Description
Book SynopsisThis book brings together a collection of social justice scholars and activists who take Foucault’s concept of discipline and punishment to explain how prisons are constructed in society from nursing homes to zoos. This book expands the concept of prison to include any institution that dominates, oppresses, and controls. Criminologists and others, who have been concerned with reforming or dismantling the criminal justice system, have mostly avoided to look at larger carceral structures in society. In this book, for example, scholars and activists question the way patriarchy has incapacitated women and imagine the deinstitutionalization of people with disabilities. In a time when popular sentiment critiques the dominant role of the elites (the “one percenters”), the state’s role in policing dissenting voices, school children, LGBTQ persons, people of color, and American Indian Nations, needs to be investigated. A prison, as defined in this book, is an institution or system that oppresses and does not allow freedom for a particular group. Within this definition, we include the imprisonment of nonhuman animals and plants, which are too often overlooked.
Trade Review"[the book is] part of a growing interest across disciplines in the injustice of mass incarceration and other forms of oppression in America that needs to continue to unfold, and offers new facets of understanding and resisting forms of oppression.” Peace and Justice Studies - Volume 23 . Number 2 (2014 WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT "THE END OF PRISONS" The End of Prisons is not your average prison abolition book. Rather, it challenges the very idea of what a prison is as it exposes the ways in which all in industrial Western-colonial culture reside in one prison or another. Most significantly, it challenges the concept of who is incarcerated, expanding that idea beyond human animals to include nonhumans and plant life as well. This is a timely book that anyone should read who is concerned with new methods of exposing, challenging and subverting domination. - Dr. Kim Socha, author of Women, Destruction and the Avant-Garde: A Paradigm for Animal Liberation This book dramatically raises the stakes in terms of what counts as prisons, who comprise the incarcerated, and what needs to be done to bring an end to prisons. This powerful and path breaking treatise will help to redefine the prison abolition movement and chart an urgent course for revolutionary transformation. - Dr. Peter McLaren, Professor, Critical Studies in Education, The University of Auckland, New Zealand The End of Prisons is an outstanding book that asks the reader to rethink how all forms of life, human or nonhuman, are locked in prisons and how this confinement is resisted. The End of Prisons is an excellent critique of the affects of institutions such as schools, jails, nursing homes, daycares, marriage, national parks, and zoos. - Sarat Colling, Editor and Founder of Political Media Review The End of Prisons takes a radical and imaginative approach to the abolition of prisons. It moves beyond the prison industrial complex to an inter-sectional critique of all oppressive institutions. It argues that "the prison" is not just a physical architecture, but a vicious, unjust approach to social life. This book is thus a call to action. Read it, discuss it, and use it to change the world! - Jason Del Gandio, Ph.D. author of Rhetoric for Radicals: A Handbook for 21st Activists Confronting captivity suggests strong acts of willing and thinking and doing. All three endeavors are thoughtfully and creatively embodied in The End of Prisons as its editors and contributors forge intersecting and complimentary paths towards freedoms. - Joy James, Presidential Professor of the Humanities, Williams College
Table of ContentsAndrew Fitz-Gibbon: Editorial Foreword Acknowledgments Mechthild Nagel and Anthony J. Nocella II: Introduction: Imprisoning the Ninety-Nine Percent Anthony J. Nocella II: The Rise of the Terrorization of Dissent David Gabbard: Rethinking the “School to Prison Pipeline” Ernesto Aguilar and Melissa Chiprin: Criminalization of Culture and the Rise of Dissent Ute Ritz-Deutch: Imprisoning Foreign Nationals Ben Carnes: Reservations as Prisons Liat Ben-Moshe: The Tension between Abolition and Reform Dennis J. Stevens: Caging Sex Offenders Amit Taneja: Queer (In)equalities: Imprisoning LGBTQ People Amy J. Fitzgerald: Imprisoning Nature Jenna McDavid: Control and Incarceration of Human and Non-Human Beings Mechthild Nagel: Patriarchal Ideologies and Women’s Domestication Tiyo Attallah Salah-El: Thoughts from an Elder Abolitionist Mechthild Nagel: An Ubuntu Ethic of Punishment Works Cited About the Authors Name Index Subject Index
