Punishing Race A Continuing American Dilemma by Mi
Punishing Race A Continuing American Dilemma by Mi
Punishing Race A Continuing American Dilemma by Mi
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Traci Schlesinger
DePaul University
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All content following this page was uploaded by Traci Schlesinger on 26 December 2017.
Reference
Tonry, Michael (1996) Malign Neglect: Race, Crime, and Punishment in America. New York:
Oxford Univ. Press.
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In his new book, From Black Power to Prison Power, Donald Tibbs
achieves precisely what the field of law and society aims to do:
demonstrate how a landmark, if largely overlooked, court decision
emerges from the historical struggle for black liberation during the
Black Power era, a conflict between an inexorable social movement
and state power intent on preserving white people’s five centuries-
old despotic relationship to black people. Through Tibbs’ legal
history, we can glean how such a thing as a labor union for prison-
ers came to be in the first place, how the organizing which made it
possible was neither anomalous nor exceptional but rather was the
culmination of black struggle across the generations, and how the
strategic decisions of prisoners and their supporters indicate what it
means to exist within the crosshairs of state repression. While it
may be unsurprising that the court ultimately decided against
the prisoners (no spoiler alert needed), From Black Power to Prison
Power’s deconstruction of the court’s reasoning in Jones illustrates a
basic principle of law and society studies—that is, contradictions
between power and jurisprudence betray the law’s fundamental
tyranny, especially where black people are concerned.
From Black Power to Prison Power is organized into three sections.
In the first section, “Foundations,” Tibbs establishes the historical
context for the two main strands of political movement that would
later come together to comprise the prisoner union movement. On
the one hand, there was the struggle within prisons by inmates who
sought to exploit the state’s ambivalent policies, which, for a time,
vacillated between rehabilitation and straight-up punishment.
From the 1950s onward, collective action by prisoners, together
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