back to school edition: TOILETS, book news, & midcentury prison history revisited

I will get to the reason for the toilet image, I promise.

My summer was bracketed, unintentionally but perfectly, by two excellent memoirs: I started the summer with Kim Gordon’s Girl In a Band and wrapped up with Lena Dunham’s Famesick. Both were helpful for their contemplations on living an artistic life and the difficulties of making art with other people. I loved the beginning of Gordon’s journey and the way she moved city to city trying to grow as an artist. Dunham’s book will stay with me as I prioritize staying well enough to keep doing the work— my usual struggle as the academic year unfolds.

We are wrapping up work on The Cambridge Companion to American Carceral History, which for me has included an unplanned deep dive back into midcentury prison and jail history. Judith Resnik’s new, big book Impermissible Punishments: How Prison Became a Problem for Democracy (Chicago) has been essential. Resnik is one of the smartest people I've ever met and takes on many of the bedrock assumptions of penology and penal practice.

As I got back into the literature, Ethan Blue’s recent classic Doing Time In the Depression: Everyday Life in Texas and California Prisons (NYU- open access!) and Vivien Miller’s Hard Labor and Hard Time: Florida's Sunshine Prison and Chain Gangs (Florida) both felt especially fresh.

I was really excited to find Amanda Hughett has a chapter, From Extraction to Repression: Prison Labor, Prison Finance, and the Prisoners' Rights Movement in North Carolina," in the book Labor and Punishment: Work in and Out of Prison (California).

A new-to-me book, Slaves of the State: Black Incarceration from the Chain Gang to the Penitentiary by Dennis Childs (Minnesota), was one I wished I had known about when I was writing my book.

BOOK NEWS

New pre-orders:

Dan Berger’s highly anticipated book Prison: Incarceration and the Making of America (Basic Books) is available for pre-order and out on March 9. This gave me goosebumps: “The land of the free is the home of the prisoner.”

My book This Is My Jail: Local Politics and the Rise of Mass Incarceration is out in paperback in December. If you pre-order right now with the code PENNSCHOOL26, you can get 50% off. I relistened to the audiobook recently and was proud of myself for including so much data about toilets, which were surprisingly absent from many jails into the 1970s!

Zoe Colley’s Assumed Guilty: Black Power, Crime, and Justice is out on February 23 (Florida). I am really fond of Zoe’s first book, Ain’t Scared of Your Jail: Arrest, Imprisonment, and the Civil Rights Movement (Florida). While you wait on your copy of Assumed Guilty, read her piece in the Journal of American Studies, “Erasing Minds: Behavioral Modification, the Prison Rights Movement, and Psychological Experimentation in America's Prisons, 1962–1983.” It will make your hair stand up.

Kelly Lytle Hernández has a new book coming on September 22, Racist by Design: Two Centuries of U.S. Immigration Control (Norton). If you are subscribing to this newsletter, you probably understand that you need to block out some time on your calendar to read that one right away. She is one of the greats. 

New releases, ready to go for Spring syllabi:

Talitha L. Leflouria’s Searching for Jane Crow: Black Women and Mass Incarceration in America from the Auction Block to the Cell Block (Beacon)

Chin Jou’s Captive Consumers: Hunger, Violence, and Inequality in American Prison Food (UNC)

Elizabeth Hinton and Elsa Julien Lora with an edited volume, Harm and Punishment: Incarcerated Writers on Violence and the US Prison (Haymarket, comes with a free ebook!)

And finally, why there's an image of a toilet on this newsletter:

Friend of the newsletter Bryant Simon has a new book out For Customers Only:
Public Bathrooms and the Making of American Inequality (Chicago). If he's doing an event in your town, you should definitely go.

Here's an essay by Calen "Wolf" Whidden at Prison Journalism Project about life with his prison toilet: "‘I Literally Live in a Bathroom.’"

Thanks for reading. If you are interested in having your book or article featured, please reach out.

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