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Vendor
Liepman Literary Agency
Marc Koralnik
Original language
English

INCARCERATION NATIONS.

Baz Dreisinger

In Search of Justice in Prisons Around the World

A journalist and activist goes behind bars in nine countries to explore the gnawing question: Does prison work?
Written by a professor and journalist who founded the Prison-to-College Pipeline to educate incarcerated men and guarantee them a place in college upon release, Incarceration Nations offers a window into a world most are denied access to, while touching on issues pertinent to our understanding of how prison is functioning (or not) in our world today. From helping to facilitate restorative justice in a notorious South African prison and working with genocide survivors in Rwanda who launch a prison visiting program, to teaching a creative writing class in an overcrowded Ugandan prison and coordinating a drama workshop for women prisoners in Thailand, Baz Dreisinger delves into the world behind bars with empathy and intellect. She journeys to Jamaica to visit a prison music program, to Singapore to learn about approaches to prisoner reentry, to Australia to grapple with the bottom line of private prisons, to a federal supermax in Brazil to confront the horrors of solitary confinement, and finally to the model prisons of Norway. Ultimately, Incarceration Nations invites us to radically rethink one of America's most devastating exportations, the modern prison system, and — by bearing witness to its human costs — acts as a call to arms, showing us how and why this unjust system urgently needs our attention. BAZ Dreisinger, an Associate Professor in the English Department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, is the founder and Academic Director of the Prison-to- College Pipeline program (P2CP). She is also a reporter on popular culture, the Caribbean, world music, and race-related issues for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, and NPR, among other outlets, and a co-producer and co-writer of the documentaries Black & Blue: Legends of the Hip-Hop Cop. She is the author of Near Black: White to Black Passing in American Culture (2008).
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Published 2016-02-01 by Other Press

Comments

Rethinking America's Criminal Justice System, With Lessons From Abroad Read more...

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"It's difficult to address mass incarceration without talking about communities of color, especially black ones. Founder of the Prison-to-College Pipeline, Dreisinger (English, John Jay Coll.) tackles America's most noxious export: prisons." - Library Journal

"An eye-opening, damning indictment of the American prison system and the way its sins reverberate around the globe." - Kirkus

"Taking a hard look at the U.S. and other countries' ill-conceived embrace of confinement." Read more...

Recently, Baz Dreisinger shared an excerpt from Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World with the Huffington Post, painting a much clearer picture of exactly what prison is like in Norway. She found herself interacting with two deckhands on the ferry to Bastoy Island. Read more...

“Baz Dreisinger traces our legacy of mass incarceration around the globe. She does it with honesty, courage, and humility over the size of the problem, and yet she finds magical possibilities everywhere she goes when the imprisoned are treated as real persons. There are answers. This book says we can find them.” —Robert A. Ferguson, George Edward Woodberry Professor of Law, Literature, and Criticism, Columbia University

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Baz Dreisinger on Norway's prison inmates Read more...

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Interview Read more...

Business Weekly, Complex Chinese

What a comparative analysis of incarceration around the world tells us. The distinction between a penal system and a criminal justice system. The recent historical development of the penal system. Penal colonies and modern prisons. How America came to value punishment. Capitalist and colonial influences on the development of incarceration. Read more...

Citic Press

Some mistakes are bigger than others. Like the ones that get you sent to prison. Should you find yourself in prison, it's important to learn the local currency. Read more...

Baz Dreisinger, author of INCARCERATION NATION'S, had a feature for her Prison to College program run on Al Jazeera - Read more...

Educating Prisoners Saves Money and Lives: 'Give a Brother a Chance' Read more...