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 Too often prison activists use statistics that are out of date, provided without citation or simply wrong.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.
December 2003
Read about trends in the Crime Control Industry
December 30, 2003
The Western Prison Project and the Prison Policy Initiative have posted the Trends in Crime Control Overview section of The Prison Index on the web. Check it out and then purchase the entire report.
The overview takes a brief look at trends within various parts of the crime control industry. It's a fair assumption that barring outside action, what happens tomorrow will resemble what happened yesterday. But with so many factors at play in the crime control industry, we should look at what influences the health of the industry in order to assess likely industry scenarios in the future.
Each section provides a short summary of the numerical trends, and then lists some factors that will determine what happens in the next two to five years. Many of these factors are directly or indirectly political, and therefore ripe for being influenced by advocacy efforts.
Discussed in this portion of The Prison Index are:
Put prisonsucks on your desktop or your website
December 19, 2003
You can keep track of updates to all of the Prison Policy Initiative websites right on your desktop using an RSS newsreader like NetNewsWire (Mac) or FeedDemon (PC). RSS Newsreaders can be used to monitor updates to the thousands of websites that produce these feeds. Download the program, and enter any or all of the feeds listed on our feeds page.
You can also include the 5 newest links added to the research and factsheet databases on your existing webpages using the javascript provided on our feeds page.
Put incarceration clock on your website
December 8, 2003
Due to popular request, we're making the prisonsucks.com incarceration clock available for you to include on your own website. We wrote some simple 3 step instructions on how to do it.
Incarceration Clock
As of --:--:-- -.-. today, there are an estimated -,---,---, people in U.S. prisons and jails. Source.
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What's new on the research page:
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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.