased more than 450%. Despite a crime rate that has been falling steadily for decades, California has led the way in this explosion, with what a state analyst called "the biggest prison building project in the history of the world." Golden Gulag provides the first detailed explanation for that buildup by looking at how political and economic forces, ranging from global to local, conjoined to produce the prison boom. In an informed and impassioned account, Ruth Wilson Gilmore examines this issue through statewide, rural, and urban perspectives to explain how the expansion developed from surpluses of finance capital, labor, land, and state capacity. Detailing crises that hit California’s economy with particular ferocity, she argues that defeats of radical struggles, weakening of labor, and shifting patterns of capital investment have been key conditions for prison growth. The results—a vast and expensive prison system, a huge number of incarcerated young people of color, and the increase in punitive justice such as the "three strikes" law—pose profound and troubling questions for the future of California, the United States, and the world. Golden Gulag provides a rich context for this complex dilemma, and at the same time challenges many cherished assumptions about who benefits and who suffers from the state’s commitment to prison expansion.

The Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement
The Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement

Author: Eric Cummins

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 9780804722322

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This is a history of the California prison movement from 1950 to 1980, focusing on the San Francisco Bay Area's San Quentin State Prison and highlighting the role that prison reading and writing played in the creation of radical inmate ideology in those years. The book begins with the Caryl Chessman years (1948-60) and closes with the trial of the San Quentin Six (1975-76) and the passage of California's Determinate Sentencing Law (1977). This was an extraordinary era in the California prisons, one that saw the emergence of a highly developed radical convict resistance movement inside prison walls. This inmate groundswell was fueled at times by remarkable individual prisoners, at other times by groups like the Black Muslims or the San Quentin chapter of the Black Panther Party. But most often resistance grew from much wider sources and in quiet corners: from dozens of political study groups throughout the prison; from an underground San Quentin newspaper; and from covert attempts to organize a prisoners' union. The book traces the rise and fall of the prisoners' movement, ending with the inevitably bloody confrontation between prisoners and the state and the subsequent prison administration crackdown. The author examines the efforts of prison staff to augment other methods of inmate management by attempting to modify convict ideology by means of "bibliotherapy" and communication control, and describes convict resistance to these attempts as control. He also discusses how Bay Area political activists became intensely involved in San Quentin and how such writings as Chessman's Cell 2455, Cleaver's Soul on Ice, and Jackson's Soledad Brother reached far beyond prison walls to influence opinion, events, and policy.

Inside the Broken California Prison System
Inside the Broken California Prison System

Author: Boston Woodard

Publisher:

Published: 2011-10

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 9780964700932

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Inside the Broken California Prison System by veteran jailhouse journalist Boston Woodard provides an insider 's view of California's dysfunctional prison industrial complex in crisis. On May 23, 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that due to massive overcrowding, California is in violation of the Eighth Amendment, which constitutionally prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. Because its 33 prisons are at nearly 200 percent capacity, the state has been ordered to release or find new accommodations for more than 30,000 prisoners within two years. With the harshest sentencing laws, toughest parole policy, and highest recidivism rate in the nation, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is a failure on all counts except for those who profit from the $10 billion spent annually to maintain it. Woodard describes how it came to this, as well as the day-to-day reality of the impact on prisoners in a corrupt system effectively accountable to no one.Inside the Broken California Prison System is a collection of more than 40 articles originally published over a period of six years in the Community Alliance, a small monthly newspaper in Fresno, California. They detail subjects such as restricted media access to prisoners, the brutal impact of overcrowding, medical and mental health treatment failures, rogue prison staff, religious and racial discrimination, an omnipotent prison guard union, and shipping prisoners out of state to private prisons. At the same time he offers real solutions to the overcrowding problem that would not endanger public safety.Woodard is a writer, musician, literacy tutor, event organizer, and prisoners rights advocate who has been writing about what goes on inside the California prison system for almost two decades in both free world and prison publications. His articles have embarrassed and angered prison officials used to operating without public oversight, and he 's paid a price for exercising his First Amendment right to define his surroundings. He 's been put in the Hole, had his mail tampered with, lost his typewriter, subjected to verbal threats, had his personal property stolen or destroyed, and been illegally and adversely transferred from prison to prison. Still he refuses to be intimidated. My writing is not about prison rights, he says. It 's about the public 's right to know about the good and bad within these prison walls and how their money is being spent. It 's also about the positive efforts of men and women given up for lost by society. I just want the guards and prison officials to do what is demanded of me and every other prisoner in the system, and that is to obey the law and follow the regulations.

Prison Truth
Prison Truth

Author: William J. Drummond

Publisher: University of California Press

Published: 2020-01-07

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 0520298365

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San Quentin State Prison, California’s oldest prison and the nation’s largest, is notorious for once holding America’s most dangerous prisoners. But in 2008, the Bastille-by-the-Bay became a beacon for rehabilitation through the prisoner-run newspaper the San Quentin News. Prison Truth tells the story of how prisoners, many serving life terms, transformed the prison climate from what Johnny Cash called a living hell to an environment that fostered positive change in inmates’ lives. Award-winning journalist William J. Drummond takes us behind bars, introducing us to Arnulfo García, the visionary prisoner who led the revival of the newspaper. Drummond describes how the San Quentin News, after a twenty-year shutdown, was recalled to life under an enlightened warden and the small group of local retired newspaper veterans serving as advisers, which Drummond joined in 2012. Sharing how officials cautiously and often unwittingly allowed the newspaper to tell the stories of the incarcerated, Prison Truth illustrates the power of prison media to humanize the experiences of people inside penitentiary walls and to forge alliances with social justice networks seeking reform.

The Toughest Beat
The Toughest Beat

Author: Joshua Page

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 0199985073

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The Toughest Beat uses the rise of the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, the state's powerful prison officers' union, to explore the actors and interests that have created, shaped, and protected the Golden State's sprawling, dysfunctional penal system -- and how it might yet be transformed.

Greenlight
Greenlight

Author: Tony “Bandit” Alvarado

Publisher: Dorrance Publishing

Published: 2021-08-25

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 1636611699

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Greenlight: California Prisons By: Tony “Bandit” Alvarado Greenlight: California Prisons is based on crimes, murders, and ordered hits by mobsters in the 1990s. Tony "Bandit" Alvarado became a full-fledged "Lowco" of the Lowell Street Gang in 1990 by putting in work, pushing weight, early initiation, being a regulator and an enforcer, showing loyalty within his crew, and using criminal behavior toward his enemies to gain respect. This story is based on those events.

Paths of Discovery
Paths of Discovery

Author:

Publisher:

Published: 2015-05-16

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 9781508895152

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"Paths of Discovery: Art Practice and Its Impact in California Prisons" tells the stories of the men and women who discover-through prison fine arts programs-untapped skills, new passions, and the rewards of introspection and self-discipline. In these programs, professional artists provide inmates with quality instruction in visual, literary, and performing arts-and in the process often become mentors and role models for their students. By traveling with their teachers down paths of discovery, many of these inmate-artists learn to transform "doing time" into positive engagements that benefit their lives in prison and beyond. New to the Second Edition: Whereas the first edition focused solely on the state-run Arts-in-Corrections program with photographs and artwork from San Quentin State Prison, this new edition covers four of California's leading prison arts programs and includes images from five men's and women's prisons. Featured here are the William James Association, Marin Shakespeare Company's prison outreach project, The Actors' Gang Prison Project, and Jail Guitar Doors USA-as well as a brief history of the Arts-in-Corrections program. Includes: color photographs, interviews, and more than 100 reproductions of inmate paintings, drawings, prints and poetry.

Breathing Fire
Breathing Fire

Author: Jaime Lowe

Publisher: MCD

Published: 2021-07-27

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 0374721920

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A dramatic, revelatory account of the female inmate firefighters who battle California wildfires. Shawna was overcome by the claustrophobia, the heat, the smoke, the fire, all just down the canyon and up the ravine. She was feeling the adrenaline, but also the terror of doing something for the first time. She knew how to run with a backpack; they had trained her physically. But that’s not training for flames. That’s not live fire. California’s fire season gets hotter, longer, and more extreme every year — fire season is now year-round. Of the thousands of firefighters who battle California’s blazes every year, roughly 30 percent of the on-the-ground wildland crews are inmates earning a dollar an hour. Approximately 200 of those firefighters are women serving on all-female crews. In Breathing Fire, Jaime Lowe expands on her revelatory work for The New York Times Magazine. She has spent years getting to know dozens of women who have participated in the fire camp program and spoken to captains, family and friends, correctional officers, and camp commanders. The result is a rare, illuminating look at how the fire camps actually operate — a story that encompasses California’s underlying catastrophes of climate change, economic disparity, and historical injustice, but also draws on deeply personal histories, relationships, desires, frustrations, and the emotional and physical intensity of firefighting. Lowe’s reporting is a groundbreaking investigation of the prison system, and an intimate portrayal of the women of California’s Correctional Camps who put their lives on the line, while imprisoned, to save a state in peril.