Dismantling Mass Incarceration: A Handbook for Change

＂You won’t find a better collection of diverse perspectives regarding how to respond to the crisis of mass incarceration--ranging from reform to abolition--than what’s offered here.＂ --Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow

＂This extraordinary collection by our nation’s most brilliant thinkers on punishment, policing and prisons is exactly the blueprint for making a just society that we have all been waiting for and desperately need.＂ --Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water

A vital reader on ending mass incarceration featuring advocates, experts, and formerly incarcerated people.

In recent years, a searching national conversation has called attention to the social and racial injustices that define America’s criminal system. But despite growing movements for change, the vast machinery of the carceral state remains very much intact. How can its damage and depredations be undone?

In this pathbreaking reader, three of the nation’s leading advocates--Premal Dharia, James Forman Jr., and Maria Hawilo--provide us with tools to move from despair and critique to hope and action. Dismantling Mass Incarceration surveys various approaches to confronting the carceral state, exploring bold but practical interventions involving police, prosecutors, public defenders, judges, prisons, and even life after prison. Rather than prescribing solutions, the book offers a forum for discussions--and disagreements--about how to best confront the harms of mass incarceration. The contributors range from noted figures such as Angela Y. Davis, Clint Smith, and Larry Krasner to local organizers, advocates, scholars, lawyers, and judges, as well as people who have been incarcerated. The result is an invaluable guide for anyone who wishes to understand mass incarceration--and hasten its end.

Premal Dahria directs the Institute to End Mass Incarceration at Harvard Law School. She has written for TheWashington Post, CNN, Slate, and other publications, and serves on the Fellows Advisory Council of the International Legal Foundation and the Academic Advisory Board of the Family Justice Law Center. James Forman Jr. is the J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law at Yale Law School and the faculty director of the Yale Law and Racial Justice Center. His book Locking Up Our Own won the Pulitzer Prize in 2017. Maria Hawilo is a distinguished professor in residence at Loyola University Law School, Chicago. She has written for The Appeal, Injustice Watch, and other publications. All three editors are former public defenders.