Rethinking the American Prison Movement provides a short, accessible overview of an important and transformational ongoing struggle for social change, highlighting key individuals and events, influential networks, strong alliances and coalitions, difficult challenges and obstacles, major successes and failures, and the movement's lasting effects on the country. With coverage of the penal farms and the penitentiaries common before World War II, through the rise in prison radicalism from the 1960s to the 1980s, to the private prison compounds of the 2000s, Rethinking the American Prison Movement will be valuable to anyone interested in the history of American prisons, the history of social movements, and the history of the United States, and it provides a strong foundation for understanding radical prison movements of the present day.

Rethinking the American Prison Movement provides a short, accessible overview of the transformational and ongoing struggles against America's prison system. Dan Berger and Toussaint Losier show that prisoners have used strikes, lawsuits, uprisings, writings, and diverse coalitions with free-world allies to challenge prison conditions and other kinds of inequality. From the forced labor camps of the nineteenth century to the rebellious protests of the 1960s and 1970s to the rise of mass incarceration and its discontents, Rethinking the American Prison Movement is invaluable to anyone interested in the history of American prisons and the struggles for justice still echoing in the present day.