Doing Time

A special collection of the best fiction, essays, poetry, and plays from annual PEN Prison Writing contest offers unique insights into the emotions and thoughts engendered by the prison experience, ranging from humor and empathy to rage, fear, and despair. 15,000 first printing.

Bo Lozoff is the director of Human Kindness Foundation and its internationally acclaimed Prison-Ashram Project. His writings, workshops, and tapes have helped countless people transform their lives into sacred practice even in some of our worst prisons -- prisons of selfishness, fear, anger, and addiction as well as bars and steel.

The first and only comprehensive guide to in-prison and post-release horticultural training programs.

2004-2005 Maude Hart Lovelace Book Award Master List 2004-2005 Charlie May Simon Children's Book Award Reading List 2004 Maryland Children's Book Award Master List 2003-2004 Sunshine State Young Reader's Award Master List 2004-2005 Volunteer State Book Award Master List 2004-2005 Iowa Children's Choice Award Master List 2005 Sequoyah Children's Book Award Master List 2005 Rebecca Caudill Young Readers' Book Award Master List 2003-2004 Great Stone Face Award Master List 2004-2005 Pennsylvania Young Reader's Choice Award Master List 2005 Sasquatch Reading Award Master List Twelve-year-old Mitchell got involved with the wrong kid this past summer, and the prank they played led to an elderly woman's injury. Now he finds himself at the police station—his "sentence" is to chat online with a nursing home resident twice a week for the next month. Mitch isn't thrilled; what could he and some "old" person possibly talk about? But Mitch’s new online friend has a personality all her own. Her name is Wootie Hayes, and she has plenty to talk about: how she got her name, how much she misses her own home, and how she detests bingo. But she also wants to know about Mitch’s situation. Without expecting it, they help each other face the truth and begin a new friendship in the process.

"A long time ago in the future, the secret of time travel became known to all. Everyone seized the opportunity -- and the world nearly ended. There will always be idiots who want to change history. And so, the Time Police were formed. An all-powerful, intenational organisation tasked with keeping the timeline straight. At all costs Their success is legendary, and the Time Wars are over. But now the Time Police must fight to save a very different future -- their own.."--Provided by publisher.

As banks crashed, belts tightened, and cupboards emptied across the country, American prisons grew fat. Doing Time in the Depression tells the story of the 1930s as seen from the cell blocks and cotton fields of Texas and California prisons, state institutions that held growing numbers of working people from around the country and the world—overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately non-white, and displaced by economic crisis. Ethan Blue paints a vivid portrait of everyday life inside Texas and California’s penal systems. Each element of prison life—from numbing boredom to hard labor, from meager pleasure in popular culture to crushing pain from illness or violence—demonstrated a contest between keepers and the kept. From the moment they arrived to the day they would leave, inmates struggled over the meanings of race and manhood, power and poverty, and of the state itself. In this richly layered account, Blue compellingly argues that punishment in California and Texas played a critical role in producing a distinctive set of class, race, and gender identities in the 1930s, some of which reinforced the social hierarchies and ideologies of New Deal America, and others of which undercut and troubled the established social order. He reveals the underside of the modern state in two very different prison systems, and the making of grim institutions whose power would only grow across the century.

By quadrupling the number of people behind bars in two decades, the United States has become the world leader in incarceration. Much has been written on the men who make up the vast majority of the nation’s two million inmates. But what of the women they leave behind? Doing Time Together vividly details the ways that prisons shape and infiltrate the lives of women with husbands, fiancés, and boyfriends on the inside. Megan Comfort spent years getting to know women visiting men at San Quentin State Prison, observing how their romantic relationships drew them into contact with the penitentiary. Tangling with the prison’s intrusive scrutiny and rigid rules turns these women into “quasi-inmates,” eroding the boundary between home and prison and altering their sense of intimacy, love, and justice. Yet Comfort also finds that with social welfare weakened, prisons are the most powerful public institutions available to women struggling to overcome untreated social ills and sustain relationships with marginalized men. As a result, they express great ambivalence about the prison and the control it exerts over their daily lives. An illuminating analysis of women caught in the shadow of America’s massive prison system, Comfort’s book will be essential for anyone concerned with the consequences of our punitive culture.

Contemporary theory is full of references to the modern and the postmodern. How useful are these terms? What exactly do they mean? And how is our sense of these terms changing under the pressure of feminist analysis? In Doing Time, Rita Felski argues that it makes little sense to think of the modern and postmodern as opposing or antithetical terms. Rather, we need a historical perspective that is attuned to cultural and political differences within the same time as well as the leaky boundaries between different times. Neither the modern nor the postmodern are unified, coherent, or self-evident realities. Drawing on cultural studies and critical theory, Felski examines a range of themes central to debates about postmodern culture, including changing meanings of class, the end of history, the status of art and aesthetics, postmodernism as "the end of sex," and the politics of popular culture. Placing women at the center of analysis, she suggests, has a profound impact on the way we thing about historical periods. As a result, feminist theory is helping to reshape our vision of both the modern and the postmodern.

"Indefinite is the first major ethnographic study of American jails since the advent of racialized mass incarceration. The author was confined in a southern California county jail system during which time, he conducted what he calls an organic ethnography of jail life. The resulting study is an investigation of the vagaries of jail living, the relationship between custodial deputies and penal residents, the endurance strategies residents employed to protect their emotional selves from being overwhelmed by the nature of jail punishment, and consequences of extremes of vulnerability, uncertainty, and penal time. Indefinite toggles between what is peculiar to jail time and what is familiar in broader social life to develop general concepts, sensitizing schemes, and theories about social life that expand beyond the specifics of jail without reducing jail to a mere case study"--

"Stigma, shame and hardship---this is the lot shared by families whose young men have been swept into prison. Braman reveals the devastating toll mass incarceration takes on the parents, partners, and children left behind." -Katherine S. Newman "Doing Time on the Outside brings to life in a compelling way the human drama, and tragedy, of our incarceration policies. Donald Braman documents the profound economic and social consequences of the American policy of massive imprisonment of young African American males. He shows us the link between the broad-scale policy changes of recent decades and the isolation and stigma that these bring to family members who have a loved one in prison. If we want to understand fully the impact of current criminal justice policies, this book should be required reading." -Mark Mauer, Assistant Director, The Sentencing Project "Through compelling stories and thoughtful analysis, this book describes how our nation's punishment policies have caused incalculable damage to the fabric of family and community life. Anyone concerned about the future of urban America should read this book." -Jeremy Travis, The Urban Institute In the tradition of Elijah Anderson's Code of the Street and Katherine Newman's No Shame in My Game, this startling new ethnography by Donald Braman uncovers the other side of the incarceration saga: the little-told story of the effects of imprisonment on the prisoners' families. Since 1970 the incarceration rate in the United States has more than tripled, and in many cities-urban centers such as Washington, D.C.-it has increased over five-fold. Today, one out of every ten adult black men in the District is in prison and three out of every four can expect to spend some time behind bars. But the numbers don't reveal what it's like for the children, wives, and parents of prisoners, or the subtle and not-so-subtle effects mass incarceration is having on life in the inner city. Author Donald Braman shows that those doing time on the inside are having a ripple effect on the outside-reaching deep into the family and community life of urban America. Braman gives us the personal stories of what happens to the families and communities that prisoners are taken from and return to. Carefully documenting the effects of incarceration on the material and emotional lives of families, this groundbreaking ethnography reveals how criminal justice policies are furthering rather than abating the problem of social disorder. Braman also delivers a number of genuinely new arguments. Among these is the compelling assertion that incarceration is holding offenders unaccountable to victims, communities, and families. The author gives the first detailed account of incarceration's corrosive effect on social capital in the inner city and describes in poignant detail how the stigma of prison pits family and community members against one another. Drawing on a series of powerful family portraits supported by extensive empirical data, Braman shines a light on the darker side of a system that is failing the very families and communities it seeks to protect.