Beyond Just Mercy

Just Mercy examines ways that the American criminal justice system—which purports to be fair for everybody—nonetheless permits bias against marginalized groups. Using his experiences with his own clients, Stevenson recounts how the system can be rife with abuse, from the local obstacles of disinterested court-appointed lawyers and corrupt officials to the national challenge of overt racial prejudice in how crime is policed and prosecuted. When these baked-in attitudes and practices go unexamined, the justice system can let down the most vulnerable people it is supposed to protect. We can begin to counter these injustices through a national conversation that elevates the stories of those who have lived through systemic oppression and takes seriously the historical research that shows that justice is not, in fact, blind.

In Caste, Isabel Wilkerson explores an unseen American phenomenon: a hidden caste system. Beyond race, class, or other factors, Wilkerson argues that there is a powerful human hierarchy that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate. Using riveting stories about people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, and Wilkerson herself—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She finds links between the caste systems of India, Nazi Germany, and America, and examines how Americans can move beyond the artificial, destructive separations of human divisions.

Read Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

In The Torture Machine, Flint Taylor takes the reader from the 1969 murders of Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton and Panther Mark Clark through the dogged pursuit of commander Jon Burge, the leader of a torture ring within the Chicago Police Department that used barbaric methods, including electric shock, to elicit false confessions from suspects. Taylor documents how activists gathered evidence to bring suit against the officers and the City of Chicago, leading ultimately to the successful campaign to end the death penalty in Illinois.

Read The Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago

Illustrated by Gillian Newland and written by Jenny Kay Dupuis and Kathy Kacer, I Am Not A Number is based on a true story about a young First Nations girl who was sent to a residential school. When eight-year-old Irene is removed from her First Nations family to live in a residential school, she is confused, frightened, and terribly homesick. She tries to remember who she is and where she came from despite the efforts of the nuns to force her to do otherwise. Based on the life of Dupuis’ own grandmother, this book brings a terrible part of Canada’s history to light in a way that children can relate to.

Read I Am Not a Number

In this picture book written and illustrated by Duncan Tonatiuh, Pancho, a young rabbit, sets out for El Norte to find his father, who is late returning from the great carrot and lettuce fields. He falls in with a ravenous coyote who offers to guide him over the border (for a price), but when the food runs out, so does Pancho’s luck. In a rather large coincidence, he’s rescued from death by his Papá. Along the way, Pancho crosses a river, climbs a fence, and passes through a tunnel guarded by uniformed, bribe-taking snakes.

Read Pancho Rabbit and the Coyote

Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law present an examination of so-called “alternatives to incarceration” such as electronic monitoring, locked-down drug treatment centers, and data-driven surveillance that actually “widen the net” of imprisonment, bringing new populations who would not otherwise have been subject to imprisonment under physical control by the state. As the foreword author asks: “What does it mean—really—to celebrate reforms that convert your home into your prison?”

Read Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms

Once a desperate teen looking to get off the streets of a violence-torn neighborhood, Victor Rios became a sociologist who now has taken a contemporary look at young Californian men who find themselves in much the same situation as he did at 15. He follows young gang members into schools, homes, community organizations, and detention facilities, watches them interact with police, grow up to become fathers, get jobs, get rap sheets, and in some cases get killed. He makes the case that the traditional street kid/decent kid dichotomy is much too simplistic, arguing instead that authorities and institutions help create these identities. In turn these groups can play an instrumental role in providing young people with the resources for shifting between roles.

Read Human Targets: Schools, Police, and the Criminalization of Latino Youth

Prisons are more than just buildings of incarceration. Brett Story investigates the production of carceral power at a range of sites, from buses to coalfields and from blighted cities to urban financial hubs, to demonstrate how the organization of carceral space is grounded in racial capitalism. By framing the prison as a set of social relations, Prison Land forces readers to confront the production of new carceral forms that go well beyond the prison system.

Read Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power across Neoliberal America

While LGBT activism has increased worldwide, there has been strong backlash against LGBT people in Eastern Europe. Although Russia is the most prominent anti-gay regime in the region, LGBT individuals in other post-communist countries also suffer from discriminatory laws and prejudiced social institutions. Conor O’Dwyer’s analysis of the development of LGBT movements in post-communist Europe includes interviews and case studies in Poland, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic.

Read Coming Out of Communism: The Emergence of LGBT Activism in Eastern Europe