Launch of “Prison and Social Death” by Joshua Price

When

Thursday, February 18, 2016

7:30 PM to 9:00 PM

Thursday, February 18, 7:30pm
Come to a launch of Joshua Price’ book “Prison and Social Death” and a discussion of current efforts to end solitary confinement and other forms of extreme isolation in state prisons and local jails in New York and nationally with the participation of Five Mualimm-ak and Terrence Slater from the Campaign for Alternatives to Isolated Confinement (CAIC).
Isolated confinement involves confining people in a cell for 22 to 24 hours a day without meaningful human contact, programming, or therapy. This practice is ineffective, counterproductive, unsafe, and inhumane, and it causes people detained in these conditions to deteriorate psychologically, physically, and socially. Nevertheless, New York utilizes isolated confinement at rates well above the national average.
We will discuss the experiences of people who have served time in solitary. We will also review recent legal settlements, legislative initiatives and activist attempts to end or curtail the use of solitary and solitary-like conditions.
Joshua Price teaches at SUNY Binghamton. He is the author of two books, Prison and Social Death (2015) and Structural Violence: Hidden Brutality in the Lives of Women (2012). He is coediting the forthcoming Decarceration and Justice Disinvestment, which examines the recent drop in the prison population in New York State. He has been committed to anti-racist, anti-gender-violence organizing for the last twenty-five years, especially in movements that advocate for currently and formerly incarcerated people. For his work, the Broome/Tioga County NAACP has honored him as Citizen of the Year and the New York State Assembly has cited him for “Outstanding Commitment to the Civil Rights of New Yorkers.”
Prison and Social Death (Rutgers, 2015)
http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/product/Prison-and-Social-Death,5462.aspx

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