Skip to main content
University of California Press

UC Press Blog

7 Results

Societies Contoured Along Penal Power

May 22 2026
Author Michael Welch presents an excerpt from his new book about the enduring meaning of containment and surveillance in post-conflict societies.
Read More

How Prisons Manage Gender Boundaries—and How That’s Changed Over Time

May 20 2026
Author Joss T. Greene traces how changing prison systems have shaped the treatment of transgender prisoners across decades.
Read More

Prisons are Still Making COVID-19 Era Mistakes

Nov 07 2024
Unless considerable prisons reforms are made now—like an aggressive 50% reduction in prison population—the next epidemic will provoke calamities similar to COVID-19.
Read More

Q&A with Rachel Ellis, author of In This Place Called Prison

Nov 13 2023
In This Place Called Prison offers a vivid account of religious life within an institution designed to punish. Rachel Ellis conducted a year of ethnographic fieldwork inside a U.S. state women’s prison, talking with hundreds of incarcerated women, staff, and volunteers. Through their stories, Ellis
Read More

“Tiger Cages” in Vietnam: How the call for U.S. Prison Abolition is a Global Issue

Jul 17 2020
By Stuart Schrader, author of Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American PolicingJuly 17, 2020Fifty years ago today, Life magazine printed photographs taken inside a prison on an island off the coast of Vietnam called Côn Sơn.The photos depicted a wing of a
Read More

Father’s Day: Acknowledging Incarcerated Fathers

Jun 21 2020
In light of Father's Day and ongoing conversations on police and prison reform, UC Press acknowledges incarcerated fathers and the challenges that families face. The following titles highlight numerous issues in the criminal justice system from wrongful convictions to the California parole system.
Read More

Dismantling the Police and Prisons: A Reading List

Jun 19 2020
From the massive prison system of California, to an abolitionist sanctuary movement, and the reimagining of how to provide safety in Puerto Rico, the following recommended titles offer in-depth research on alternatives to policing and incarceration. Golden GulagPrisons, Surplus, Crisis,
Read More