Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn't Work and How We Can Do Better

Through the stories of prisoners and their families, including her own family’s experiences, Maya Schenwar shows how the institution that locks up 2.3 million Americans and decimates poor communities of color is shredding the ties that, if nurtured, could foster real collective safety. As she vividly depicts here, incarceration takes away the very things that might enable people to build better lives. But looking toward a future beyond imprisonment, Schenwar profiles community-based initiatives that successfully deal with problems--both individual harm and larger social wrongs--through connection rather than isolation, moving toward a safer, freer future for all of us.

“Schenwar's thoughtful analysis of a deeply flawed system centers on this personal experience, augmented by dozens of interviews with inmates and their family members across the country.”
*-Publisher’s Weekly

• “Schenwar, editor in chief of social justice website Truthout, has written extensively about prisons, but the topic hit home for the author when her sister Kayla was incarcerated on drug charges. Kayla's experience in jail impelled Schenwar to pen this book in order to ask for reforms in the system. In particular, the author discusses the often overlooked effects on the family and the community of incarcerated people. In addition to her sister, Schenwar considers other inmates who have committed more serious crimes and suggests ways that these, too, could have been better handled. The complexity of the current criminal justice system means that many of her ideas seem pie in the sky, but certainly they are worth a second glance. Given the author's personal involvement, she deserves kudos for bringing them to light. VERDICT This book should be read by students and professionals in criminal justice. Since it has an easy-to-read style, it should also be of interest to the general reader who simply wishes to know what it's like to be behind bars.”
  *-Frances O. Sandiford, formerly with Green Haven Correctional Facility Lib., Stormville, NY Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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  “Schenwar illustrates how making a fundamental move away from isolation and toward connection has the potential to liberate our energies and to free our imaginations.”
  *-Bill Ayers, Truth-Out
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  “Locked Down, Locked Out breaks through this disinterest in a couple pointed ways. The first is that talks about prison through a personal story. Schenwar’s story feels honest because her sister is not that way—her family acknowledges that she has drug problems and even at one point feels safer knowing she’s in prison than running around on her own.”
  *-Sarah Mirk, Bitch Media
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  “Maya Schenwar’s newly released book, Locked Down, Locked Out, weaves together excellent political analysis with her personal perspective to demonstrate how our current prison system fails both prisoners and those on the outside.”
  *-Suzana Bobadilla, Feministing
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  “While Schenwar shows how prison is not the answer to addiction, her dedication to a better world is inspiring, and convincing too: there are solutions to what often feels like despair.”
  *-Jean Trounstine, JeanTroustine.com
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  “Deftly weaving her own personal experiences with her sister’s incarceration alongside the stories of prisoners who she has been writing to over the last eight years, Schenwar illustrates the devastating effects of prisons on those who are incarcerated, their families, and our communities. With her book, she not only offers a searing analysis of the prison industrial complex but also possibilities for creating alternatives to mass incarceration.”
  *-Alice Kim, Praxis Center

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  “What I appreciated most about the book is the consistent emphasis on the need for connection between people. Locked Down understands that relationships matter greatly. Connection and relationships are the very things that prisons excel at destroying.”
  *-US Prison Culture

• “Unlike other books about the devastation caused by prisons, Schenwar doesn’t simply describe the problems and then propose policy recommendations to decrease the number of people sent to jails and prisons. Instead, she devotes half of her book to examining existing programs that attempt to address violence and other forms of harm without relying on prisons or prison-like alternatives, weaving these alternatives in as she describes the harm and violence that prisons cause.”
  *-Victoria Law, Waging Nonviolence
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  “Locked Down, Locked Out is both an incomparably put together report incorporating statistics and studies with individual quotations and anecdotes, and a personal story of how incarceration has impacted the author's own family and how the author has thought through the complex issues.”
  *-David Swanson, War Is A Crime
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  “Maya Schenwar's stories about prisoners, their families (including her own), and the thoroughly broken punishment system are rescued from any pessimism such narratives might inspire by the author's brilliant juxtaposition of abolitionist imaginaries and radical political practices.”
  *—Angela Y. Davis, author of Are Prisons Obsolete?
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  “This book has the power to transform hearts and minds, opening us to new ways of imagining what justice can mean for individuals, families, communities, and our nation as a whole. Maya Schenwar’s personal, openhearted sharing of her own family’s story, together with many other stories and real-world experiments with transformative justice, makes this book compelling, highly persuasive, and difficult to put down. I turned the last page feeling nothing less than inspired.”
  *—Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow
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  “A tour de force! Schenwar has written a must-read, damning account of the twisted philosophy and practice of incarceration…Until society changes its approach toward its ‘offenders,’ until we leaven punishment with forgiveness, reconciliation, and restorative justice, we are all guilty as charged.”
  *—Dennis J. Kucinich, US Congressman (1997–2013) and presidential candidate
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  “Locked Down, Locked Out paints a searing portrait of the real-life human toll of mass incarceration, both on prisoners and on their families, and—equally compellingly—provides hope that collectively we can create a more humane world freed of prisons. Read this deeply personal and political call to end the shameful inhumanity of our prison nation.”
  *—Dorothy Roberts, author of Shattered Bonds and Killing the Black Body
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  “This moving book makes a very important intervention into both the popular understanding and the political discussions about the devastating impact of mass imprisonment. In her riveting descriptions of what happens to individuals and families caught in the long reach of the prison nation, Schenwar makes a compelling case for prison abolition and reinvestment in communities. This book will change both what we understand about injustice and how we work for more logical and effective solutions.”
  *—Beth E. Richie, author of Arrested Justice
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  “I read Locked Down, Locked Out ravenously, surprised and enlightened on every page. It is a searing portrait of waywardness and redemption, justice arrested and deliverance detained. No one has narrated and illuminated the collateral damage of our carceral state more powerfully than Maya Schenwar.”
  *—Bill Ayers, author of Fugitive Days and A Kind and Just Parent
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  “The prime excuse for i…