Prison Ministry Task Force
of the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland

To Learn More About the Issues:

BOOKS

When Prisoners Return by Pat Nolan, president, Justice Fellowship, and Chuck Colson, Prison Fellowship.  $9.95 at www.Amazon.com. About 600,000 prisoners return to our communities yearly. For the first time, reentry has become a priority for prison administrators. This book tells how we and our churches can help make "the least of his" return to the light of community.

Effective Jail & Prison Ministry for the 21st Century: A COPE (Coalition of Prison Evangelists) publication co-edited by Dr. W. Thomas Beckner and Jeff Park combines the wisdom of men who, collectively, have over four centuries of prison ministry experience, including Kairos’, God's time in prison. Dr. Beckner is the former director of the Center for Justice and Urban Leadership at Taylor University, Fort Wayne, IN. The book points out the “greater need” beyond Bible studies and worship is for “discipleship through strategies such as mentoring, recovery support groups, life skill training, aftercare and community reintegration, family reconciliation and restoration.” $6.50 includes shipping. Bulk orders available – call or email for pricing. Contact COPE at 817-684-7870 or see its Web site at www.copeminstries.org

Gates of Injustice: The Crisis in America’s Prisons (ISBN 0131427911) by Alan Elsner. Problems women face, male rape, the mentally ill, prison finances, racist gangs are covered, along with conditions in supermaximum security prisons, death rows, etc. Practical suggestions are made to improve the situation and increase prison rehabilitation while reducing recidivism. Recommended by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Author available to read, lecture, debate. www.alanelsner.com or gatesofinjustice@aol.com. Financial Times Prentice Hall. $17.47 at www.amazon.com

Alcatraz Island by Milton Daniel Beacher, M. D. Mass Market Paperback - August 2001. Dr. Beacher was assigned in 1937 to the dreaded prison on an island off California.  He kept a journal. After his death in 1993, his daughter turned it into a book. www.amazon.com.  $19.95

The Celling of America: An Inside Look at the U. S. Prison Industry. Written by and for prisoners, it covers a lot of ground from conditions on death row to official corruption in private prisons, and as an introduction to Prison Legal News. A monthly journal covering legal issues since 1990. By Daniel Burton-Rose with Washington State inmates Paul Wright and Dan Pens. They publish news from a network of inmates across the nation.  “It is amazing,” writes William Greider, “that a small, under-financed publication written and produced by prisoners can still regularly scoop the big media.” Common Courage Press. $19.95. www.prisonlegalnews.org       

On the Yard by Malcolm Braly. Reissued by New York Review Books Classics.  . Kurt Vonnegut called it “Surely the great American prison novel. Braly spent nearly 17 years  behind bars for burglary and died at 54 in a car accident. He wrote about the complex and frightening world of the penitentiary through the eyes of Chilly Willy and Paul.   E-mail: nyrb@nybooks.com $14.95.

Power, Politics & Crime by William J. Chambliss. Westview Press. Published in 1999 but speaks to the “huge chasm between the reality of crime, the public’s perception of it, and the information being disseminated to the public by law enforcement agencies, the media and politicians.”  Chambliss teaches sociology at George Washington University and is former president of the American Society for Criminology. He challenged the accuracy of the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report that depict dramatic rises in crime and criticizes the increase in corrections budgets and decreases in education money. $25.

Executing Justice: An Insider Account of the Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal by Daniel Williams, post-conviction defense attorney for Abu-Jamal. The writer was fired by the inmate because the book refutes a new defense theory that the policeman was the victim of a mob hit aimed at suppressing police corruption investigations. St. Martin’s Press. $24.95

The Wrong Man: The True Story of Innocence on Death Row by Michael Mello is about Joseph Spaziano, a biker sentenced to death for the mutilation and murder of a young woman. University of Minnesota Press. $29.95.

Games Criminals Play: How You Can Profit by Knowing Them by Bud Allen, Diana Bosta. Rae John Publishing Company. $16.95 Amazon.com. Or Yahoo.com.

Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing by Ted Conover. Random House. $24.95 hard cover. Also audio tapes abridged and unabridged. When journalist Ted Conover was unable to get into Sing Sing as a reporter, he trained to become a corrections officer for a year before going inside the New York maximum security prison. He writes about being on the “edge of violence” and finding “unsuspected sensitivity and sadness.” One reviewer writes, “The toll exacted on the jailed and the jailors is also on the society that puts both of them in there in increasing numbers.“ The New York Times called the book “a moving indictment of our ways of punishment.”

The Soul Knows No Bars: Inmates Reflect on Life, Death and Hope by Drew Leder with Maryland maximum security inmates. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Leder, a professor of philosophy at Loyola in Baltimore, engages 14 Maryland Penitentiary inmates in philosophical dialogue. The reviewer, Brenda Vogel, Library Coordinator, Maryland Correctional Education Libraries, said the book “provides an understanding as to how people become mired in violence” and the “emotional prisoner” in us. “It will help cut through the stereotypes of convicts as sub-human . . . and tells us more about the value of prison education than any study to date” as well as the “importance of the student-teacher relationship.”

God Is Not in the Thesaurus, Stories from an Oklahoma Prison by Bo Don Cox Forward Movement Publications, Cincinnati, OH. www.forewardmovement.org. These stories “tell the story of Bo's life, his old life and his new life, the power of God and the presence of Jesus Christ in the prison where Bo lives; of hope and promise and new life — behind razor wire and prison walls.” — Edward S. Gleason, Editor.

Unjust in the Much, The Death Penalty in North Carolina — A Symposium edited by Calvin Kytle and Daniel H. Pollitt. The sponsor encourages duplication and wide circulation. To order: Geoffrey Mock. geoff@dukenews.duke.edu . This edited transcript (book) grew out of an April 17, 1998, symposium sponsored by North Carolinians Against the Death Penalty, an umbrella organization of 13 civic and religious groups opposed to capital punishment.. Chapters include: The Demographics of Death Row, Mentally Retarded and Juvenile Delinquents, What the Constitution Says, Race and Class, and Inadequacy of Counsel and Legal Process. There also are sections on the American Bar Association’s resolution for a moratorium, some facts for advocates, and helpful web sites and books.

Dead Man Walking by Helen Prejean, C.S.J. - Vintage Books, New York. Paperback. $13. She writes: “... I stepped quite unsuspectingly from a protected middle-class environment into one of the most explosive and complex moral issues of our day . . . I have been changed forever by the experiences that I describe here.”

The Expanding Prison: The Crisis in Crime and Punishment and the Search for Alternatives by David Cayley. The Pilgrim Press, Cleveland, OH. This book was conceived at a conference in Norway called by Nils Christie, professor of criminology at the University of Oslo, in 1995, in the hope of drawing attention to a dangerous political emergency: the swelling numbers of people imprisoned throughout the Western world. Sections cover The Prison Boom, Imprisonment and Society, Some Promising Alternatives and Turning Point?

Conferencing Handbook: The New Real Justice Training Manual. By Terry O'Connell, Ben Wachtel and Ted Wachtel. A procedural guide for coordinating and facilitating conferences for anyone who wants to have conferences in school, criminal justice areas and other settings. It covers the details in selecting cases, inviting participants, making preparations and running the conference itself. $25. For more information and to order, go to www.realjustice.orgRace to Incarcerate Race to Incarcerate by Marc Mauer. A close examination of America’s booming prison population and analysis of the unintended consequences of “get tough on crime” laws. New Press, 1999. $22.95

Conferencing Handbook: The New Real Justice Training Manual. By Terry O'Connell, Ben Wachtel and Ted Wachtel. A procedural guide for coordinating and facilitating conferences for anyone who wants to have conferences in school, criminal justice areas and other settings. It covers the details in selecting cases, inviting participants, making preparations and running the conference itself. $25. For more information and to order, go to www.realjustice.orgby Marc Mauer. A close examination of America’s booming prison population and analysis of the unintended consequences of “get tough on crime” laws. New Press, 1999. $22.95

Facing the Demons Video and Companion Commentary Video. An hour-long documentary now available from Real Justice, following the journey of the family and friends of murder victim Michael Marslew, who confront face-to-face two of the offenders accused of his death. $95. The companion 30-minute video ($30) with commentary by Terry O'Connell features the Australian police sergeant who facilitated the dramatic conferences answer questions and discuss issues raised by the documentary. Go to www.realjustice.org to order.

Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing (1999) edited by Bell Gale Chevigny. As described in the introduction, “The writing coming out of U.S. prisons has never been as strong, rich, diverse and provocative as in the final quarter of the twentieth century. Each year during this period the writers’ association PEN has sponsored a contest for American writers behind bars nationwide. Doing Time presents the best work of the winners. By bearing witness to the secret world that has isolated and would silence them, these writers offer an incisive anatomy of the contemporary prison and an intimate view of the men and women struggling to keep their humanity alive.” In the foreword, Sister Helen Prejean writes of these pages, "The words in them have made their way into our hands against great odds. Several of these writers have done long stretches of time in the hole for their writing. Why at such cost do they write? Read their reasons in the back of this book.” Arcade Publishing. $27.95.

Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis by Christian Parenti. The author, according to reviewer Colman McCarthy in The Washington Post, is a “passionate and compassionate writer” who recommends “less policing, less incarceration, shorter sentences, less surveillance, fewer laws governing individual behavior,” noting the high percentage of people entering prison for minor offenses. Documented by 808 footnotes in 10 chapters. 1999. $25.

Dead Run: the Untold Story of Dennis Stockton and America’s Only Mass Escape from Death Row, by Joe Jackson and William F. Burke Jr., goes inside the shadows of the Mecklenburg Correction Center in Virginia, a facility packed with the condemned. 1999. $25

Restorative Justice – Healing the Effects of Crime (1995, 1999) by The Rev. Jim Consedine. Forward by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Covers punishment, the crisis in the U.S. criminal justice system and prisons, Biblical Justice, the Celtic tradition, indigenous traditions including Canada. It reflects the experience of New Zealand where restorative justice is the way for all juvenile offenders and for some adults. $15 (includes postage)

Restorative Justice – Contemporary Themes and Practices (1999) edited by the Rev. Jim Consedine and Helen Bowen, a lawyer and skilled facilitator who has been involved with more than 600 Family Group Conferences in New Zealand. Chapters are written by leading proponents of restorative justice, including judges, victims and indigenous peoples, church leaders and practitioners. $15 (includes postage.

          To order these two books, make payment to:
                    The Rev. Michael Bryant
                    1357 East Capitol St.
                    Washington, DC 20003

Deep & Simple by Bo Lozoff, director, Human Kindness Foundation. His first new book in almost ten years draws on his essays, talks and workshops. A practical down-to-earth guide for every reader who sincerely wants to make changes in his or her life. Three sections: spiritual practice, simple living and dedication to service. $10.

We're All Doing Time We're All Doing Time by Bo Lozoff has a forward written by the Dalai Lama. Often called “the convict’s bible.” Since 1984, acclaimed for “crossing religious, ethnic, cultural and economic lines with such a clear and simple, immediately useful expression of ageless spiritual truths.” In its 11th printing and available on tape and in Spanish. $10

VIDEOTAPES

Democracy's Ghosts -- How 5 Million Americans Have Lost the Right to Vote -- produced by the ACLU and Off Ramp Films.  www.democracysghosts.org