Recs if you like Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy...

These texts all require some level of prior knowledge and understanding of abolition, how the carceral system functions, organizing, & more.

I also have a list for intro/beginner texts

All of the books listed here are introductory texts for Prison Abolition. The books on this list need no prior knowledge and are all great starting points for understanding prison abolition. You will find personal accounts, journalistic and essay books, as well as accessible analyses and histories of policing/incarceration

This list is the why of abolition

A list of Banned or Censored books (from around the world) that I want to read and form my own opinions about...

ask large questions in small spaces! avoids (but not void of) memoirs/biographies, some case studies, and the macro i'm not a historian or an expert by any means but i am salty. a lot of contemporary lists for microhistory reads contain a lot of books that are absolutely not micro. At. All. think mark kurlansky ("milk", "salt", "cod" etc.), anything that starts with "a short history of [incredibly complex geopolitical event]", or literally any historical account that spans centuries/countries/cultures/individuals. while there is definitely some gray areas and overlap, a good way to attempt to distinguish micro from the macro is macrohistory looks at how an individual/event/object/place changed and influenced the world/society/culture -- an outward expansion of one idea that proliferates time and space. microhistory is the inverse. how did the contemporary society, culture, and world change and influence a specific, tangential individual/place/event? the micro attempts to answer that! so let's reduce the scale of investigation! focus on the ones history would have otherwise forgotten if not for the diligent note takers! we're talking footnotes! anecdotes! indexes! the hot goss! EA-NASIR! macrohistory is about everyone but microhistory is about you and me baby!

Nonfiction books that address criminal psychology, flaws with the justice system, and what is to be done about it.

The Bancroft Prize is awarded each year by the trustees of Columbia University for books about diplomacy or the history of the Americas. The award goes back to 1948 with two winners every year, so I'm adding them starting with the most recent.