Research Catalog

Title

Prison industrial complex for beginners / by James Braxton Peterson ; illustrated by John Jennings and Stacey Robinson ; foreword by Michael Eric Dyson.

Author

Peterson, James Braxton, 1971-

Publication

• Danbury, CT : For Beginners, [2016]
• ©2016

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

• Jennings, John, 1970-
• Robinson, Stacey (Graphic artist)
• Dyson, Michael Eric

Description

x, 144 pages : illustrations; 23 cm

Summary

"Prison Industrial Complex For Beginners is a graphic narrative project that attempts to distill the fundamental components of what scholars, activists, and artists have identified as the Mass Incarceration movement in the United States. Since the early 1990s, activist critics of the US prison system have marked its emergence as a 'complex' in a manner comparable to how President Eisenhower described the Military Industrial Complex. Like its institutional 'cousin,' the Prison Industrial Complex features a critical combination of political ideology, far-reaching federal policy, and the neo-liberal directive to privatize institutions traditionally within the purview of the government. The result is that corporations have capital incentives to capture and contain human bodies. The Prison Industrial Complex relies on the 'law and order' ideology fomented by President Nixon and developed at least partially in response to the unrest generated through the Civil Rights Movement. It is (and has been) enhanced and emboldened via the US 'war on drugs,' a slate of policies that by any account have failed to do anything except normalize the warehousing of nonviolent substance abusers in jails and prisons that serve more as criminal training centers then as redemptive spaces for citizens who might re-enter society successfully."--Provided by publisher.

Series Statement

A For beginners documentary comic book

Uniform Title

Writers and Readers documentary comic book

Subject

• African American prisoners
• Prisons > United States
• Prisoners > United States
• Criminals > Rehabilitation > United States
• Criminal justice, Administration of > United States
• Discrimination in criminal justice administration > United States
• United States > Race relations

Genre/Form

Graphic novels

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographic references (pages 135-142).

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

The origins of complexes -- Race and the persistence of law-and-order ideology -- The failed war(s) on drugs -- Private profits and private prisons -- Youth, immigration, and solitary confinement -- Recidivism and real reform.

ISBN

• 9781939994318
• 1939994314

OCLC

• 907195421
• SCSB-12852830

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library