Research on the crime control industry
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 Too often prison activists use statistics that are out of date, provided without citation or simply wrong.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.
January 2006
Most disturbing criminal justice stories of 2005
January 15, 2006
Each January at Prisonsucks.com, we name the most disturbing criminal justice stories of the previous year. We try to highlight stories that are not just depressing, but thought provoking analyses of serious problems that require serious attention in the year ahead. Here's for a better criminal justice system in 2006.
Three Cheers for the Urban Institute's new website
January 10, 2006
The Urban Institute recently unveiled a new website design. It's cool, it's attractive, it's modern, and you know what else? All of the old links to their existing material still work! Yes, it appears they changed underlying content management systems and and needed to change the URLs, but the old URLs still work!
Given that prisonsucks is little but edited links to other research available on the internet, you imagine why we take this issue seriously.
We've been ranting about the importance of preserving links and offering technical solutions for years. Typically, we get ignored, so we are thrilled to see organizations like the Urban Institute treat their web visitors and their website with respect.
So to our colleagues who run websites for other organizations, we point to the Urban Institute's website as a great example that even if your website is absolutely huge, it's entirely possible to put the interests of your visitors above your choice of technology solution. All you have to do is make sure your technology vendor is going to preserve your old URLs.
And to the Urban Institute, we offer our congratulations on the new site. It looks great, and the thousands of users of this site -- and the billions of people who use Google -- can find your carefully prepared documents just as easily as they could before. That's a win for everyone.
Incarceration Clock
As of --:--:-- -.-. today, there are an estimated -,---,---, people in U.S. prisons and jails. Source.
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Other site features:
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Electronic books:
- Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Prison Abolitionists, 1976
- Limits to Pain by Nils Christie, 1981
Other resource lists:
Like the site? Love the book!
Written by the editor of this site and co-published with the Western
Prison Project, The Prison Index: Taking the Pulse of the Crime Control
Industry is the first index of statistics about our nation's criminal
justice system ever published. Containing 611 facts and 17 graphs and
charts, this 48-page volume presents, in black-and-white, the state of
crime control in America. Read more and order online.