RESOURCES and FURTHER INFORMATION: If you have suggestions/additions for this list, please let me know. This is ever growing.

Abolition & Arts 
Theatre programs working with justice-involved populations:
Readings/Books on arts inside prisons: 
Challenging the Prison Industrial Complex: Activism, Arts, and Educational Alternatives edited by Stephen John Hartnett
Performing New Lives: Prison Theater, edited by Jonathan Shailor
America Is the Prison: Arts and politics in Prison in the 1970s, Lee Bernstein
American Theatre's 2019 special issue on Theatre in Prison
Prison Theatre and the Crisis of Incarceration, by Ashley E. Lucas

Prison Industrial Complex: 
Books (there are soooo many):
Are Prisons Obselete? by Angela Davis
The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
With Liberty for Some: 500 Years of Imprisonment in America by Scott Christianson
Going up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation by Joseph T. Hallinan
Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America by James Forman Jr.
From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America by Elizabeth Hinton
Incarceration Nations by Baz Dreisinger
The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale


Foundations and Organizations: 
  • Founded in 1986, The Sentencing Project works for a fair and effective U.S. criminal justice system by promoting reforms in sentencing policy, addressing unjust racial disparities and practices, and advocating for alternatives to incarceration.
  • Equal Justice Initiative is a private, nonprofit organization that challenges poverty and racial injustice, advocates for equal treatment in the criminal justice system, and creates hope for marginalized communities.
  • The non-profit, non-partisan Prison Policy Initiative produces cutting edge research to expose the broader harm of mass criminalization, and then sparks advocacy campaigns to create a more just society.
  • ​For almost 100 years, the ACLU has worked to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution and laws of the United States
  • The Correctional Association of New York (CANY) is designated by law to provide independent monitoring and oversight of state prisons in New York State.
  • Incarceration Nations Network is a global network that supports, instigates and popularizes innovative prison reform and justice reimagining efforts around the world.

Prison Activist Groups:
Critical Resistance
Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice
All of Us or None

Prison Memoirs: 


Experiences of teachers/volunteers inside prisons: 

Reentry/Homecoming
When Prisoners Come Home: Parole and Prisoner Reentry by Joan Petersilia
All Alone in the World: Children of the Incarcerated by Nell Bernstein.
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