Research
1. PCARE is the Prison Communication Activism Research and Education collective, a group of NCA-affiliated scholars who began meeting in 2003. Sections of this essay were drafted by Beate Gersh, Stephen Hartnett, Edward Hinck, Shelly Hinck, Daniel Larson, Bryan McCann, Jonathan Marlow, Lori Pompa, Carol Stabile, Robert Wells, Jennifer Wood, and Bill Yousman. Final compilation, editing, and additional drafting were performed by Hartnett and Wood. All website addresses in these notes on 14 September 2007. (The content of this website originates from this article.)
2. Elliott Currie, Crime and Punishment in America (New York: Henry Holt, 1998), 13; and see Christian Parenti, Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (London: Verso, 1999) and The Real War on Crime: The Report of the National Criminal Justice Commission, ed. Steven Donziger (New York: Harper, 1996).
3. Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories, 2003), 11; and see Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prisons, Torture, and Empire - Interviews with Angela Davis, ed. Eduardo Mendietta (New York: Seven Stories, 2005).
4. President Dwight Eisenhower's 17 January 1961 Farewell Address, p. 2 of the version downloaded from http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/ike.htm
5. On Eisenhower's duplicity with the very thing he warns against, see Robert Ivie, "Eisenhower as Cold Warrior," in Eisenhower's War of Words: Rhetoric and Leadership, ed. Martin Medhurst (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1994), 7-25, and Ivie, Democracy and America's War on Terror (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005).
6. Figures from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (hereafter BJS), Special Report: State Prison Expenditures, 2001 (Washington, DC: Department of State, 2004); and see David Shichor, Punishment for Profit: Private Prisons/Public Concerns (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995) and The Celling of America: An Inside Look at the US Prison Industry, ed. Daniel Burton-Rose (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1998).
7. See Mike Davis, "Hell Factories in the Field: A Prison-Industrial Complex," The Nation (20 February 1995): 229-34; Eric Scholosser, "The Prison-Industrial Complex" The Atlantic Monthly (December 1998), 51-77; Nils Christie, Crime Control as Industry; Towards Gulags, Western Style, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1994); and Joel Dyer, The Perpetual Prisoner Machine (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000).
8. Figures from the BJS, Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear, 2003 (Washington, DC: Department of Justice, 2004), 4-9; BJS, Prisoners in 2003 (Washington, DC: Department of Justice, 2004), 1-3; BJS, Prisoners in 2004 (Washington, DC: Department of Justice, 2005), 1-3; Research, Development, and Statistics Directorate, Home Office, United Kingdom, World Prison Population List (London: Crown, 2004), 3; BJS, Probation and Parole in the US, 2002 (Washington, DC: Department of Justice, 2003), 1; BJS, Prevalence of Imprisonment in the US, 1974-2001 (Washington, DC: Department of Justice, 2003), 1.
9. On the historical echoes of slavery in the US prison system, see Frankling Zimring, The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 89-118; Stephen John Hartnett, "Prison Labor, Slavery, and Capitalism in Historical Perspective," Dark Night Field Notes 11 (Winter 1998): 25-29; and Michael Stephen Hindus, Prison and Plantation: Crime, Justice, and Authority in Massachusetts and South Carolina, 1767-1878 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980).
10. For a description of the racial disparities in the prison-industrial complex, see Human Rights Watch, Incarcerated America (2003), available at http://hrw.org/backgrounder/usa/incarceration/; for counterarguments, see John McWhorter, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America (New York: Free Press, 2000) and William Wilbanks, The Myth of a Racist Criminal Justice System (Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole, 1987).
11. Regarding public defenders and their clients, see Ken Armstrong, Florangela Davila, and Justin Mayo, "For Some, Free Counsel Comes at a High Cost," Seattle Times (4 April 2004), available at http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/news/local/unequaldefense/stories/one/, and Joshua C. Krumholz, "Provide Adequate Funding," National Law Journal (24 October 2005), available at http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe
12. Consider the fact that in New York and California, blacks and Hispanics totaled 91 percent and 71 percent, respectively, of drug-possession incarcerations (see "Does the Punishment Fit the Crime? Drug Users and Drunk Drivers, Questions of Race and Class," a Sentencing Project report available at http://sentencingproject.org/pdfs/9040smy.pdf); and see Stephen John Hartnett, "A Rhetorical Critique of The Drug War and 'The Nauseous Pendulum' of Reason and Violence," The Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 16:3 (August 2000): 247-71; Clarence Lusane, Pipe Dream Blues: Racism & The War on Drugs (Boston: South End Press, 1991); and Drug War Politics, ed. Eva Bertram (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
13. See Marsha Tarver, Steve Walker, and Harvey Wallace, Multicultural Issues in the Criminal Justice System (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2002), 42-45, and Chaka Ferguson, "Report: Black, White Disparities Abound," Associated Press Online (23 March 2004), available at http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe
14. See the BJS, Capital Punishment, 2002 (Washington, DC: Department of Justice, 2003); John C. McAdams, "Racial Disparity and the Death Penalty," Law and Contemporary Problems 61 (Autumn 1998): 153-70, and the US General Accounting Office, "Death Penalty Sentencing: Research Indicates a Pattern of Racial Disparities," in The Death Penalty in America: Current Controversies, ed. Hugo Adam Bedau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 268-74.
15. See Marc Mauer, "Mass Imprisonment and the Disappearing Votes," in Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment, ed. Mauer and Meda Chesney-Lind (New York: New Press, 2002), 50-58; Jamie Fellner and Marc Mauer, Losing the Vote: The Impact of Felony Disenfranchisement Laws in the United States (Washington, DC: The Sentencing Project, 1998); and Elizabeth Hull, The Disenfranchisement of Ex-Felons (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006).
16. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Dirty Politics: Deception, Distraction, and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 15-42 on the Horton scandal, quotation from 35.
17. Beatrix Campbell, "Boys Will be Boys: Social Insecurity and Crime," in Insecure Times: Living with Insecurity in Contemporary Society, ed. John Vail, Jane Wheelock, and Michael Hill (London: Routledge, 1999), 184-98, quotation from 187; for historical perspectives, see Karen Halttunen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998) and Carol Stabile, White Victims, Black Villains: Gender, Race, and Crime News in US Culture (New York: Routledge, 2006).
18. BJS, Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear, 2004 (Washington, DC: Department of Justice, 2005), 3; and see Women and Prisons at http://womenandprison.org
19. Sasha Abramsky, "Crime as America's Pop Culture," The Chronicle Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education (15 November 2002), B11-12.
20. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (1967; New York: Zone, 2004), #68, p. 45, and # 64, p. 42.
21. HeleneVosters, "Media Lockout: Prisons and Journalists," Media Alliance (13 May 2004), available at http://media-alliance.org
22. Ted Conover, Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing (New York: Random House, 2000).
23. See the Open Prisons project at http://spj.org/prisonaccess.asp
24. Associated Press, "Schwarzenegger Vetoes Bill Expanding Media Access to Prisons," The Mercury News (30 September 2006), available at http://mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/states/california/northern_california/15648955.htm
25. Along these lines, see The Future of the Media: Resistance and Reform in the 21st Century, ed. Robert McChesney, Russell Newman, and Ben Scott (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), 303-72.
26. Contact Beyondmedia Education at http://beyondmedia.org
27. Quotation from Paper Tiger's "What is PTTV?," available at http://papertiger.org
28. Quotation from the Free Press "About" section, available at http://freepress.net/; and see the related materials from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, available at http://fair.org
29. John M. Sloop, The Cultural Prison: Discourse, Prisoners, and Punishment (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996); Michael Huspek and Lynn Comerford, "How Science is Subverted: Penology and Prison Inmates' Resistance," Communication Theory 6, issue 4 (1996): 335-60; and Frederick C. Corey, "Personal Narratives and Young Men in Prison: Labeling the Outside Inside," Western Journal of Communication (1996): 57-75.
30. Stephen John Hartnett, Incarceration Nation: Investigative Prison Poems of Hope and Terror (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2003); and see Judith Tannenbaum, Disguised as a Poem: My Years Teaching Poetry at San Quentin (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000).
31. Steven J. Jackson, "Ex-Communication: Competition and Collusion in the US Prison Telephone Industry," Critical Studies in Media Communication 22, issue 4 (2005): 263-80; Travis Dixon and Daniel Linz, "Race and the Misrepresentation of Victimization on Local Television News," Communication Research 27, issue 5 (2000): 547-73; Travis Dixon, Cristina Azocar, and Michael Casas, "The Portrayal of Race and Crime on Television Network News," Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 47, issue 4 (2003): 498-523; and Jimmie Reeves and Richard Campbell, Cracked Coverage: Television News, the Anti-Cocaine Crusade, and the Reagan Legacy (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994).
32. Susan Freinkel, "Keeping Prisoners from the Press," Columbia Journalism Review 35, issue 3 (1996): 20-21; Eleanor M. Novek, "'Heaven, Hell, and Here': Understanding the Impact of Incarceration through a Prison Newspaper," Critical Studies in Media Communication 22, issue 4 (2005): 281-301; and Novek, "'The Devil's Bargain,'" Journalism 6, issue 1 (2005): 5-23.
33. Jeff Manza, Clem Brooks, and Christopher Uggen, "Public Attitudes Toward Felon Disenfranchisement in the United States," Public Opinion Quarterly 68, issue 2 (2004): 275-86; Gary D. Bond, Daniel M. Malloy, Elizabeth A. Arias, Shannon N. Nunn, and Laura A. Thompson, "Lie-biased Decision Making in Prison," Communication Reports 18, issue 1 (2005): 9-19; Chris Segrin and Jeanne Florra, "Perceptions of Relational Histories, Marital Quality, and Loneliness When Communication Is Limited: An Examination of Married Prison Inmates," Journal of Family Communication 1, issue 3 (2001): 151-73.
34. Jennifer K. Wood, "In Whose Name: Crime Victim Policy and the Punishing Power of Protection," The National Women's Studies Association Journal 17, issue 3 (2005): 1-17.
35. Robert Branham, "'I Was Gone on Debating': Malcolm X's Prison Debates and Public Confrontations," Argument and Advocacy 31 (1995): 117-37; Stephen John Hartnett, "Lincoln and Douglas Meet the Abolitionist David Walker as Prisoners Debate Slavery: Empowering Education, Applied Communication, and Social Justice," Journal of Applied Communication Research 26, issue 2 (1998): 232-53; Ed and Shelly Hinck, "Service Learning and Forensics," National Forensics Journal 16 (1998): 1-26; Kristin Bervig Valentine, "'If the Guards Only Knew': Communication Education for Women in Prison," Women's Studies in Communication 21, issue 2 (1998): 238-43; and Aaron Warriner, "Forensics in a Correctional Facility," National Forensics Journal 16 (1998): 27-42.
36. See Dwight Conquergood, "Homeboys and Hoods: Gang Communication and Cultural Spaces," in Group Communication in Context: Studies of Natural Groups, ed. Larry Frey (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1994), 23-55; Larry Frey, Barnett Pearce, Mark Pollock, Lee Artz, & Bren Murphy, "Looking for Justice in All the Wrong Places: On a Communication Approach to Social Justice," Communication Studies 47 (1996): 110-27, quotations from 117, 111; and see Communication Activism, 2 vols., ed. Larry Frey and Kevin Carragee (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 2007).
37. Figures from Kathleen Connolly, Lea McDermid, Vincent Schiraldi, and Dan Macallair, From Classrooms to Cellblocks: How Prison Building Affects Higher Education and African American Enrollment (San Francisco: Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, 1996), available at http://cjcj.org; Fox Butterfield, "Prison-Building Binge in CA Casts Shadow on Higher Education," New York Times (12 April 1995), A11; and "More Inmates in the US than Ever Before," New York Times (13 September 1994), A8.
38. See "Education Not Incarceration," a report by The Education not Incarceration Coalition available at http://ednotinc.org; and see Reconstructing the School-to-Prison Pipeline, papers from a May 2003 conference hosted by The Civil Rights Project of Harvard University and The Northeastern University Institute on Race and Justice.
39. See Education Reduces Crime, a 2003 report by the Correctional Education Association, available at http://ceanational.org; Dennis J. Stevens and Charles Ward, "College Education and Recidivism," Journal of Corrections Education 48 (1997): 106-12; and Wendy Erisman and Jeanne B. Contardo, Learning to Reduce Recidivism: A 50-State Analysis of Postsecondary Correctional Educational Policy (Washington, DC: Institute for Higher Education Policy, 2005).
40. See Michael D. Buisch, "Best in the Business: Providing Juveniles the Materials to Make a Change," Corrections Today 65 (2003): 44.
41. Billy Mason, a former Indiana prisoner, quoted from Jail Birds, a 1995 documentary produced by Jon Rutter and Stephen John Hartnett.
42. See bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 1994).
43. Phil Bayliss, "Learning Behind Bars: Time to Liberate Prison Education," Studies in the Education of Adults 35, issue 2 (2003): 157-72, quotation from 171-72.
44. For essays supporting these claims, see note #35.
45. Contact the Patten College/San Quentin program at jlewen@earthlink.net; and see the program as portrayed in Hartnett, Incarceration Nation, 43-56.
46. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (1970; revised 20th anniversary edition, New York: Continuum, 1995), 75-76; also see Ira Shor, When Students Have Power: Negotiating Authority in a Critical Pedagogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
47. Contact Inside-Out at http://temple.edu/inside-out; and see Lori Pompa "Service-Learning as Crucible: Reflections on Immersion, Context, Power, and Transformation," Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning 9 (2002): 67-76, and Barbara Baals, "Program Breaking Down Prison Walls," Temple Times 36 (2005): 1.
48. Contact the Prison Creative Arts Project at http://lsa.umich.edu/english/pcap/; on the University of Illinois Center on Democracy in a Multiracial Society's Prison Arts Festival, see the 2006 newsletter of the CDMS, pages 8-9, available at http://cdms.ds.uiuc.edu.
49. Samuel R. Gross, Kristen Jacoby, Daniel J. Matheson, Nichols Montgomery and Jujata Patil, "Exonerations in the United States: 1989 Through 2003," The Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology 95, issue 2 (2005): 523-60; and see the information posted by the Death Penalty Information Center at http://deathpenaltyinfo.org
50. See "Innocence Projects in the United States," posted by Truth in Justice at http://truthinjustice.org/ips.html; on Ryan's moratorium, see Stephen John Hartnett and Daniel Mark Larson, "'Tonight Another Man will Die': Crime, Violence, and The Master Tropes of Contemporary Arguments About the Death Penalty," Communication and Critical Cultural Studies 3:4 (2006): 263-78.
51. The Declaration of Independence (1776), cited as reprinted in Stephen Schechter, The Roots of the Republic: American Founding Documents Interpreted (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1990), 146-49.
52. The argument that violence is a central component of US national identity has received attention in Halttunen, Murder Most Foul; Ivie, Democracy and America's War on Terror; Michael Bellesiles, ed., Lethal Imagination: Violence and Brutality in American History (New York: New York University Press, 1999); and Jeremy Engels, "'Equipped for Murder': The Paxton Boys and 'the Spirit of Killing all Indians' in Pennsylvania, 1763-1764," Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8, issue 3 (2005): 355-82.
53. See Benjamin Rush, An Enquiry Into the Effects of Public Punishments Upon Criminals and Upon Society (Philadelphia: Joseph James, 1787); Robert Rantoul (probable author), "Report #79," in Documents of the Senate of the State of New York, 58th Session, Vol. 2 (Albany, NY: Croswell, 1836), 1-11; John O'Sullivan's speeches were reprinted (in altered form) as "The Gallows and the Gospel" and "Capital Punishment," in The United States Magazine and Democratic Review 12, issue 57 (March 1843), 227-36 and in 12, issue 58 (April 1843), 409-24; Ida B. Wells, "Lynch Law in All its Phases," a 13 February 1893 speech in Lift Every Voice: African American Oratory, 1787-1900, ed. Philip Foner and Robert Branham (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 745-60; Clarence Darrow's 23 September 1924 debate with Alfred J. Talley is available as Debate, Resolved: That Capital Punishment is a Wise Public Policy; Clarence Darrow, Negative; Judge Talley, Positive (New York: League for Public Discussion, 1924); Eugene Victor Debs, Walls and Bars: Prisons and Prison Life in the "Land of the Free" (1927; Chicago: Charles Kerr, 2000); Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" (16 April 1963), in I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches that Changed the World, ed. James Washington (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 83-100; George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (1970; Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1994); Angela Y. Davis, Angela Davis: An Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1974); Norma Stafford, Dear Somebody: The Prison Poetry of Norma Stafford (Santa Cruz, CA: Privately Printed, 1975); Patricia McConnel, Sing Soft, Sing Loud (Flagstaff, AZ: Logoria, 1995); Wilbert Rideau and Ron Wikberg, ed., Life Sentences: Rage and Survival Behind Bars (New York: Times Books, 1992); and Mumia Abu Jamal, Death Blossoms: Reflections from a Prisoner of Conscience (Philadelphia: Plough, 1997).