A groundbreaking investigation into the roots of the American criminal justice system reveals how the past bleeds into the present.

Beyond These Walls is an ambitious and far-ranging exploration that tracks the legacy of crime and imprisonment in the United States, from the historical roots of the American criminal justice system to our modern state of over-incarceration, and offers a bold vision for a new future. Author Tony Platt, a recognized authority in the field of criminal justice, challenges the way we think about how and why millions of people are tracked, arrested, incarcerated, catalogued, and regulated in the United States. 

Beyond These Walls traces the disturbing history of punishment and social control, revealing how the criminal justice system attempts to enforce and justify inequalities associated with class, race, gender, and sexuality. Prisons and police departments are central to this process, but other institutions - from immigration and welfare to educational and public health agencies - are equally complicit. 

Platt argues that international and national politics shape perceptions of danger and determine the policies of local criminal justice agencies, while private policing and global corporations are deeply and undemocratically involved in the business of homeland security. 

Finally, Beyond These Walls demonstrates why efforts to reform criminal justice agencies have often expanded rather than contracted the net of social control. Drawing upon a long tradition of popular resistance, Platt concludes with a strategic vision of what it will take to achieve justice for all in this era of authoritarian disorder. 

Full production copyright: Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, “Venus Over Alderson - New Year’s Eve 1956,” in The Alderson Story: My Life as a Political Prisoner (New York: International Publishers, 1963), p. 204. Reprinted by permission of International Publishers. Itaru Ina, “Haiku,” translated by Hisako Ifshini and Leza Lowitz, Modern Haiku 34, no. 2 (summer 2003), modernhaiku.org/essays/itaruinahaiku.html. Reprinted by permission of Satsuki Ina. Fragment of poem by William Wantling, “From Sestina to San Quentin” (1979). Reprinted by permission of Ruth Wantling. Fragment of poem by Jimmy Santiago Baca, “The County Jail.” Reprinted by permission of Jimmy Santiago Baca.