The End of Prisons: Reflections from the Decarceration Movement (Value Inquiry Book)

This book brings together a collection of social justice scholars and activists who take Foucault's concept of discipline and punishment to explain how prisons are constructed in society from nursing homes to zoos. This book expands the concept of prison to include any institution that dominates, oppresses, and controls. Criminologists and others, who have been concerned with reforming or dismantling the criminal justice system, have mostly avoided to look at larger carceral structures in society. In this book, for example, scholars and activists question the way patriarchy has incapacitated women and imagine the deinstitutionalization of people with disabilities. In a time when popular sentiment critiques the dominant role of the elites (the "one percenters"), the state's role in policing dissenting voices, school children, LGBTQ persons, people of color, and American Indian Nations, needs to be investigated. A prison, as defined in this book, is an institution or system that oppresses and does not allow freedom for a particular group. Within this definition, we include the imprisonment of nonhuman animals and plants, which are too often overlooked.

[the book is] part of a growing interest across disciplines in the injustice of mass incarceration and other forms of oppression in America that needs to continue to unfold, and offers new facets of understanding and resisting forms of oppression. --Peace and Justice Studies - Volume 23 . Number 2 (2014)

The End of Prisons is not your average prison abolition book. Rather, it challenges the very idea of what a prison is as it exposes the ways in which all in industrial Western-colonial culture reside in one prison or another. Most significantly, it challenges the concept of who is incarcerated, expanding that idea beyond human animals to include nonhumans and plant life as well. This is a timely book that anyone should read who is concerned with new methods of exposing, challenging and subverting domination. --Dr. Kim Socha, author of Women, Destruction and the Avant-Garde: A Paradigm for Animal Liberation

This book dramatically raises the stakes in terms of what counts as prisons, who comprise the incarcerated, and what needs to be done to bring an end to prisons. This powerful and path breaking treatise will help to redefine the prison abolition movement and chart an urgent course for revolutionary transformation. --Dr. Peter McLaren, Professor, Critical Studies in Education, The University of Auckland, New Zealand