PGP Recommended Reading: For Black History Month and Beyond

As Black History Month nears its end, we hope you will continue your reflection on how our criminal legal system disproportionately impacts Black people and center their voices in your learning and exploration. The Petey Greene Program staff has pulled together a list of books from system-impacted authors and Black people writing on the criminal legal system and the need for systemic change. 

• The Master Plan: My Journey from Life in Prison to a Life of Purpose, Chris Wilson

• Letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr.

• Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela 

• Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson, George Jackson

• Bad: The Autobiography of James Carr, James Carr

• Blood in My Eye, George Jackson

• Felon: Poems, Reginald Dwayne Betts

• A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival and Coming of Age in Prison, Reginald Dwayne Betts

• Writing My Wrongs: Life, Death and Redemption in an American Prison, Shaka Senghor

• Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880-1910, Kali Nicole Gross

• The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, Khalil Gibran Muhammad

• The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander

• Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, James Forman

• Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation, Beth Richie

• Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom, Derecka Purnell

• Abolition for the People: The Movement for a Future Without Policing & Prisons, edited by Colin Kaepernick

• We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice, Mariame Kaba