Overview

The Struggle Within is an accessible yet wide-ranging historical primer about how mass imprisonment has been a tool of repression deployed against diverse left-wing social movements over the last fifty years. Berger examines some of the most dynamic social movements across half a century: black liberation, Puerto Rican independence, Native American sovereignty, Chicano radicalism, white antiracist and working-class mobilizations, pacifist and antinuclear campaigns, and earth liberation and animal rights. Berger's encyclopedic knowledge of American social movements provides a rich comparative history of numerous social movements that continue to shape contemporary politics. The book also offers a little-heard voice in contemporary critiques of mass incarceration. Rather than seeing the issue of America's prison growth as stemming solely from the war on drugs, Berger locates mass incarceration within a slew of social movements that have provided steep challenges to state power.

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9781604869552

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This book is about people who are locked up for revealing what's wrong with the United States, and Berger's meticulous documentation of activist struggles shows how incarceration serves as an attempt to erase their dissent. --Maya Schenwar, truth-out.org

Author Information

Dan Berger is an assistant professor of comparative ethnic studies at the University of Washington-Bothell. He is the author of The Hidden 1970s, Letters from Young Activists, and Outlaws of America, and his writings on race, prisons, media, and American social movements have appeared various journals. He is the cofounder of Decarcerate PA, an organization that works to end mass incarceration in Pennsylvania. He lives in Seattle. Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a professor of geography at the CUNY Graduate Center at City University of New York. She is a member of the founding collective of Critical Resistance, one of the most important national antiprison organizations in the United States. She is the author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, which was awarded the Lora Romero First Book Award by the American Studies Association. She lives in New York City. dream hampton has written about music, culture, and politics for 20 years. Her articles and essays have appeared in Detroit News, Essence, Harper's Bazaar, the Village Voice, and a dozen anthologies. She lives in Detroit.

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