Incarceration Nations ─ A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World

Narrated by a professor and journalist who founded the Prison-to-College Pipeline to educate incarcerated men and guarantee them a place in college upon release,Incareration Nations: In Search of Justice in Prisons Around the World offers a window into a world most are denied access to, while touching on issues pertinent to our understanding of how prison is functioning (or not) in our world today.

From serving as a restorative justice facilitator in a notorious South African prison and working with genocide survivors in Rwanda who launch a prison visiting program, to teaching a creative writing class in an overcrowded Ugandan prison and coordinating a drama workshop for women prisoners in Thailand, Baz Dreisinger delves into the world behind bars with empathy and intellect. She journeys to Jamaica to visit a prison music program, to Singapore to learn about approaches to prisoner reentry, to Australia to grapple with the bottom line of private prisons, to a federal supermax in Brazil to confront the horros of solitary confinement, and finally to the model prisons of Norway. Ultimately,Incarceration Nations invites us to radically rethink one of America's most devastating exportations, the modern prison system, and--by bearing witness to its human costs--acts as a call to arms, showing us how and why this unjust system urgently needs our attention.

Baz Dreisinger is an Associate Professor in the English Department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, and the founder and Academic Director of the Prison-to-College Pipeline program (P2CP), which offers credit-bearing college courses and reentry planning to incarcerated men. She is also a reporter on popular culture, the Caribbean, world music, and race-related issues for theNew York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, and NPR, among others, and a co-producer and co-writer of the documentariesBlack & Blue: Legends of the Hip-Hop Cop and Rhyme & Punishment. She is the author ofNear Black: White to Black Passing in American Culture (2008).