Video Spotlight
In this animated interview, the sociologist Bruce Western provides a brief introduction to the American reality of systems of mass incarceration:
Find Books
Excessive Punishment : How the Justice System Creates Mass Incarceration by Location: Available OnlinePublication Date: 2024A wide-ranging and powerful look at the failures of the status quo, Excessive Punishment also considers how to reimagine the justice system to support restoration instead of retribution.
From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime by Location: Available OnlinePublication Date: 2016How did the "land of the free" become the home of the world's largest prison system?
Prison Capital by Location: Available OnlineISBN: 9781469675107Publication Date: 2023Through extensive research, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs illuminates how policy makers enlarged Louisiana's carceral infrastructures with new prisons and jail expansions alongside the bulking up of police and prosecutorial power.
Building the Prison State by Location: Available OnlinePublication Date: 2018The United States incarcerates more people per capita than any other industrialized nation in the world--about 1 in 100 adults, or more than 2 million people--while national spending on prisons has catapulted 400 percent.
The Supreme Court's Role in Mass Incarceration by Location: Available OnlinePublication Date: 2020The Supreme Court's Role in Mass Incarceration illuminates the role of the United States Supreme Court's criminal procedure revolution as a contributing factor to the rise in U.S. incarceration rates.
American purgatory prison imperialism and the rise of mass incarceration by Location: Available OnlinePublication Date: 2023Here is a bold new effort to tell the full story of prisons and incarceration--at home and abroad--as well as a powerful future vision of a world without prisons.
Data Spotlight
The Sentencing Project details statistics on imprisonment and racial and ethnic disparities:
Find Articles
The following is a selection of the many articles available to you through BU Libraries:
- "Women's Health in the Era of Mass Incarceration" by Christopher Wildeman and Hedwig Lee" (2021). Available here.
- "Roe v Wade and the New Jane Crow: Reproductive Rights in the Age of Mass Incarceration" by L.M. Paltrow (2022). Available here.
- "Fear or Loathing in the United States? Public Opinion and the Rise of Racial Disparity in Mass Incarceration, 1978–2015" by Scott Duxbury (2021). Available here.
- "Assessing mass incarceration's effects on families" (2021). Available here.
- "Neoliberalism, mass incarceration, and the US debt–criminal justice complex" by Dillon Wamsley (2019). Available here.
- "Reconstructive Justice — Public Health Policy to End Mass Incarceration" by Eric Reinhart and Debra Malina (2023). Available here.
