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For four days in October 1932, during the height of the Great Depression, prisoners at Kingston Penitentiary revolted. They took control of their workshops and brought the convict labour regime to a halt, until the guards and militia violently regained control. This revolt was the culmination of more than a year of organizing and collective actions. Prisoners wrote manifestos, participated in work refusals, elected representatives, and developed a sophisticated critique of the conditions of their incarceration and the penitentiary administration. Using a unique collection of archival documents, this article closely examines the complaints, criticisms, fears, hopes, and frustrations of the incarcerated, whose demands and goals are crucial for understanding how and why the prisoner revolt unfolded as it did. I argue that the prisoners at Kingston Penitentiary, by striking and organizing to assert their dignity, democratically organized their lives and ensured a “fair deal” should be considered part of the Depression-era protests of the unemployed, imprisoned, and marginalized.

From one o’clock on the afternoon of July 24, 1974, until shortly before ten o’clock the night of August 3, eleven days later, one of the longest hostage-taking sieges in the history of the United States took place in Texas’s Huntsville State Prison. The ringleader, Federico (Fred) Gomez Carrasco, the former boss of the largest drug-running operation in south Texas, was serving life for assault with intent to commit murder on a police officer. Using his connections to smuggle guns and ammunition into the prison, and employing the aid of two other inmates, he took eleven prison workers and four inmates hostage in the prison library. Demanding bulletproof helmets and vests, he planned to use the hostages as shields for his escape. Negotiations began immediately with prison warden H. H. Husbands and W. J. Estelle, Jr., Director of the Texas Department of Corrections. The Texas Rangers, the Department of Public Safety, and the FBI arrived to assist as the media descended on Huntsville. When one of the hostages suggested a moving structure of chalkboards padded with law books to absorb bullets, Carrasco agreed to the plan. The captors entered their escape pod with four hostages and secured eight others to the moving barricade. While the target was en route to an armored car, Estelle had his team blast it with fire hoses. In a violent end to the standoff, Carrasco committed suicide, one of his two accomplices was killed (the other later executed), and two hostages were killed by their captors.

Case studies of nine riots in Illinois, New York State, New Mexico, Michigan, and West Virginia.

The most extensive and detailed work yet written on the subject, this book examines case studies of recent prison riots in five states, explaining the occurrence and variations of riots as a reflection of the administrative breakdown of the prison system within a changing ideological context.

The book uses eight diverse case studies of prison riots to explore how the outcomes were affected by policies, procedures, management, communications, and strategy immediately before, during, and after the riot. Exploring the results achieved by negotiation, by force, and by simply waiting, the authors illuminate the factors most important in controlling the costs of damage and human suffering that can result from increasingly common prison disturbances.

On the crisp morning of 21 Feb 2012, five young women walked into Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Situated in the heart of the Russian capital, the cathedral is the tallest Orthodox church in the world. Wearing a blaze of color in sleeveless dresses, neon tights, and their signature balaclava ski masks, they jumped on the altar, turned their backs to the lavish icon screen, took out their electric guitars, and began a song that was a mix of punk-rock riffs and traditional Orthodox chant. The lyrics criticized the close relations between the Russian Patriarch Kirill and President Vladimir Putin, and the Orthodox Church's conservative antiwoman and anti-LGBT rhetoric, while the refrain--styled as a traditional Orthodox prayer chant--addressed the Mother of God directly, pleading her to \"oust Putin\" and \"become a feminist.\" Here, Bernstein argues that under conditions of postsocialist transformation in Russia, the bodies of the Pussy Riot participants became vital sites for the enactment of sovereignty for a wide range of citizens.

[...]what if its conclusions were unacceptable to the prevailing liberal secular humanist mindset? I would like to know what proportion of those who engaged in criminal activity came from fatherless homes, how many use cannabis or other mind altering drugs (including prescribed), how much time they spend playing violent video games (several participants compared the disturbances to \"being in a video game\"), and what their beliefs are about the entitlement culture versus individual responsibility. If an objective study comparing looters and non-looting controls shows that (for example) living in a benefit funded fatherless household is a key factor, would McKee and Raine support the active promotion of lifelong monogamous marriage as a public health measure?

Significant riots occurred in London in August 2011. The riots took place in highly localised geographical areas, with crime going up hugely in the affected sub-wards. The criminal justice response was to make sentencing for rioters much more severe. We show a significant drop in riot crimes across London in the six months after the riots, consistent with a deterrence effect from the tougher sentencing. More evidence of general deterrence comes from the observation that crime also fell in the post-riot aftermath in areas where rioting did not take place.

Based on an ethnographic study of a medium-security UK men’s training prison, this article has two main aims: to document the nature and experience of power in the late-modern prison, and to detail the ways in which prisoners adapt to these mechanisms of penal power. It is argued that although overt resistance is uncommon and prisoners generally appear highly compliant, this public transcript of consent comprises a range of prisoner orientations, from normative commitment to strategic, backstage resistance. In this respect, the article highlights the heterogeneous effects of penal power, and illustrates how the different components of prison social order are expressed through a range of adaptations to the ends and techniques of contemporary imprisonment.

In this way, the rippling history of labor struggles at Wetumpka requires us to consider how southern Black women's absence from early twentieth-century industrial labor organizing might falter if we take a closer look at prisons and their contracts with private companies.6 While the dining hall strike was short-lived, it laid bare the radical potential of burgeoning organizing in the prison. When cooperation existed, it was often fleeting - disrupted by white women's assertions of racial domination and attempts to invoke the power to punish Black women even if they themselves did not have the authority to do so in prison.7 The tenuous relationships between Black and white women were deeply personal. Incarcerated women not only worked together, but lived together, even if in segregated cell blocks. [...]the prison's social order was fundamentally organized around white supremacy and depended upon white women, even those incarcerated, to uphold racial boundaries. [...]what the warden called persistent \"trouble\" offers an important window into late-night conversa- tions and early-morning solidarities that may have existed among the women who had been refusing to get dressed to go to work at the sound of the first bell.11 The warden's invocation of trouble also may have gestured toward the failure of the prison as a political and social enclosure.