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ABOUT US

Black Sheep Books, a community space and bookstore in Montpelier, Vermont, offers affordable radical and scholarly books, and hosts educational events on cultural and political topics. As an all-volunteer project, we are operated by a five-member collective hand in hand with a group of dedicated volunteers. Our principle focus is to provide access to anti-authoritarian Left ideas in a way that promotes intellectual debate and challenges today’s hegemonic culture.

We see print media and public talks as necessary for the development of critical consciousness and ultimately social change. Such engagement with the transformative power of ideas connects us to each other, helps us to understand our historical context, and guides us in action. This linking of past to present, theory to practice, is a crucial precondition for the emergence of a free and directly democratic society.

By creating this space in public, we strive to contest the depoliticization and alienation rampant under statist and capitalist social relations. We also aim to generate visibility for identities marginalized by normative values and systems of domination through providing community resources and a welcoming space in the context of our rural location.

Together with horizontalist social movements and political projects, bookstores, infoshops, and publishers, Black Sheep Books works toward an egalitarian, ecological, and nonhierarchical society.

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Black Sheep Books is an all-volunteer
workers' collective specializing in radical
and scholarly used books.
5 State Street, Montpelier, VT | (802) 225-8906
Help support our move!

Black Sheep Books has, at long last, found a perfect new location! And we’re hoping we can count on your financial support to help make our September 1 move to 5 State Street possible.

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Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration

03/24/08 6:00pm

2008-03-24 18:00
2008-03-24 19:30
Etc/GMT-5

Talk and book presentation by Paul Wright

Monday, March 24, from 6 to 7:30 p.m.
at 4 Langdon Street, Montpelier, VT

Paul Wright, editor and cofounder of "Prison Legal News" (the longest-publishing independent prisoner rights magazine in U.S. history), will be discussing his new book "Prison Profiteers: Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration" (New Press, January 2008).

Locking up 2.3 million people isn’t cheap. Each year federal, state, and local governments spend over $185 billion annually in tax dollars to ensure that one out of every 137 Americans is imprisoned. "Prison Profiteers" is a unique work in that it examines who profits and benefits from this mass imprisonment, rather than who is harmed by it and how. "Prison Profiteers" looks at the private prison companies, investment banks, churches, guard unions, medical corporations, and other industries and individuals that benefit from this country’s experiment with mass imprisonment. It lets us follow the money from public to private hands, and exposes how monies formerly designated for the public good are diverted to prisons and their maintenance. Find out where your tax dollars are going as you help to bankroll the biggest prison machine the world has ever seen.

Aside from editing "Prison Legal News" (PLN), Paul Wright is the National Lawyers Guild Jailhouse Lawyer national co-vice president. A former prisoner, Paul was imprisoned for 17 years in Washington State until his release from prison in 2003. During and since his incarceration, he has successfully litigated a wide variety of censorship and public records issues against prison systems around the country both pro se, as a plaintiff and on behalf of "Prison Legal News." Paul founded PLN in 1990 while imprisoned. He is a 2005 Petra Fellow and a 2007 recipient of the James Madison Award from the Washington Coalition for Open Government. He is also on the advisory board of Stop Prison Rape.

Aside from "Prison Profiteers," Paul is also the coauthor of "The Celling of America: An Inside Look at the U.S. Prison Industry" (Common Courage, 1998) and "Prison Nation: The Warehousing of America’s Poor" (Routledge, 2003).

For more info on "Prison Profiteers," see
https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/104_ProductDetails.aspx

For a "7 Days" article in Paul and PLN, see
http://www.7dvt.com/2007/doing-wright

info@blacksheepbooks.org | (802) 225-8906 | 5 State Street, Montpelier, VT, 05602 | login