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 Too often prison activists use statistics that are out of date, provided without citation or simply wrong.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.
November 2003
Real Cost of Prisons website
November 22, 2003
The Real Cost of Prisons Project has created a new website to promote their popular education workshops and materials which explore both the immediate and long-term costs of incarceration on the individual, her/his family, community and the nation. The goals of the Real Cost of Prisons Project are to strengthen and deepen the organizing capacity of grassroots prison/justice activists and to broaden the public's understanding of the economic and social consequences of mass incarceration.
See the website and contact the organizers to bring their workshops to your community.
Felon Disenfranchisement, Prison Racial Disparities and Prison Proliferation
November 21, 2003
The Nation has an excellent article on Felon Disenfranchisement by Rebecca Perl: The Last Disenfranchised Class. AmericanRadioWorks also has a similar piece on their website complete with a realaudio feed, transcripts and links to other resources.
Paul Street has an article on ZNet entitled Starve the Racist Prison Beast that summarizes a lot of important research, including his own ground-breaking work on the demographics of Illinois' prisoners.
Prisonersofthecensus.org has a great map showing the growth of prisons in the last century: Prison Proliferation 1900-1995