Sharpe James was elected mayor of his adopted city, Newark, New Jersey in 1986. He served for an unprecedented twenty years. As Mayor, Sharpe helped to move his beloved city from urban blight to urban bright. After retiring in 2006, Sharpe was accused of crimes against his beloved city that he did not commit. He was indicted, arrested and convicted of these crimes receiving a sentence of twenty-seven months in a federal prison. While incarcerated, Sharpe wrote his memoir. Political Prisoner is a poignant story of a poor boy from Florida who rose to become a prominent politician in the state of New Jersey, only to be brought down by the unscrupulous tactics of an aspiring governor.
A WALL STREET JOURNAL, USA TODAY, and PUBLISHERS WEEKLY NATIONAL BESTSELLER NEW BOOK CLAIMS DONALD TRUMP WILL RUN AND WIN IN 2024! A riveting account of the HOAX that sent a presidential campaign chairman to solitary confinement because he wouldn’t turn against the President of the United States. The chief weapon deployed by the government-corporate-media Establishment against the Trump presidency was propaganda. Time and again, allegations from anonymous sources were disseminated by a partisan media, promoted by a dishonest Democrat Party leadership, and ultimately debunked when the facts surfaced. But by the time the truth came out, it was too late. There had already been casualties. One of the highest profile casualties was Paul Manafort. Desperate to defeat Donald Trump—or hamper his presidency after he won—Democrats and their Establishment allies colluded with foreign operatives to concoct a completely false narrative about Paul’s supposed conspiracy with pro-Russian elements in Ukraine to further Vladimir Putin’s efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election. But it wasn’t just defamation of Paul’s character. They took the unprecedented step of enlisting the US intelligence and law enforcement communities in using their power against President Trump and his campaign team. Political Prisoner finally exposes the lies left unchallenged by media who pronounced Paul guilty long before his case ever saw the inside of a courtroom. Not only is it untrue that Victor Yanukovych or any of Paul’s clients were “pro-Putin,” it is the opposite of the truth. Paul’s work in Ukraine and throughout his career was 100 percent aligned with US interests in the countries he worked in, sometimes even acting as a back channel for the White House itself. Neither was Paul guilty of laundering money, evading taxes, or deliberately deceiving the US government by failing to register as a foreign agent—which he wasn’t. These were all politically motivated charges manufactured by the Special Counsel’s team for one reason and one reason only: to get Paul to testify against Donald Trump about a conspiracy that never existed. When they hear the basis of these spurious charges, Americans will wonder what country they are living in and what has happened to our system of justice. Political Prisoner tells the real story of Paul’s life and career, exploding the lies about his work in Ukraine, his previous work with foreign governments and business interests in other countries, his involvement with the Trump campaign, and the “process crimes” for which he was wrongly convicted and sent to prison. It is no exaggeration to say that everything most Americans think they know about Paul Manafort is false.
On a November night in 1984, Susan Rosenberg sat in the passenger seat of a U-Haul as it swerved along the New Jersey Turnpike. At the wheel was a fellow political activist. In the back were 740 pounds of dynamite and assorted guns. That night I still believed with all my heart that what Che Guevara had said about revolutionaries being motivated by love was true. I also believed that our government ruled the world by force and that it was necessary to oppose it with force. Raised on New York City's Upper West Side, Rosenberg had been politically active since high school, involved in the black liberation movement and protesting repressive U.S. policies around the world and here at home. At twenty-nine, she was on the FBI's Most Wanted list. While unloading the U-Haul at a storage facility, Rosenberg was arrested and sentenced to an unprecedented 58 years for possession of weapons and explosives. I could not see the long distance I had traveled from my commitment to justice and equality to stockpiling guns and dynamite. Seeing that would take years. Rosenberg served sixteen years in some of the worst maximum-security prisons in the United States before being pardoned by President Clinton as he left office in 2001. Now, in a story that is both a powerful memoir and a profound indictment of the U.S. prison system, Rosenberg recounts her journey from the impassioned idealism of the 1960s to life as a political prisoner in her own country, subjected to dehumanizing treatment, yet touched by moments of grace and solidarity. Candid and eloquent, An American Radical reveals the woman behind the controversy--and reflects America's turbulent coming-of-age over the past half century.
In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in the role of the prison as a source of political ideas and site of political engagement, as well as in the prisoner’s quest for citizenship. The rising number of prisoners has increased fiscal burdens, which has meant that imprisonment has become a more important political issue. There is also greater interest in the prison as a site of political activism and in the generation of radical political ideas within the prison context and the formation of political networks within prison which extend beyond the prison walls. This book considers the prison as a site of political protest, discusses the quest for citizenship and the denial or negation of citizenship in prison, examines the discovery of politics in prison and the role of the prison in increasing political awareness, explores the treatment of political prisoners and reflects on the prisoner as a political problem for politicians negotiating pressures from the media and the public when addressing prisoners’ demands. Drawing on a range of contemporary and historical topics such as prison riots, radicalisation and the denial of voting rights, and including discussion of cases from the UK, US and Russia, this book examines the prison as a political institution and as a site of both politicisation and political protest. This book will be of interest to students and academics engaged with prisons, penology, punishment and corrections.
A CounterPunch Best Book of the Year A Lone Star Policy Institute Recommended Book “If you care, as I do, about disrupting the perverse politics of criminal justice, there is no better place to start than Prisoners of Politics.” —James Forman, Jr., author of Locking Up Our Own The United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. The social consequences of this fact—recycling people who commit crimes through an overwhelmed system and creating a growing class of permanently criminalized citizens—are devastating. A leading criminal justice reformer who has successfully rewritten sentencing guidelines, Rachel Barkow argues that we would be safer, and have fewer people in prison, if we relied more on expertise and evidence and worried less about being “tough on crime.” A groundbreaking work that is transforming our national conversation on crime and punishment, Prisoners of Politics shows how problematic it is to base criminal justice policy on the whims of the electorate and argues for an overdue shift that could upend our prison problem and make America a more equitable society. “A critically important exploration of the political dynamics that have made us one of the most punitive societies in human history. A must-read by one of our most thoughtful scholars of crime and punishment.” —Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy “Barkow’s analysis suggests that it is not enough to slash police budgets if we want to ensure lasting reform. We also need to find ways to insulate the process from political winds.” —David Cole, New York Review of Books “A cogent and provocative argument about how to achieve true institutional reform and fix our broken system.” —Emily Bazelon, author of Charged
The Struggle Within is an accessible yet wide-ranging historical primer about how mass imprisonment has been a tool of repression deployed against diverse left-wing social movements over the last fifty years. Berger examines some of the most dynamic social movements across half a century: black liberation, Puerto Rican independence, Native American sovereignty, Chicano radicalism, white antiracist and working-class mobilizations, pacifist and antinuclear campaigns, and earth liberation and animal rights. Berger’s encyclopedic knowledge of American social movements provides a rich comparative history of numerous social movements that continue to shape contemporary politics. The book also offers a little-heard voice in contemporary critiques of mass incarceration. Rather than seeing the issue of America’s prison growth as stemming solely from the war on drugs, Berger locates mass incarceration within a slew of social movements that have provided steep challenges to state power.
Bilanggo is the diary of a decade behind bars.William Pomeroy and his Filipina wife, Celia Mariano, like hundreds of other communists and militants, were sent to prison in the early 1950s for participating in the Huk guerilla struggle for liberation. Although this is the story of political prisoners in Philippine jails some fifty years ago, it is a story that has increasing relevance in a society that has seen increased political oppression in the last decade.
Prisons constitute one of the most controversial and contested sites in a democratic society. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the industrialized world, with over 2 million people in jails, prisons, and detention centers; with over three thousand on death row, it is also one of the few developed countries that continues to deploy the death penalty. International Human Rights Organizations such as Amnesty International have also noted the scores of political prisoners in U.S. detention. This anthology examines a class of intellectuals whose analyses of U.S. society, politics, culture, and social justice are rarely referenced in conventional political speech or academic discourse. Yet this body of outlawed 'public intellectuals' offers some of the most incisive analyses of our society and shared humanity. Here former and current U.S. political prisoners and activists-writers from the civil rights/black power, women's, gay/lesbian, American Indian, Puerto Rican Independence and anti-war movements share varying progressive critiques and theories on radical democracy and revolutionary struggle. This rarely-referenced 'resistance literature' reflects the growing public interest in incarceration sites, intellectual and political dissent for social justice, and the possibilities of democratic transformations. Such anthologies also spark new discussions and debates about 'reading'; for as Barbara Harlow notes: 'Reading prison writing must. . . demand a correspondingly activist counterapproach to that of passivity, aesthetic gratification, and the pleasures of consumption that are traditionally sanctioned by the academic disciplining of literature.'—Barbara Harlow [1] 1. Barbara Harlow, Barred: Women, Writing, and Political Detention (New England: Wesleyan University Press, 1992). Royalties are reserved for educational initiatives on human rights and U.S. incarceration.
