Reseña del libro "American Prisoner: Above the Cage (en Inglés)"
FROM 1982 TO 1998, California embarked on the most massive prison building spree in the history of the world by building 24 prisons from Tehachapi and Folsom along highway 99 in a stretch known as Prison Alley, ushering in the era of Mass Incarceration. In order to fill prison beds and create jobs for California Correctional Peace Officers Association members, laws changed to expand lengths of prison sentences and ensure an increase in the prison population. California was aggressively moving away from an economy previously built on government defense contracts and agriculture to a new kind of economic model... the Prison Industrial Complex. In 1977 the prison population in California was around 19,000, but by 2009 it topped 160,000 prisoners and required the intervention of a federal receivership in order to deal with Constitutional violation lawsuits involving overcrowding and substandard medical care. Prison is a twilight world existing in the shadows, largely unknown to outsiders. What goes on within the walls and electric fences of this nation's penitentiaries would shock the senses of most people. To those of us confined, controlled and caged we adapt, endure, and negotiate our way through the labyrinth of violence, deprivation and dispossession from genteel society. We attend rehabilitative groups and learn the causes and effects of our criminality (those of us rightfully convicted) or earn college degrees to expand our knowledge, becoming critical thinkers as we grow toward pro-social adaptation. In becoming critical thinkers, some of us are compelled to challenge conditions we recognize as inhumane and go beyond what any individual, incarcerated or otherwise, should endure. To bring light to these dark places of concrete and steel incarcerated writers and journalists and those who support them stand up to censorship and power to report truth, illuminating the forgotten, dispossessed and disenfranchised Voices from the Shadows.
