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 Too often prison activists use statistics that are out of date, provided without citation or simply wrong.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.
February 2003
Limits to Pain available online
February 12, 2003
We can't speak highly enough of Nils Christie's Crime Control as Industry (review, buy from Amazon.com). Christie's first book, Limits to Pain (1981), which argues that the criminal justice system is in fact a pain delivery system, with the size of the system controlled not by the number of committed acts labeled as crimes but by the amount of pain that a society is willing to impose on its citizens, is now available on the internet. Limits to Pain is powerful in its own right, and very helpful in studying the most recent book. We suggest you read the on-line version of Limits to Pain today.
Incarceration Clock
As of --:--:-- -.-. today, there are an estimated -,---,---, people in U.S. prisons and jails. Source.
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Electronic books:
- Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Prison Abolitionists, 1976
- Limits to Pain by Nils Christie, 1981
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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.