Beyond Bars: A Path Forward from 50 Years of Mass Incarceration in the United States takes academic research and successfully delivers it into the public arena, to new non-academic audiences.
The collection, edited by the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP) and published in association with The Sentencing Project, a US research and advocacy centre working for decarceration, reflects on the lessons from the past half century and offers ideas and solutions for a path forward.
“It’s good to have the research get into the hands of other academics and people in positions of politics or governance, but we’re 50 years in now and the data shows that half a century of getting really tough on criminals has exacerbated issues elsewhere.”
“We felt that highlighting the collateral consequences of imprisonment and the ripple effect it has in society was a story that needed to be shared with a larger audience”, says Beyond Bars co-editor David C. Lane.
The editors put their expanded audience ambitions in motion by applying a three-fold strategy to the edited collection.
The Sentencing Project partnership
Firstly, they accessed a different audience by choosing to partner with The Sentencing Project.
This resulted in over 1,000 mainly non-academic registrants attending a multilingual webinar, run by The Sentencing Project, as a means of sharing the research from the book. Beyond Bars was featured on Prison Pipeline, a KBOO public radio programme, dedicated to educating the public about the criminal justice system in Oregon. The book and the research were also covered by The Davis Vanguard, a community-based watchdog and news reporting organisation.
“Our lead editor Kristen Budd is also a Research Analyst at The Sentencing Project. She has been a phenomenal driving force behind the project,” says Lane.
“It has been great working with The Sentencing Project; it’s really allowed us to reach into audiences interested in these issues.”
Open access
The Sentencing Project partnership helped to fund the second crucial element of the strategy, which was to make Beyond Bars available Open Access. This has resulted in just under 8,000 readers accessing the publication. As Lane says, “having this Open Access was an essential part of the innovation of this volume. It has meant the book and the research could be a resource for people who are incarcerated or who are suffering from some of those undue burdens.”
“The research enables those people to acknowledge that this system is set up in a way that is detrimental to some people and not others – and to have the data and the science to back up what at some level they doubtlessly already know.”
Accessible writing style
The third and final pillar to getting Beyond Bars to a wider audience is the accessible writing style. Writing less academically is central to the SSSP approach with all its edited volumes.
“Beyond Bars was a Rapid Responses volume,” says Lane, “This format is only used when pressing problems must be discussed, such as COVID-19 or mass incarceration. These are in addition to our regular publications in even years.”
“Like all our volumes, the work was intentionally written in such a way to be digestible. If you can write with clarity and people can pick it up, that’s great, because more people will read your ideas.”
To achieve this, the editorial process for Beyond Bars, as with all SSSP publications, was different from the traditional academic model.
“Much of our editorial work is spent reminding people that they don’t always have to write that way to reach people. It’s liberating, but it’s also shocking because as academics we spend so long learning to write this particular way for a small audience. It’s such a habit, it’s hard to undo,” says Lane.
The creation of Beyond Bars was a collaborative process between authors and editors, and one that authors involved in the project found rewarding.
“There’s a kind of social responsibility we have as editors towards our authors,” says Lane. “We want to build people up to be successful. Our editorial process can go through several rounds before we reach the final piece, but the approach always comes from a place of ‘how can we make this even better?’.”
A public sociology
The SSSP agenda is to deliver a truly public sociology, informing citizens not only of problems – as a news agency might – but also to share with them what solutions can and do look like and help them to find a route to figuring out fresh ways of thinking and acting around these big issues.
“To be included in the volume, each piece had to have a definition of a problem, data documenting its severity, and solutions – and it had to address mass incarceration.”
Many of the solutions proposed in Beyond Bars have already been implemented. The book includes examples of programmes that have worked in one area and could work in others.
“These are not new problems,” says Lane. “Crime isn’t new, drug use isn’t new – and if we look back historically, we can see whether what has been implemented has been more or less successful and we can use that data. Equally, solutions from 50 years ago might not be applicable in the last 20 years.”
“The project of mass incarceration, if we look at the data, is one such example of a response to crime that has not been successful over the long term.”
Chapter authors have also shared their research via the LSE blog on topics including the issues of monetary sanctions in successfully addressing mass incarceration; how children of incarcerated parents need more support; and the relationship between criminality and housing.
Rebecca Megson-Smith is a writer and writing coach, founder of Ridley Writes.
David C. Lane is an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice Sciences at Illinois State University.
Beyond Bars edited by Kristen M. Budd, David C. Lane, Glenn W. Muschert, and Jason A. Smith is available open access on Bristol University Press Digital.
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