Angela Davis Resource Guide: Prison Industrial Complex

In this edition of Journal, Bill Moyers sits down with attorneys Bryan Stevenson and Michelle Alexander-- experts in civil rights advocacy and litigation-- to discuss just how far the U.S. has come as a country, why poor and working-class Americans have fallen further behind economically, and what the nation must do to fulfill Martin Luther King's vision. Alexander pays special attention to the treatment of Blacks in the prison system.

To view this film visit: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04022010/watch.html

Challenges one of America's most cherished assumptions, the belief that slavery in the U.S. ended with Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, by telling the harrowing story of how, in the South, a new system of involuntary servitude took its place with shocking force.

To view this film visit: http://www.pbs.org/tpt/slavery-by-another-name/watch/

This documentary was designed as a teaching tool to expand knowledge about the history of the prison industrial complex and the prison abolition movement in the United States.

Since the 1980s prison construction and incarceration rates in the U.S. have been rising exponentially, evoking huge public concern about their proliferation, their recent privatisation and their promise of enormous profits. But these prisons house hugely disproportionate numbers of people of colour, betraying the racism embedded in the system, while studies show that increasing prison sentences has had no effect on crime. Here, esteemed civil rights activist Angela Davis lays bare the situation and argues for a radical rethinking of our rehabilitation programmes.

Despite the triumphant dismantling of the Jim Crow Laws, the system that once forced African Americans into a segregated second-class citizenship still haunts America, the US criminal justice system still unfairly targets black men and an entire segment of the population is deprived of their basic rights. Outside of prisons, a web of laws and regulations discriminates against these wrongly convicted ex-offenders in voting, housing, employment and education. Alexander here offers an urgent call for justice.

For a more detail look at the issues that Alexander raises in her book visit: http://newjimcrow.com/.

This volume offers rhetorical and political analyses of police culture, the so-called drug war, media coverage of crime stories, and the public school- to-prison pipeline. The collection also includes case studies of successful prison arts and education programs in Michigan, California, Missouri, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania that provide creative and intellectual resources typically denied to citizens living behind bars. Writings and artwork created by prisoners in such programs richly enhance the volume.

Global Lockdown is the first book to apply a transnational feminist framework to the study of criminalization and imprisonment. The distinguished contributors to this collection offer a variety of perspectives, from former prisoners to advocates to scholars from around the world. The book is a must-read for anyone concerned by mass incarceration and the growth of the prison-industrial complex within and beyond U.S. borders, as well as those interested in globalization and resistance.

Based on a vast record of original documents and personal narratives,Slavery by Another Nameunearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude. It also reveals the stories of those who fought unsuccessfully against the re-emergence of human labor trafficking, the modern companies that profited most from neoslavery, and the system’s final demise in the 1940s, partly due to fears of enemy propaganda about American racial abuse at the beginning of World War II.

To view commentary by the author visit: http://www.slaverybyanothername.com/