Books like Not A Crime To Be Poor — picked by fans

Gilmore's Golden Gulag helps us see why California is one of the wealthiest economies on the planet, but also home to the largest carceral system in the world.

She connects the evaporation of the social safety net and disruptions to stable employment by global capitalism to provide the answer: California uses prisons to absorb the surplus labor created by the greed, racism, and inequality of the global economy.

Read this book, and you will understand why, in my book, so many people I wrote about were pushed through our carceral system in California and never returned home.

Award-winning historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez tells the story of how Los Angeles became home to the nation's largest jail by taking us back to the founding of Los Angeles and the western settlement of California.

She explains that European and Anglo-American settlers looked to eliminate unwanted populations in the region by using war, raids, genocide, and incarceration to clear and restrict the presence of Native, Hispanic, and racial outsiders from western landscapes.

City of Inmates dispels any simple ideas about jails in America being rooted in reform—punishment and death have always been a part of law enforcement.

Black rebellions in the 1960s were a response to the decades of terror by police, the loss of jobs, poor housing, white supremacy, and the evaporation of the social safety net. Rebellions in Watts, New Jersey, and elsewhere happened because these communities were not safe and had been targets of state violence and indifference.

Hinton in America on Fire helps us see how the Black unrest of the 1960s were rebellions against forms of discrimination and injustice, and were led by people failed many times over by our democracy.

Reading this book helps us realize why the George Floyd Protests of 2020 were a nationwide phenomenon—Americans are tired of police violence. This book also helps us understand how current protests against state violence being perpetrated by ICE stand in a long tradition of civil rebellion against anti-democratic forces in America.

Many people who are unsure about police or prison abolition ask if we should still use carceral spaces for violent repeat offenders.

I have always found this question problematic because it assumes, firstly, that our criminal justice system, as currently constructed, actually arrests and convicts violent offenders to begin with. It also assumes that more police and more jails make us safer.

If that were true, the United States would be the safest of all advanced industrial democracies. It surely is not, and No Human Involved helps us understand that police continue to fail Black communities, especially Black women, who have been killed by violent repeat offenders.

Neely chronicles a series of unsolved murders involving Black women whose perpetrators are never found because of police indifference.

Flann O’Brien is famous for his ingenious novels, At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman, but I regard his funniest book as this short fictional memoir about life in the far West of Ireland. Originally published in Gaelic in 1941, it is a mock-pastoral farce about the customs of the remotest region in the country, where it rains all the time, but O’Brien is actually satirising the lack of mutual understanding between the local inhabitants and the modern outside world. The narrator’s adventures begin immediately after he is born and include (among many other absurdities) catastrophic pigs and the quest to climb a mountain to find an eternal fountain of whisky.

Jean-Marie Déguignet is not your typical Breton peasant. He’s small and puny—and these people aren’t built that way. At nine, a bee caused him to fall and hit his head, leaving an ugly wound that oozed for years and left a deep indentation in his skull when it finally healed. The result was a lifetime interest in bees and a lonely life, as no one wanted to be near him.  

A curious and isolated lad, he becomes an auto-diktat, and like many auto-diktats has lots of disparaging things to say about those who are less educated and more successful and powerful than he—especially church and government officials, monarchists, and landlords: ignorant bastards he constantly fought (and lost) who controlled and ruined his life. He’s an anti-cleric in this most Catholic of lands. He’s a Republican in a time and place of monarchists. He understands the world as a… show more.

I was lucky enough to read this book when it was still a manuscript. It’s the story of 10-year old Hastin, driven by poverty but also by his impulsiveness and youthful optimism. Running away from home to make money to help his mother and sick sister, Hastin ends up far from his village in India, and in the clutches of a cruel circus owner. He also becomes keeper to a baby elephant, Nandita. As an outsider to the setting of this book, Lynne Kelly dug in, persevered, and did the hard work of writing the story with respect and care. The baby elephant is a pure delight. 

This is a story of children torn from their homes and forced to live in the horrific conditions of residential schools. Imprisoned and away from the love and protection of families and communities, many were abused for years by people whose words may have preached God’s love but whose actions demonstrated darker intentions. A few children managed to escape while many others were carelessly released to the unforgiving streets of east Vancouver where some managed to navigate their way through life while others succumbed to the demons that haunted them.

Having personally seen the impact this has had on people in my community, including family members, I feel that the characters may be fiction, but the story is a very real example of a shameful time in Canadian history where the effects continue through generations.

As economic inequality has grown exponentially over the past five decades, some of the dispossessed have rebelled. 

Focusing on mobilizations in Brazil, Mexico, and Salvador, Gledhill demonstrates how struggles for social justice are transformed into “threats” to national security, which require “securitization” measures. Through intricate ethnographies, the book documents the deployment of the police, military, and paramilitary to quell domestic disputes.

Protests by students, laborers, migrants, Indigenous, the poor, environmentalists, and human rights activists are subjected to police “pacification” involving state violence, criminalization, incarceration, and sometimes death.

Situating securitization in the context of transnational and global relations generated by capitalist uneven development, Gledhill argues that the logic of capitalist accumulation in the current era is inseparable from repressive violence against “inconvenient” populations.

Maybe you think Asia and Africa are mired in depressing immiseration. Certainly that’s what the mainstream media sell us. Yet in the last 25 years more progress has been made against poverty in these places than in all of previous human history combined! Radelet, a professor at Georgetown University, shows that the improvement – still a long way to go, of course – of the developing world is the most important thing happening in our spinning world.