Prison by Any Other Name by Maya Schenwar

Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law write about a variety of “alternatives to incarceration” – including electronic monitoring, school police, drug courts, and more – and how these alternatives still tie people to the state, limit their ability to heal and thrive, and disproportionately negatively affect Black, brown, Indigenous, and low-income communities.

While more people have gained awareness about the racist awfulness of mass incarceration due to books like Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and films like 13th, I feel like contemporary society in the United States has not named the damage brought on by the popular reforms discussed in this book. So appreciated this book for its exploration of harmful prison reforms that may seem beneficial yet continue to enact harm. Finally, the book offers a bolder vision for truly alternative justice practices. A foreword by Michelle Alexander situates the book in the context of criminal justice reform conversations. In Prison by Any Other Name, activist journalists Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law reveal the way the kinder, gentler narrative of reform can obscure agendas of social control and challenge us to question the ways we replicate the status quo when pursuing change. But-though they’re promoted as steps to confront high rates of imprisonment-many of these measures are transforming our homes and communities into prisons instead. But many of these so-called reforms actually widen the net, weaving in new strands of punishment and control, and bringing new populations, who would not otherwise have been subject to imprisonment, under physical control by the state.Īs mainstream public opinion has begun to turn against mass incarceration, political figures on both sides of the spectrum are pushing for reform.

These are some of the key alternatives held up as cost-effective substitutes for jails and prisons. “But what does it mean-really-to celebrate reforms that convert your home into your prison?” -Michelle Alexander, from the forewordĮlectronic monitoring. A crucial indictment of widely embraced “alternatives to incarceration” that exposes how many of these new approaches actually widen the net of punishment and surveillance.

Prison by Any Other Name by Maya Schenwar