100 books like Golden Gulag

I knew Michelle when she was teaching at Stanford University before she wrote this book, but I didn’t know then how much of the work she’d done. Her book is so profound that when I first read it, I was in Vegas on vacation, and I couldn’t get out of the room because I was so deep into reading her book. I couldn’t get to the great food or the penny slots because she was putting together all the pieces I had read about or heard discussed in different places, and she built a picture of the system of oppression Black people live under in the United States.

She affirmed what I had suspected: that incarceration continues the enslavement of Black people. I called a colleague and said, this book will have more impact than I could making speeches to a thousand people at a time, a hundred times a… show more.

If we are to reverse, dismantle, or eliminate mass incarceration we need an alternative model for addressing a reality where harm and injustice exist. We can never eliminate harm, but this book, through short writings by well-known authors constructs not only a clear case for eliminating prisons, jails, and policing but helps us to imagine how we might get to such a world through our own collective actions. Brought together by the most famous person to be banished by the National Football League, this volume stirs the soul and takes us on what may perhaps be an uncomfortable but very necessary journey. I have one essay in this book, entitled "Challenge E-Carceration" which contests the notion that electronic monitors and other punitive technologies are an alternative to incarceration. 

This is Albert Woodfox’s shocking and amazing life history of spending most of his life in Angola, the most brutal prison in Louisiana.

It’s an exposé of prison brutality and dehumanization. But it’s also a stunning account of his own courage and spirit. On top, the writing is sparse, stark, and beautiful. 

As public awareness of mass incarceration has grown, reformers, and even law enforcement, have attempted to build alternatives, policies, and institutions they argue are alternatives to prisons and jails. These alternatives include policies like electronic monitoring, drug courts, halfway houses, lockup mental health facilities, and court supervision. In this book, Law and Schenwar systematically demolish the notion that such initiatives do anything more than widen the net of incarceration. In their view, these “alternatives” create programs and institutions based on the notion that altering the form or style of punishment will eliminate mass incarceration. Instead, they argue this requires the elimination of the paradigm of punishment and the establishment of programs outside the criminal legal system that provide freedom and opportunities for targeted populations. 

Deported was one of the first books I read that fully explained the links between deportation and inequality, in both readable and evidence-backed ways.

I appreciate it for the way it uses riveting narratives from deportees themselves, to demonstrate how the unequal conditions of global capitalism spur migration in the first place, while inequality in the United States leads to the criminalization and deportation of men of color.

This book stands out to me in its focus on Black and Afro-Latinx immigrants from the Caribbean, a group known to be targeted by the US War on Drugs, who are often left out of the literature on immigration enforcement and deportation.

While most academic work on detention focuses on immigration enforcement on the U.S.-Mexico border or in the U.S. interior, this book traces the origin of detention to U.S. efforts to deter the Cuban and Haitian migration that occurred as part of U.S. Cold War dealings.

With fascinating, painstaking historical research, Loyd and Mountz argue that the legal and infrastructural foundations of the contemporary detention system were established through the U.S. response to Caribbean migration in the 1990s and the goal of preventing migrants from claiming the international right to asylum.

The book also shows how racism—especially anti-Black racism—has been at the core of immigration detention since the beginning, as have abhorrent, shocking conditions of detention facilities.

This book explicitly ties the explosion in immigration detention to goals of political gain and corporate profit, pairing careful historical and legal analysis with piercing personal stories of detention.

After laying out how U.S. foreign policy has triggered the migration patterns that now send lawmakers and the public into a nativist frenzy, legal scholar García Hernández breaks down how laws have been warped to make more people detainable.

He zeroes in on the role of private prison companies, and he explains how Latino immigrants have been turned into fodder for the detention system through lobbying and manipulation of the public narrative. The book finishes by laying out a framework for curbing this corrupt and abusive system.

Unfortunately, the word “gulag” is all too apt for describing U.S. carceral systems.

While this book came out nearly twenty years ago, I picked it because its gut-wrenching descriptions of what goes on inside U.S. immigration facilities still reflect contemporary reality.

Journalist Mark Dow draws on interviews with detainees, guards, and immigration officials to document the atrocious material conditions, violations of human rights, and abuses routinely experienced by detainees.

He details how guards are conditioned to treat all detainees as criminals, regardless of who they are, and how using private companies helps shield facilities from scrutiny and accountability. Given the horrors revealed in this book, it is especially alarming that the detention system has more than doubled since its publication.

This book deals with the death penalty. The author covers several cases involving people who were on death row and were subsequently found to be innocent.

The book also covers related topics, such as mass incarceration, mandatory sentencing, racial bias, prison overcrowding, cruel and unusual sentences for minors, the psychological impact of long-term solitary confinement, and a host of other crime and punishment issues.

Forman’s book is a must-read to learn why the War on Crime was not merely the work of one party or one racial group in society. Indeed, a number of people of color, including black mayors and black chiefs of police, strongly supported tough-on-crime measures.

The book raises the question of what it will take to reverse the trends of mass incarceration, given these realities.