To celebrate the release of Dismantling Mass Incarceration: A Handbook for Change we will host one of the editors, Maria Hawilo, in conversation with Maya Dukmasova.

Please note: This event is free to attend, but we ask that you register! By registering for this event, you agree to abide by W&CF’s Covid-19 policies, including wearing a mask throughout the duration of the event.

“You won’t find a better collection of diverse perspectives regarding how to respond to the crisis of mass incarceration—ranging from reform to abolition—than what’s offered here.” —Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow

“This extraordinary collection by our nation’s most brilliant thinkers on punishment, policing and prisons is exactly the blueprint for making a just society that we have all been waiting for and desperately need.” —Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Blood in the Water

A vital reader on ending mass incarceration featuring advocates, experts, and formerly incarcerated people.

In recent years, a searching national conversation has called attention to the social and racial injustices that define America’s criminal system. But despite growing movements for change, the vast machinery of the carceral state remains very much intact. How can its damage and depredations be undone?

In this pathbreaking reader, three of the nation’s leading advocates—Premal Dharia, James Forman Jr., and Maria Hawilo—provide us with tools to move from despair and critique to hope and action. Dismantling Mass Incarceration surveys various approaches to confronting the carceral state, exploring bold but practical interventions involving police, prosecutors, public defenders, judges, prisons, and even life after prison. Rather than prescribing solutions, the book offers a forum for discussions—and disagreements—about how to best confront the harms of mass incarceration. The contributors range from noted figures such as Angela Y. Davis, Clint Smith, and Larry Krasner to local organizers, advocates, scholars, lawyers, and judges, as well as people who have been incarcerated. The result is an invaluable guide for anyone who wishes to understand mass incarceration—and hasten its end.

Maria Hawilo is a distinguished professor in residence at Loyola University Law School, Chicago. She has written for The Appeal, Injustice Watch, and other publications.

Maya Dukmasova is a senior reporter at Injustice Watch where she writes about judges, prisons, housing, and the courts. Before joining Injustice Watch in 2021, Maya was a senior writer at the Chicago Reader, where she produced award-winning long-form features and investigative stories, as well as profiles, film reviews, and essays on a wide range of topics. A collection of her Reader articles on housing issues was published in 2020 as the collection A Home in Chicago: Rent, ownership, and neighborhood struggle since the collapse of public housing. Maya was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and spent much of her childhood in Appalachia. She moved to Chicago after completing a master’s degree in art history at the University of Cambridge and now lives on the Far North Side.

Accessibility: This event is hosted at the bookstore, which is a wheelchair accessible space. Masks are required. Seating is on a first-come, first-serve basis. To request ASL interpretation for this event, please email events@womenandchildrenfirst.com by no later than 14 days before the event. For other questions or access needs, please email events@womenandchildrenfirst.com.

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Tags: Chicago, Dismantling Mass Incarceration: A Handbook for Change, Edgewater, Maria Hawilo, Women & Children First Bookstore