Books Archives - Hadar Aviram

FESTER Wins ASC Book Award

Friends, I’m thrilled (and quite surprised and shocked) to share with you the good news that our book FESTER: Carceral Permeability and California’s COVID-19 Correctional Disaster has won the American Society of Criminology Michael J. Hindelang Book Award for 2025!

This is a huge and rare honor, and one we did not expect in our wildest dreams, even though we deeply believed in our project and knew the book was good. We didn’t write it to win awards or attend fancy plenaries, but to bear witness to California’s worst-ever medical prison scandal and sound the alarm about prison conditions that allow disease and suffering to fester. We wrote it from the bottom of our wrenched hearts and it spoke to the awards committee from the same heartfelt place.

The story of FESTER is, first and foremost, your story: the story of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people, families, activists, advocates, lawyers, doctors, journalists, psychiatrists, psychologists, statisticians, epidemiologists, volunteers, and other upstanding citizens who came together to sound the alarm on behalf of the most neglected people in the state when your voice mattered the most–and when the government turned its back on our most vulnerable friends and neighbors in their most dire hour of need. Our hope is that this award will help FESTER contribute, even a little, to an urgent conversation about how to improve prison and jail conditions that will prevent the horror we lived through from happening ever again.

You followed this story in real time: this blog documented what we learned every day from our friends and neighbors about the neglect, ineptitude, rumor mongering, and devaluing of human lives they suffered. You were the first to have access to our raw data and to read our blow-by-blow account of the state and federal litigation. And when the time came to speak up, many of you stood with us and with our neighbors behind bars, reminding the rest of our state–and the government–that, in the context of health crises, there is no “other”.

Our book is your book. Our story is your story. Our award is your award. And our struggle is your struggle.

Fester

"This poignant and convincing cautionary tale of the pandemic experience inside California’s prisons exposes the permeability of prison walls as well as the folly of contemporary public health and criminal legal priorities. Beginning with prison downsizing to counter the crowding of carceral spaces, the authors propose entirely wise and attainable remedies.”

Terry Kupersauthor of Solitary: The Inside Story of Supermax Isolation and How We Can Abolish It

"Fester is a searing indictment of how COVID and the state's deliberate indifference led to the worst humanitarian disaster in California prison history and a compelling obituary to the myth that prisons contain and keep us safe from risk. A triumph of socio-legal research."

Jonathan SimonAuthor of Mass Incarceration on Trial: A Remarkable Court Decision and the Future of Prisons in America

Aviram, with Goerzen, has produced another tour de force unpacking a new legitimation crisis in California’s punishment infrastructure. . . . the book reads like a true crime thriller – about the horrors wrought not by the people inside prisons but by the people running and overseeing those prisons. Poignant details of everyday life in prisons in crisis make vivid the book’s pointed policy critiques. . .

Prof. Keramet ReiterLaw Professor, UCI

Myths can kill, and FESTER dissects a vicious one: the idea that prisons are worlds apart, isolated from their surrounding communities. With passion, rigor, and a flair for storytelling, Aviram and Goerzen show how California's fealty to this myth placed whole cities at risk during the coronavirus pandemic, transforming the state's overcrowded prisons into virus bombs that exploded outward. An indictment of a failed system and the politicians and judges who prop it up, this stunning book is also a call to action, laying out reforms that could save lives the next time a deadly virus proves that we're all connected.

Jason FagoneSan Francisco Chronicle

Even against the backdrop of pandemic mismanagement in the United States, the COVID-19
disaster in California’s prisons stands out as the worst medical prison catastrophe in the state’s
history. Three-quarters of the state’s prison population was infected; 256 incarcerated people
and 50 staff members died. Socio-legal scholar Hadar Aviram and data scientist Chad Goerzen’s
forthcoming book FESTER exposes the COVID-19 correctional experience through hundreds of
first-person accounts, months of courtroom observations, years of carefully collected
quantitative COVID-19 data, and a wealth of policy documents.

Against the backdrop of decades of systemic vulnerabilities of overcrowding and abysmal healthcare, the book recounts the suffering that COVID-19 and its mismanagement wrought behind bars–the fruit of neglect, incompetence, fearmongering, sabotage, and dehumanization. FESTER illuminates the lack of control over county jails; the uphill battle to prioritize prisons as vaccine sites, and the struggle
to vaccinate the custodial staff; the harms of zero-sum thinking in light of the transmissivity
between prisons and their surrounding communities; how efforts to litigate on behalf of incarcerated people are thwarted by judicial deference to disingenuous, responsibility-shirking behavior by the state; and how our fear of the optics of releasing people convicted of violent crimes–sometimes decades ago–endanger not only the oldest and most frail people behind
bars, but also everyone in California.

FESTER bears witness to the immense suffering we bring on ourselves and our fellow humans through dehumanization, fear, and ignorance, and stands as a monument for a brave coalition of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people, family members and loved ones, advocates and activists, doctors and journalists, who worked to shed light on one of the Golden State’s correctional system’s darkest times.

Yesterday’s Monsters

Aviram’s book makes it clear that parole, particularly parole hearings, must be a part of conversations around criminal justice reform and transformative justice, and she uses an unusual case to do so. As Aviram notes, she never intended to write a book about the Manson Family. Similarly, many of us never intend to read a book about the Mansons. In this case, however, not doing so would be a mistake.

Rita ShahAuthor of The Meaning of Rehabilitation and Its Impact on Parole.

"Aviram delves into the world of the California parole process, finding almost unfettered administrative discretion, prison programming inadequacies, high-pitched emotions, and political pressures."

Law and Social Inquiry

"Yesterday's Monsters provides a rich, detailed and provocative examination of parole through the lens of an infamous case, yet without sensationalism or voyeurism. Aviram has a unique voice which magnifies the readability of the text. . . . Readers interested in criminal justice as well as students in other disciplines like media studies, sociology, and psychology would be captivated by the book. Aviram's book will also appeal to true crime fanatics and may even provide an avenue for building empathy for people in prison.”

Punishment and Society

The book is a study, not an exposé — there are nearly 800 footnotes — but its language is everyday and accessible. . . It’s aimed at two sets of readers, those who care about the workings of the criminal justice system and those with enduring memories of the Manson nightmare (this reviewer fits both categories).

Bob EgelkoSan Francisco Chronicle

“Yesterday’s Monsters is three remarkable books at once: a compelling work of late twentieth-century social history, a sober and scholarly analysis of the flaws in our parole system, and an enlightened program for sensible reform.”

Robert WeisbergProfessor of Law, Stanford University

In 1969, the world was shocked by a series of murders committed by Charles Manson and his “family” of followers. Although the defendants were sentenced to death in 1971, their sentences were commuted to life with parole in 1972; since 1978, they have been regularly attending parole hearings. Today all of the living defendants remain behind bars.

Relying on nearly fifty years of parole hearing transcripts, as well as interviews and archival materials, Hadar Aviram invites readers into the opaque world of the California parole process—a realm of almost unfettered administrative discretion, prison programming inadequacies, high-pitched emotions, and political pressures. Yesterday’s Monsters offers a fresh longitudinal perspective on extreme punishment.

Cheap on Crime

After forty years of increasing prison construction and incarceration rates, winds of change are blowing through the American correctional system. The 2008 financial crisis demonstrated the unsustainability of the incarceration project, thereby empowering policy makers to reform punishment through fiscal prudence and austerity. In Cheap on Crime, Hadar Aviram draws on years of archival and journalistic research and builds on social history and economics literature to show the powerful impact of recession-era discourse on the death penalty, the war on drugs, incarceration practices, prison health care, and other aspects of the American correctional landscape.

“After decades of stability, mass incarceration is suddenly shapeshifting with enormous speed. Long-held debates are quickly becoming outdated. Aviram has provided us an incisive analysis of this transformation in progress and a lexicon for the new language of carceral power.”

Jonathan SimonAdrian A. Kragen Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley

"Thought-provoking and notable work... Cheap on Crime documents how market values have come to dominate the discourse on American corrections since the Great Recession. A welcome edition to the literature at the intersection of economics and criminology."

Larry KarsonSocial Science Journal

“Masterfully interrogates the economic logics that underpin our America’s massive penal crisis in the wake of the Great Recession. Aviram offers a wonderfully rich analysis of the emerging ‘cheap on crime’ ethos.”

Mona LynchProfessor of Criminology, Law, and Society and Law, University of California, Irvine

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Category: Books

FESTER Wins ASC Book Award

Fester

FESTER Wins ASC Book Award

Prison Systems Still Making COVID19-Era Mistakes

The Zero-Sum Game of Epidemiology

News! FESTER Available for Preorder

FESTER Blurb from UCI’s Keramet Reiter

FESTER Blurb from the Chronicle’s Jason Fagone

Yesterday’s Monsters

Cheap on Crime

Euthanize the Death Penalty Already: Scenes from Capital Punishment’s Chronic Deathbed

I Was Right About Recession-Era Decarceration: Population Has Decreased and So Have Racial Disparities

Free Phone Calls from Prison – And Not a Moment Too Soon

Fighting Ridiculous Court Fees – One Piece at a Time

Paying for Your Time: Low-Level Financial Hassles and Criminal Justice

AB 2730 Proposes a Prison-Release Continuum