Site Network: Prisonsucks.com | Prison Policy Initiative | Prisoners of the Census

About this site

Prisonsucks.com is a clearinghouse for useful, verifiable statistics about the crime control industry. Too often prison activists use statistics that are out of date, provided without citation or simply wrong. One of these days the public will start listening to prison activists, so let's be prepared to win without being sidetracked by arguments over defective statistics. In some cases, the numbers we need don't exist. In others, the facts exist but activists don't know where to find them. Now you do. Start at prisonsucks.com.

The site was founded in February 2001 as a private tool to keep track of prison research superior to a stack of news clippings. In December of that year the site was picked up by the Prison Policy Initiative and considerably expanded.

What's here and what's not

The site has relatively comprehensive links to quality research, factsheets, books and other resources for researchers and activists.

This site doesn't have much in the way of links to important news events and activist organizations. Why? It's too much work and it's already being done very well by others. However, you can add your own links to our links page, or use these great resources elsewhere:

We also don't have much in the way of general education materials besides the factsheets, and we don't know of any really good ones elsewhere on the net. That's frustrating because the common perception about prisons and prisoners is pretty horrible and most of what we've put on this site comes in at too high a level. We need more stuff directed at the "prisoners have it easy" and "prisoners must have done something wrong" crowds. If anyone has put together a list of such sites and resources, let us know and we'll link to it directly, otherwise the Prison Policy Initiative is looking for help to develop moreof these resources. In the mean time, here are a few good resources:

For journalists

Image credits

  • The fence image in the banner is a detail of an image licensed from istockphoto.
  • The graphs used in the banner were produced by the Prison Policy Initiative from research in the The Prison Index: Taking The Pulse of the Crime Control Industry
  • The maps on the front page are from the Prison Policy Initiative Atlas.

Colophon

The skeleton of this website is hand-coded in BBEdit to validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional. No tables are used for presentational purposes. Instead, we rely on valid CSS to control the presentation of this website. These techniques improve your experience on the site, make the website easier for the disabled to use, and guarantee that this website is useable by the internet devices of the future. We welcome criticism of the technical operation of the website as well as the substance.

Tools

This site could not exist without the help of third party tools and scripts:

  • Gossamer Threads' Links 2.0 software powers the Visitor Links, Research, Factsheet and Music pages and their respective RSS feeds. The Visitor Links are almost virtually a standard installation of Links. The fesearch, factsheet and music databases are managed by a heavily modified version. You can get our modifications to these scripts on our software page.
  • The site announcements are managed by Coranto which was produced by Amphibian Web.
  • The Guestbook is hosted by Htmlgear
  • The Incarceration Clock was written in javascript with the assistance of Matt Elrod and the Drug War Clock.
  • The mailing list is powered by Mailman although the setup was kindly done by our webhost Pair Networks.
  • Image rotator used in in the banner and the front page maps is from NMS CGI project