Beyond the obvious, today has been auspicious in a personal way, too. I’m elated to share that my book with Chad Goerzen, FESTER: Carceral Permeability and the California COVID-19 Prison Crisis, is under contract with the University of California Press. This will be my fourth book (after Cheap on Crime, The Legal Process and the Promise of Justice, and Yesterday’s Monsters) and my third with UC Press. It will also be Chad’s first book. Chad is a superb research engineer and data scientist with the San Jose State Research Foundation and my partner of 17 years.
The book will bear witness to the COVID-19 catastrophe in California Prisons and will feature multiple sources and research methods. We rely on archival and journalistic sources, oral histories and interviews with people who experienced the crisis, and quantitative modeling and analysis of data from CDCR, the New York Times, the L.A. Times, and the BSCC.
The theoretical framework of the book–the concept of carceral permeability–relies on a synthesis of carceral geography, situational crime prevention, and prison health scholarship.
We are hard at work on the book and hope you will have it in your hands, at the latest–COVID and our son’s preschool permitting–in early 2024. In the meantime, you can continue to read about this catastrophe on this blog, or follow the book on Twitter using the hashtag #FESTER.
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