Instead of Prisons

From discussions on the range of voices that comprise the movement for prison abolition to demystification of the myths surrounding the justification of imprisonment and practical steps toward breaking free from relying on imprisonment, Instead Of Prisons offers organizrs and activists a primer for strategy and actin in the fight to build a world without prisons. A reprint of this 1976 classic, with a new introduction from Critical Resistance. When it was first published almost three decades ago, Instead of Prisons proposed a conceptual toolkit for those of us who believed then that ever larger numbers of prisons would result in a dangerous entrenchment of the racism we were trying to eliminate. We now face what was our worst nightmare: proliferating penal institutions linked to a global prison industrial complex that transforms bodies of color into society's excess. The republication of this handbook by Critical Resistance is a response to this contemporary emergency. Prisons must be abolished or there will be no hope for a democratic future. - Angela Y. Davis, UC Santa Cruz From Howard Zinn: "The return of INSTEAD OF PRISONS comes at a time when it is very much needed, when two million human beings languish behind bars and barbed wire in the United States, and the reports of abuse, torture, rape, well as false convictions and cruel sentences, make moe people question the whole idea of prisons. But these thoughtful essays are not utopian. They present realistic alternatives to a system which is both cruel and ineffectual. It is more and more clear that prisons do not diminish crime. They diminish the men and women inside, and diminish the humanity of the rest of us outside. I hope this book will be widely read, so it can do for imprisonment what "Uncle Tom's Cabin" did for slavery -- arouse the nation."