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 Too often prison activists use statistics that are out of date, provided without citation or simply wrong.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 2005
First Real Cost of Prisons comic book: Prison Town: Paying the Price
February 10, 2005
The Real Cost of Prisons Project, which does innovative popular education workshops on criminal justice issues, has completed the first of the comic books based on one of their workshops:
Prison Town: Paying the Price by Kevin Pyle and Craig Gilmore tells one story of the way in which the financing and siting of prisons and jails impact the people and economies of rural communities where prisons are built. It tells a parallel story of the damage done to people in urban communities by mass incarceration. Included is a two page "map" of How Prison Are Paid For (and who really pays?) as well as alternatives to the current system. It's available on the web now in PDF and will be out in print in March 2005.
Other comic books being prepared for release later this spring are Prisoners of the War on Drugs and Prisoners of a Hard Life: Women and Children. Organizations can order up to 300 copies of each comic book for use in their own organizing, community education and outreach work for free, merely by explaining how they would use the books. See the instructions on the Real Cost of Prisons comics page.