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Prison by Any Other Name
- The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms
- Narrated by: Emily Durante
- Length: 9 hrs and 19 mins
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Publisher's summary
Electronic monitoring. Locked-down drug treatment centers. House arrest. Mandated psychiatric treatment. Data-driven surveillance. Extended probation. These are some of the key alternatives held up as cost-effective substitutes for jails and prisons. But many of these so-called reforms actually widen the net, weaving in new strands of punishment and control, and bringing new populations, who would not otherwise have been subject to imprisonment, under physical control by the state.
As mainstream public opinion has begun to turn against mass incarceration, political figures on both sides of the spectrum are pushing for reform. But - though they're promoted as steps to confront high rates of imprisonment - many of these measures are transforming our homes and communities into prisons instead.
In Prison by Any Other Name, activist journalists Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law reveal the way the kinder, gentler narrative of reform can obscure agendas of social control and challenge us to question the ways we replicate the status quo when pursuing change. A foreword by Michelle Alexander situates the book in the context of criminal justice reform conversations. Finally, the book offers a bolder vision for truly alternative justice practices.
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- Narrated by: Kevin R. Free
- Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Today, Americans are debating our criminal justice system with new urgency. Mass incarceration and aggressive police tactics - and their impact on people of color - are feeding outrage and a consensus that something must be done. But what if we only know half the story? In Locking Up Our Own, the Yale legal scholar and former public defender James Forman Jr. weighs the tragic role that some African Americans themselves played in escalating the war on crime.
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Outstanding Book
- By Andrew on 12-13-17
By: James Forman Jr.
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To Protect and Serve
- How to Fix America's Police
- By: Norm Stamper
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 10 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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American policing is in crisis. The last decade witnessed a vast increase in police aggression, misconduct, and militarization, along with a corresponding reduction in transparency and accountability. Nowhere is this more noticeable and painful than in African American and other ethnic minority communities. Racism - from raw, individualized versions to insidious systemic examples - appears to be on the rise in our police departments.
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Truth mixed with liberal rhetoric
- By Eric G. on 11-19-16
By: Norm Stamper
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A Colony in a Nation
- By: Chris Hayes
- Narrated by: Chris Hayes
- Length: 5 hrs
- Unabridged
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Emmy Award-winning news anchor and New York Times best-selling author Chris Hayes argues that there are really two Americas: a Colony and a Nation. America likes to tell itself that it inhabits a postracial world, but nearly every empirical measure - wealth, unemployment, incarceration, school segregation - reveals that racial inequality hasn't improved since 1968.
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So much to this book!
- By Crystal Broadnax on 04-18-17
By: Chris Hayes
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Handbook for a Post-Roe America
- By: Robin Marty
- Narrated by: Charon Normand-Widmer
- Length: 5 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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This comprehensive manual for understanding and preparing for the looming changes to reproductive rights law explains how to get the healthcare you need - by any means necessary. Activist and writer Robin Marty guides listeners through various worst-case scenarios of a post-Roe America and offers ways to fight back, including how to acquire financial support, how to use existing networks and create new ones, and how to, when required, work outside existing legal systems.
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Old Version
- By Paige Clarkson on 01-26-23
By: Robin Marty
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America on Fire
- The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 60's
- By: Elizabeth Hinton
- Narrated by: Shayna Small
- Length: 10 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Elizabeth Hinton demonstrates in America on Fire the events of 2020 had clear precursors - and any attempt to understand our current crisis requires a reckoning with the recent past. Black rebellion, America on Fire powerfully illustrates, was born in response to poverty and exclusion, but most immediately in reaction to police violence. Presenting a new framework for understanding our nation’s strife, America on Fire is also a warning: Rebellions will surely continue until an oppressive system is finally remade on the principles of justice and equality.
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Giant leaps of logic
- By Aaron Rudroff on 08-10-21
By: Elizabeth Hinton
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Golden Gulag
- Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California
- By: Ruth Wilson Gilmore
- Narrated by: Machelle Williams
- Length: 7 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Since 1980, the number of people in US prisons has increased more than 450 percent. 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 conjoined to produce the prison boom.
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Started off great but devolved into case study
- By normal person on 10-16-21
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Dirty Work
- Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America
- By: Eyal Press
- Narrated by: Neil Shah
- Length: 11 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Drone pilots who carry out targeted assassinations. Undocumented immigrants who man the "kill floors" of industrial slaughterhouses. Guards who patrol the wards of America's most violent and abusive prisons. In Dirty Work, Eyal Press offers a paradigm-shifting view of the moral landscape of contemporary America through the stories of people who perform society's most ethically troubling jobs. As Press shows, we are increasingly shielded and distanced from an array of morally questionable activities that other, less privileged people perform in our name.
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A Must Read for Conservatives
- By Nice guy on 11-05-21
By: Eyal Press
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America's Original Sin
- Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America
- By: Jim Wallis
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 10 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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America's problem with race has deep roots, with the country's foundation tied to the near extermination of one race of people and the enslavement of another. Racism is truly our nation's original sin. "It's time we right this unacceptable wrong", says best-selling author and leading Christian activist Jim Wallis. Fifty years ago, Wallis was driven away from his faith by a white church that considered dealing with racism to be taboo.
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Important book, but narrator was an amateur
- By RevReader on 06-01-18
By: Jim Wallis
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Con Job
- How Democrats Gave Us Crime, Sanctuary Cities, Abortion Profiteering, and Racial Division
- By: Crystal Wright
- Narrated by: Crystal Wright
- Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Black voters have overwhelmingly supported the Democratic Party for the last fifty years - and for their loyalty, black Americans have been rewarded with worsening schools, collapsed families, skyrocketed incarceration rates, disappearing jobs, and rising crime. Crystal Wright, editor of the blog Conservative Black Chick, exposes how the Democratic Party has systematically betrayed black voters.
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Awesome!
- By Tracy on 05-11-16
By: Crystal Wright
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Fight of the Century
- Writers Reflect on 100 Years of Landmark ACLU Cases
- By: Michael Chabon - editor, Ayelet Waldman - editor
- Narrated by: an all-star cast
- Length: 11 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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In collaboration with the ACLU, authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman have curated an anthology of essays about landmark cases in the organization’s 100-year history. Fight of the Century takes you inside the trials and the stories that have shaped modern life. Some of the most prominent cases that the ACLU has been involved in - Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, Miranda v. Arizona - need little introduction. Others you may never even have heard of, yet their outcomes quietly defined the world we live in now.
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Outstanding
- By Nancy B on 10-06-20
By: Michael Chabon - editor, and others
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In Our Backyard
- Human Trafficking in America and What We Can Do to Stop It
- By: Nita Belles
- Narrated by: Nicol Zanzarella
- Length: 7 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Human trafficking is not just something that happens in other countries. Nor is it something that just happens to "other people," such as runaways or the disenfranchised. Even kids in your own neighborhood can fall victim. But they don't have to.
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A good entry to learning about HT
- By Justicepirate on 12-05-16
By: Nita Belles
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Buying the paperback now too
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content is great, but audiobook is unlistenable
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No More Police
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In this powerful call to action, New York Times bestselling author Mariame Kaba and attorney and organizer Andrea J. Ritchie detail why policing doesn't stop violence, instead perpetuating widespread harm; outline the many failures of contemporary police reforms; and explore demands to defund police, divest from policing, and invest in community resources to create greater safety through a Black feminist lens. No More Police makes a compelling case for a world where the tools required to prevent, interrupt, and transform violence in all its forms are abundant.
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Started off great but devolved into case study
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Buying the paperback now too
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content is great, but audiobook is unlistenable
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highly recommended
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A physician reveals how right-wing backlash policies have mortal consequences - even for the white voters they promise to help.
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Justice for Some
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Justice for Some offers a new approach to understanding the Palestinian struggle for freedom, told through the power and control of international law. Focusing on key junctures—from the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to present-day wars in Gaza—Noura Erakat shows how the strategic deployment of law has shaped current conditions. Over the past century, the law has done more to advance Israel's interests than the Palestinians'. But, Erakat argues, this outcome was never inevitable.
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Excellent book bizarrely NOT narrated by the author
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The New Jim Crow
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Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times best seller list.
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Shocking, Important and Brilliant
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The Color of Law
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In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein explodes the myth that America's cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation - that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, he incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de jure segregation - the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments - that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day.
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Better suited to print than audio
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What listeners say about Prison by Any Other Name
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- Happy
- 11-28-20
I would give this book 6 stars out of 5.
If we would ALL read this book, see it's truths and consider it's suggestions, we'd have a better world.
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- Katherine Colour
- 08-24-20
well thought out
The reading tone was about right for the type of book this is, almost android like, versus emotional. I prefer emotions in the voice over myself.
One doesn't have to agree with the views of the author to understand the points they are getting across, to recognize the unfairness, the need for change. American's spend a lot of money on prisons, from the up keep of those within the prison system to the up keep on the buildings and the cost of people to run the places. we may be better served to try a didn't approach
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- Amazon Customer
- 04-29-22
please read!
if you are even remotely interested in prison abolition, you must read this! very digestible length, gives great background and history on why our current system/proposed reforms are ineffective and how there are better solutions already in practice. excellent book!
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- Lena Lee
- 05-20-21
MUST READ!!!
Every American needs to read this book and immediately start putting the ideas into practice. I am starting today. Will you join me?
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- Bethany McWilliams
- 06-28-22
A MUST READ
I really want to recommend this book...so much so, I wrote a long promo for it lmaoooo....
Here goes:
As it should, our perspective on the world changes the more experiences we have with humanity. When I was in graduate school I was certain I knew the ways in which the world turned, the motives that stirred people, the way we interacted with each other. I knew I didn’t understand everything, and I was eager to be open to more, but I really felt my foundation of knowledge seemed secure. It was a safe and comforting feeling.
My first day as an intern therapist, I sat across from my very client ever, an unhoused individual on the sex offender’s registry who had a diagnosis in his chart from a previous therapist that read “Anti-Social Personality Disorder; VERY manipulative behavior patterns, be vigilant”. My nervous baby therapist hands probably shook as I handed him the consent paperwork to sign. I wish I could say I made a big impact on this person, I probably didn’t. I was clumsy and all over the place in sessions, trying to use different theory models and approaches I was learning and failing miserably. Not much progress was made that I could write in his charts; I doubt he would even remember me.
I bring up this long-winded story (thanks for reading if you still are!) because this time period in my life, this client, that stuffy old office was the beginning of me realizing how terrifyingly the system is, how it fails generations of people from birth until death, and how the criminal justice system in particular plays a huge role in most people’s lives. I am admittedly ashamed it took so long, but this is the beginning of that foundation of knowledge crumbling. I was seeing first hand, in the lives of clients I cared deeply about, how the justice system chains people (primarily of color) into a form of modern day slavery.
The whole world is rightfully talking about reproductive rights currently, and also, I believe it is important to include conversations about the systems which affect those rights; everything is frightfully connected when you take a step back and look.
People in power go round and round in conversational circles discussing the nuances of concepts such as abortion, crime rates, poverty, homelessness, drug abuse, women’s rights, etc. but why is nobody dissecting it to its core? The prison system was established in 1891, have we seen any benefits? Are there less incarcerated individuals? Are rates of recidivism down? Actually, there has been a 500% INCREASE over the past 40 years…we are moving astronomically backwards. Yet we continue to let the system reign its vile power over individuals who will likely never find a way out its grip, albeit not because they aren’t desperately trying.
This is a long plug for a book I didn’t even write lol, but it is an important book I wish everyone would read. I wish we would take a giant step away from everything we thought we knew, or think we understand and really look at this criminal justice system from a fresh lens. Really explore how this system controls, coerces, and manipulates people, families. How this system is the leading character in generational trauma and continuous systemic racism.
I realize I have made some blanket statements without giving much detail, just for the sake of time and space. If you would like to discuss more about any of the topics brought up, you know I would love to as well. I don’t expect everyone to get on the radical abolitionist train (though all are welcomed!) but I do think it is important to have conversations, to really think about this mammoth of a concept and how it does affect every part of our lives as Americans, even if you aren’t directly impacted.
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- normal person
- 08-03-21
strong case for abolishing prison alternatives too
Each chapter is devoted to demonstrating how various prison alternatives like inpatient treatment, foster care, emonitoring, etc are really just... well, prison by another name.
Highly recommend, learned a lot
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