Justice Reform 101: What to Read, Watch, and Listen To
Criminal Legal System:
📚 Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration, by Emily Bazelon
Bazelon argues that the unchecked power given to prosecutors is a driving force in the crisis of mass incarceration in the United States, while also reporting on reform-minded prosecutors who are making strides toward justice.
Joshua B. Hoe’s podcast discusses how to radically reimagine the U.S. criminal legal system, and the broad scope of the changes needed to deliver justice.
A dramatization of the true story of Bryan Stevenson, an attorney and the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, who won the freedom of Walter McMillian, a man on death row in Alabama for a murder he did not commit.
Each episode of this podcast covers a different criminal justice issue, from schools in prison to the death penalty to junk forensic science.
🎙️ Money Bail: Freedom for Sale (News Beat Podcast)
A News Beat podcast episode about how the money bail system in the U.S. has crushed the poor and pressures potentially innocent people to confess to crimes they did not commit.
📺 13th
Ava DuVernay’s Oscar-nominated documentary examines the exception written into the 13th Amendment that still permits slavery in the U.S., so long as it is punishment for crime. The film explores ways this loophole has facilitated the mass criminalization of Black people and the prison boom.
Three decades after the passage of the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Enforcement Act (commonly known as the 1994 Crime Bill), the Vera Institute of Justice and journalist Josie Duffy Rice look into the legislation's impact and examine mass incarceration in the U.S. today. The podcast tells the story of the legislation through conversations with advocates, academics, directly impacted people, and some of the bill’s original supporters.
Immigration:
This film examines the infrastructure that facilitates mass deportation and advocates for policy reform that values the human rights and aspirations of immigrants.
📚 The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail, by Jason De León
This book illuminates the consequences of the U.S. Prevention through Deterrence program, which drives people migrating across the country’s southern border to cross through the dangerous terrain of the Sonoran Desert in Arizona. Between January 2000 and September 2014, 2,771 bodies were found in this region—but that figure hides those that have not been recovered.
📚 Migrating to Prison: America’s Obsession with Locking Up Immigrants, by César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández
This book examines the emergence of mass immigrant imprisonment in the mid-1980s and how federal and state governments have increasingly used their powers to incarcerate people accused of violating immigration laws.
📚 No Justice in the Shadows: How America Criminalizes Immigrants, by Alina Das
This book details the history of U.S. immigration policy to unpack how the idea of the “criminal alien” was constructed and the creation of a deportation machine that banishes people convicted of drug or traffic offenses from their homes.
🎙️ Radiolab Presents: Border Trilogy
This three-episode series investigates the Prevention Through Deterrence policy and how it has increased the numbers of migrant deaths in the Sonoran Desert.
📚 Separated: Inside an American Tragedy, by Jacob Soboroff
This book illuminates the horror of the intentional and systemic separation of children from their parents at the U.S.–Mexico border as a strategy to deter immigration.
Prisons:
📚 All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence, by Emily L. Thuma
This book describes women activists who fought gender violence and incarceration inside and outside of prisons. It traces the origins of anti-carceral feminism at the intersections of racial and economic justice.
📚 American Prison: A Reporter’s Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment, by Shane Bauer
In 2014, Bauer, an investigative journalist, was hired to work at a private prison in Winnfield, Louisiana. His account puts his own experience in the context of the history of for-profit prisons in the U.S. and their roots in slavery.
🎙️ CoreCivic: Unlocking the Truth (Calling Bullshit Podcast)
This podcast episode discusses CoreCivic, the largest private prison company in the world. Founded in the early 1980s, when the U.S. didn’t have enough prisons to hold the people being incarcerated by its “wars” on crime and drugs, it has grown into a business worth $1.8 billion in revenue.
📚 Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, by Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Since 1980, the number of people in U.S. prisons has increased more than 450 percent, with California leading the way in this explosion. This book examines how political and economic forces produced the prison boom.
Race:
📚 The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, by Khalil Gibran Muhammad
Muhammad, a professor of African American Studies and Public Affairs at Princeton University and chair of Vera’s Board of Trustees, offers a biography of the idea of Black criminality, revealing the influence this pernicious myth has had on our society.
📚 Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, by James Forman Jr.
This book examines why many Black leaders—facing rising murder rates and open-air drug markets—supported the war on crime, and the tragic consequences its long prison sentences and aggressive police tactics have had on Black communities.
📚 The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander
Civil rights attorney and activist Michelle Alexander argues that mass incarceration has taken the place of legal discrimination as a tool for controlling Black people and denying their rights. She argues, “We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”
Impacted People’s Voices and Stories:
This PBS film series tells the story of a small group of incarcerated people struggling to earn college degrees and improve their lives in the Bard Prison Initiative, one of the most rigorous and effective prison education programs in the U.S.
🎙️ Ear Hustle
This podcast illuminates the daily realities of life inside prison, as told by those living it. It also offers stories from people who are formerly incarcerated.
This dramatic miniseries illustrates the workings of New York City’s criminal legal system through the story of a young Pakistani American man accused of murder.
📚 Solitary, by Albert Woodfox
A powerful memoir by a man who was sentenced to life in solitary confinement in Louisiana’s Angola prison for a crime he did not commit. He speaks of how he survived the ordeal and the dire need for reform in the U.S. criminal legal system.
This podcast tells the story of Edge of Daybreak, a 1970s soul band formed through a prison music program that recorded an album inside a rural Virginia penitentiary at the height of America’s prison boom.
📚 Unaccompanied, by Javier Zamora
In this book of poems, Javier Zamora narrates the experience of migrating alone from El Salvador to the United States at the age of nine to be reunited with his parents.
📚 The Undocumented Americans, by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
This book, written by a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipient and Harvard graduate, explores the lives of undocumented people living within the U.S.
This drama is based on the true story of the Central Park Five, five teens from Harlem who were wrongfully accused and convicted of a brutal attack on a jogger in Central Park in 1989. Their convictions were vacated in 2002.
📺 The Zo
Inspired by a Yale senior thesis, this series of videos is based on a huge archive of letters compiled by the American Prison Writing Archive. Its title is prison jargon describing “the twilight zone,” the disorienting experience of the psychic warfare waged on incarcerated people by corrections officers.
Click here to download an older version of this guide (published July 2023).