The Failure of the American Prison Complex: Let's Abolish It

New Publication Now Available!

Experts such as U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and scholars such as Mechthild Nagel and Anthony J. Nocella II agree that the American prison complex is broken. The American prison complex must be dismantled before the United States descends into societal collapse.

Dennis J. Stevens’ The Failure of the American Prison Complex: Let’s Abolish It examines cutting-edge perspectives and explores the hardships that the American prison complex delivers to correctional personnel and residents alike.

To enhance learning and comprehension, The Failure of the American Prison Complex includes pedagogical features such as Learning Objectives, Key Words, Words of Wisdom (a quote from a famous philosopher applicable to the theme of the chapter), relevant sociological and psychological perspectives, numerous examples and analogies from various media, numerous scholarly/ media citations/references, and at the end of each chapter perforated student worksheets.

Set to be released Spring 2014, The Failure of the American Prison Complex: Let’s Abolish It:

• Challenges the reader’s perspective about how the accused are processed and punished. Once imprisoned and then released, these violators are transformed into instruments of America’s demise.
• Features persuasive accounts and data of drug and alcohol troubled, females, prison healthcare recipients, juveniles, mentally ill, sex offenders, and wrongfully convicted who represent largely America’s lower social class, and will aid in a present day understanding of the failures of prison complex. 
• Links childhood literacy, poverty, and criminal convictions to the prison pipeline. If you’re poor, brown or black, and can’t read in third grade, you have a 1 in 15 chance of being sent to prison before you’re eighteen.
• Provides methods of punishment that cost far less, reduce recidivism, and add to the social health of American communities. 
• Examines the growth of the American justice complex which includes all agencies in the justice community; it has become a sprawling massive enterprise whereby governmental policy, regulations, and practices, all defined by government, take precedent over the constitutional rights of the individuals whom government is sworn to serve. 
• Documents show the American prison complex is a socially accepted means to control America’s disenfranchised social class. The power to enslave another class of people rests on the ability to keep them ignorant. Quality education is the way up and out.