"Past and present efforts to reform prisons and mental hospitals are haunted by a desire to democratize custody. Embedded in this desire, Democracy in Captivity shows, is a persistent anxiety about who ought to govern ward life. Stuck in the middle of the social engineering efforts of both custodians and would-be democratic reformers are prisoners and patients themselves. Wards struggle for representation and, invariably, provoke backlash -- not only in the blunt forms of restraint chairs, riot gear, and a surgeon's scalpel, but also more covert sorts of maneuvering under the cover of 'democratic' management. Christopher D. Berk explains how these more subtle moves facilitate exploitation, entrench disenfranchisement, and naturalize authoritarian rule. In doing so, he uses custody as a lens to examine wider pathologies that have captured the politics of punishment today"--

For 2,000 years Western culture has leaned heavily on the Ten Commandments for guidance in religion, ethics, and morality. The author, drawing upon modern Biblical science, demonstrates that those laws were designed for an entirely different purpose--to provide alternatives to repressive policies Israel reeled under in Egypt. The Decalogue is a political document designed to limit government intrusion into private lives. Its precepts deal with matters like political parties and intellectual freedom, central banking and taxation, occupational choice, free economy, humane working conditions, local government, right to life and international relations, land possession and inheritance, equal justice and education, and citizenship and public health. The author's interpretation necessitates a wholesale repositioning of Biblical religion. The Bible is not a book about religious worship, but is rather a book about citizen-empowered local democracy. This essay suggests a way out of the woods for an American democracy that has lost its way in a headlong veer toward heavy-handed central government.

From the 1811 German Coast Slave Rebellion to the 1971 Attica Prison Uprising, from the truancy of enslaved women to the extreme self-discipline exercised by prisoners in solitary confinement, Black Americans have, through time, resisted racial regimes in extraordinary and everyday ways. Though these acts of large and small-scale resistance to slavery and incarceration are radical and transformative, they have often gone unnoticed. This book is about Black rebellion in captivity and the ways that many of the conventional well-worn constructs of academic political theory render its political dimensions obscure and indiscernible. While Hannah Arendt is an unlikely theorist to figure prominently in any discussion of Black politics, her concepts of world and worldlessness offer an indispensable framework for articulating a theory of resistance to chattel and carceral captivity. Politics in Captivity begins by taking seriously the ways in which slavery and incarceration share important commonalities, including historical continuity. In Zuckerwise’s account of this commonality, the point of connection between enslaved and incarcerated people is not exploited labor, but rather resistance. The relations between the rebellions of both groups appear in the writings of Muhammed Ahmad, Angela Davis, George Jackson, Ruchell Magee, and Assata Shakur, a genre Zuckerwise calls Black carceral political thought. The insights of these thinkers and activists figure into Zuckerwise’s analyses of largescale uprisings and quotidian practices of resistance, which she conceives as acts of world-building, against conditions of forced worldlessness. In a moment when a collective racial reckoning is underway; when Critical Race Theory is a target of the Right; when prison abolition has become more prominent in mainstream political discourse, it is now more important than ever to look to historical and contemporary practices of resistance to white domination.

This book takes a unique stance on a controversial topic: zoos. Zoos have their ardent supporters and their vocal detractors. And while we all have opinions on what zoos do, few people consider how they do it. Irus Braverman draws on more than seventy interviews conducted with zoo managers and administrators, as well as animal activists, to offer a glimpse into the otherwise unknown complexities of zooland. Zooland begins and ends with the story of Timmy, the oldest male gorilla in North America, to illustrate the dramatic transformations of zoos since the 1970s. Over these decades, modern zoos have transformed themselves from places created largely for entertainment to globally connected institutions that emphasize care through conservation and education. Zoos naturalize their spaces, classify their animals, and produce spectacular experiences for their human visitors. Zoos name, register, track, and allocate their animals in global databases. Zoos both abide by and create laws and industry standards that govern their captive animals. Finally, zoos intensely govern the reproduction of captive animals, carefully calculating the life and death of these animals, deciding which of them will be sustained and which will expire. Zooland takes readers behind the exhibits into the world of zoo animals and their caretakers. And in so doing, it turns its gaze back on us to make surprising interconnections between our understandings of the human and the nonhuman.

*Shortlisted for the 2020 Arthur Ross Book Award* From America’s leading scholar of democracy, a personal, passionate call to action against the rising authoritarianism that challenges our world order—and the very value of liberty Larry Diamond has made it his life's work to secure democracy's future by understanding its past and by advising dissidents fighting autocracy around the world. Deeply attuned to the cycles of democratic expansion and decay that determine the fates of nations, he watched with mounting unease as illiberal rulers rose in Hungary, Poland, Turkey, the Philippines, and beyond, while China and Russia grew increasingly bold and bullying. Then, with Trump's election at home, the global retreat from freedom spread from democracy's margins to its heart. Ill Winds' core argument is stark: the defense and advancement of democratic ideals relies on U.S. global leadership. If we do not reclaim our traditional place as the keystone of democracy, today's authoritarian swell could become a tsunami, providing an opening for Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and their admirers to turn the twenty-first century into a dark time of despotism. We are at a hinge in history, between a new era of tyranny and an age of democratic renewal. Free governments can defend their values; free citizens can exercise their rights. We can make the internet safe for liberal democracy, exploit the soft, kleptocratic underbelly of dictatorships, and revive America's degraded democracy. Ill Winds offers concrete, deeply informed suggestions to fight polarization, reduce the influence of money in politics, and make every vote count. In 2020, freedom's last line of defense still remains "We the people."

This collection of essays and interviews provides a frank look at the nature and purposes of prisons in the United States from the perspective of the prisoners. Written by Native American, African American, Latino, Asian, and European American prisoners, the book examines captivity and democracy, the racial "other," gender and violence, and the stigma of a suspect humanity. Contributors include those incarcerated for social and political acts, such as conscientious objection, antiwar activism, black liberation, and gang activities. Among those interviewed are Philip Berrigan, Marilyn Buck, Angela Y. Davis, George Jackson, and Laura Whitehorn.