NCW Libraries

"There is a long and ugly history of violent encounters between law enforcement officers and Americans of color, particularly Black Americans. About 1,000 Americans are killed each year by law-enforcement officers, and numerous studies have found a link between race and police killings"--

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...

"An examination of the historical and present racial inequities of the prosecutorial system and a blueprint for transforming the system to one of fairness and justice"-- Provided by publisher.

The three lives in this creative nonfiction account are united by the presence of actual harm--sometimes horrific violence. Imarisha, dealing with the complexities of her own experience with sexual assault and accountability, brings us behind prison walls to visit her adopted brother Kakamia and his fellow inmate Jimmy "Mac" McElroy, a member of the brutal Irish gang the Westies. Together they explore the questions: People can do unimaginable things...

"The use of incarceration in the United States has increased five-fold since 1973. Twenty-nine percent of black males born today can expect to be imprisoned in their lifetime." "Race to Incarcerate tells the chilling story of this unprecedented explosion in the prison population, demonstrating how the dramatic expansion of prisons and jails has failed to have any substantial impact on crime." "Exploring the intersection of race and class that underpins...

The author relates how her cousin was imprisoned at the age of fifteen for attempted carjacking and how she took him in upon his release, only to lose him to the deadly streets of South Central L.A.

"A young activist opens a window for young readers into his fight for equal education, racial justice, and economic equity. Born in Brooklyn, New York, to Haitian immigrants, Frantzy Luzincourt has dedicated his life to service and the empowerment of youth voices. When he was fifteen, Frantzy became the founding president of his high school's Black Student Union, where he advocated for more Black male teachers and for bringing social justice into...

"We are better than this" has been the rallying cry since Donald Trump was elected. But as New York Times-bestselling author Mychal Denzel Smith shows, Americans are too comfortable imagining our greatness. We like to believe in the rightness of our path and the inevitability of choosing our better angels. But historically, we've only come close to living up to the ideals we profess after we've been dragged, kicking and screaming, toward justice....

"Drawing upon 25 years of experience representing black youth in Washington D.C.'s juvenile court, Kris Henning confronts America's irrational, manufactured fears of Black youth and makes a powerfully compelling case that the crisis in racist American policing begins with its relationship to Black children. She explains how discriminatory and aggressive policing has socialized a generation of Black teenagers to fear, resent, and resist the police,...

"The American criminal justice system is supposed to be a contest between two equal adversaries, the prosecution and the defense, with judges ensuring a fair fight. But in fact, it is prosecutors who have the upper hand, in a contest that is far from equal. More than anyone else, prosecutors decide who goes free and who goes to prison, and even who lives and who dies. The system wasn't designed for this kind of unchecked power, and in Charged, Emily...