The American prison system has grown tenfold in thirty years, while crime rates have been relatively flat: 2 million people are behind bars on any given day, more prisoners than in any other country in the world — half a million more than in Communist China, and the largest prison expansion the world has ever known. In Going Up The River, Joseph Hallinan gets to the heart of America’s biggest growth industry, a self-perpetuating prison-industrial complex that has become entrenched without public awareness, much less voter consent. He answers, in an extraordinary way, the essential question: What, in human terms, is the price we pay? He has looked for answers to that question in every corner of the “prison nation,” a world far off the media grid — the America of struggling towns and cities left behind by the information age and desperate for jobs and money. Hallinan shows why the more prisons we build, the more prisoners we create, placating everyone at the expense of the voiceless prisoners, who together make up one of the largest migrations in our nation’s history.

With bountiful salmon and fertile plains, the Duwamish River has drawn people to its shores over the centuries for trading, transport, and sustenance. Chief Se’alth and his allies fished and lived in villages here and white settlers established their first settlements nearby. Industrialists later straightened the river’s natural turns and built factories on its banks, floating in raw materials and shipping out airplane parts, cement, and steel. Unfortunately, the very utility of the river has been its undoing, as decades of dumping led to the river being declared a Superfund cleanup site. Using previously unpublished accounts by Indigenous people and settlers, BJ Cummings’s compelling narrative restores the Duwamish River to its central place in Seattle and Pacific Northwest history. Writing from the perspective of environmental justice—and herself a key figure in river restoration efforts—Cummings vividly portrays the people and conflicts that shaped the region’s culture and natural environment. She conducted research with members of the Duwamish Tribe, with whom she has long worked as an advocate. Cummings shares the river’s story as a call for action in aligning decisions about the river and its future with values of collaboration, respect, and justice.

First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A young soldier survives a Confederate prison camp during the Civil War.

Bonnie and Debby Fairchild decide to make money by selling pictures and bluing to their neighbors.

On a steamy August day in 1993, the Pee Dee Education Center held its monthly meeting in the long, narrow board room on the second floor of the building located on Dargan Street in downtown Florence. On that day, eighteen of the nineteen member superintendents voted to sue the state of South Carolina. As they took this action, the superintendents were not aware they were becoming a part of a state-by-state national movement, a movement that would challenge state governments to provide a higher level of education for each state's poorest students. The South Carolinians only knew they were struggling to offer students in their districts the kind of education the students needed to break out of the cycle of poverty in which most of them were trapped. This book is the story of how the Pee Dee superintendents brought the suit against the state, risking their reputations and livelihoods to stand up for poor children in their districts. It's also the story of a state's unwillingness to address the educational needs of its children. Part I of the book traces the development of school finance suits in the country with special emphasis on New Jersey, Kentucky, and Ohio. Part II describes the South Carolina trial, including testimonies of the eight plaintiff superintendents and other key witnesses. Part III includes the court decision in the South Carolina case, a comparison of that decision with those in New Jersey, Kentucky, and Ohio and a more detailed comparison of the South Carolina case with its neighbor, North Carolina.