I admire books that bust myths about social points in society. Myths operate as meaning-making occasions that stretch a false, incomplete, and infrequently compromised narrative perpetually into the longer term. Perpetuating myths guarantee a forgery of recollections and a disconnect between trigger and impact within the current.
A current ebook by prolific freelance journalist and creator Victoria Law, “Prison Make Us Safer” – and 20 Different Myths about Mass Incarceration, supplies a radical undoing of the social, political, authorized, and cultural myths that justify and keep the continuing habit to mass incarceration.
Prisons Make Us Safer “explains how racism and social management had been the catalysts for mass incarceration and have continued to be its driving pressure: from the post-Civil Warfare legal guidelines that states handed to imprison former slaves, to the legal guidelines handed beneath the “Warfare Towards Medicine” marketing campaign that disproportionately imprison Black individuals. [Law] breaks down these difficult points into 4 essential components:
1. The rise and reason for mass incarceration
2. Myths about jail
3. Misconceptions about incarcerated individuals
4. Tips on how to finish mass incarceration”
Inside these 4 sections, Regulation identifies, unpacks, and demonstrates the social operate of “21 key myths that propel and keep mass incarceration, together with:
• The system is damaged and we merely want some reforms to repair it
• Incarceration is important to maintain our society protected
• Jail is an efficient approach to get individuals into drug remedy
• Non-public jail firms drive mass incarceration”
Try Regulation’s different books: Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women (PM Press 2009), Prison By Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reform (New Press 2020), and co-editor of Don’t Leave Your Friends Behind: Concrete Methods to Assist Households in Social Justice Actions and Communities (PM Press 2012).
Here is an archive of Regulation’s journalistic writing for the previous 12 years.
