When TNI asked me if I’d be interested in adding a syllabus to the review I jumped at the opportunity. I’m very happy here to offer a few suggested readings, listenings, and viewings of varying length. I’m not a sociologist (I have a PhD in Literature) but I teach in the interdisciplinary fields of Literature, Black Studies, American Studies, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
With thanks to Mariame Kaba and Dr. Tamara Nopper for their help.
Introduction to The Prison Industrial Complex
I recommend everything on the blog Prison Culture “How the PIC Structures Our World…”
Young People Continue To Talk About the Cops
Louder Than A Bomb 2014: Chicago Youth Have Their Say
Nicholas K. Peart, "Why Is the N.Y.P.D. After Me?"
C Angel Torres and Naima Paz, Young Women’s Empowerment Project's Bad Encounter Line zine
Rose Brewer and Nancy Heitzeg, The Racialization of Crime and Punishment: Criminal Justice, Color-Blind Racism, and the Political Economy of the Prison Industrial Complex
Sylvia Wynter, “No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues”
On Fugitivity and Captivity
Slave narratives, from Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl: Written by Herself, to Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass An American Slave: Written by Himself, to David Walker’s Appeal, to Ida B. Well’s The Red Record
Keguro Macharia, fugitivity
Fred Moten and Stefano Harvey, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study
Tavia Nyong’o, Black Survival in the Uchromatic Dark
Percy Howard Interviews Frank Wilderson Frank B. Wilderson, “Wallowing in the contradictions”, Parts 1 and 2
Jared Sexton, Captivity, By Turns: A Comment on the Work of Ashley Hunt
Connie Wun, Disciplining Violence
Tamara K. Nopper and Kenyon Farrow, Why the AFL-CIO must address Black criminalization and (un)employment: A position paper
To Watch & Listen
Joy James, Refusing Blackness as Victimization: Trayvon Martin and the Black Cyborgs
Angela Davis, On the Prison Industrial Complex
Ruth Gilmore, Beyond The Prison Industrial Complex
Murder on a Sunday Morning (documentary)
Damien Sojoyner, “Trouble Man: The Limitations of Policy Oriented Black Masculinity”
"You Don't Really Know Us," Chicago Kids Tell News Media
Simone Browne, Dark Sousveillance Race, Surveillance and Resistance
Books
A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison by Reginald Dwayne Betts
States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons edited by Joy James
Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy edited by Joy James (2007)
Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America's Prison Nation by Beth Richie
Global Lockdown: Race, Gender and the Prison-Industrial Complex edited by Julia Sudbury
Live from Death Row by Mumia Abu-Jamal
Police Brutality: An Anthology edited by Jill Nelson
