A Thief's Primer

Politics & Social Sciences

JACKSON, BRUCE

Social Sciences

Macmillan Pub. Co.

In the Life: Versions of the Criminal Experience

HOLT. RINEHART AND WINSTON

Examines crime statistics, trials, plea bargaining, sentencing, parole, recidivism, and the criminal justice bureaucracy

Law and Disorder: CRIMINAL JUSTICE IN AMERICA

University of Illinois Press

Fieldwork

Fieldwork deals with the practical, mechanical, ethical, and theoretical aspects of collecting data. Jackson discusses how fieldworkers define their role, how they relate to others in the field, and how they go about recording for later use what occurred in their presence. This treatment offers an abundance of useful information to those who do folklore fieldwork as well as those who work in any of the other social sciences or humanities. An appendix relates the author's own experiences while documenting Texas's death row.

As recently as the 1970s, many inmates in southern prisons lived and worked on prison farms that were not only modeled after the American slave plantation, but even occupied lands that literally were slave plantations before the Civil War, and on which working and living conditions had not changed much a century after the war. Bruce Jackson began visiting some of these prison farms in the 1960s to study black convict worksongs and folk culture. He took a camera along as means of visual note taking, but soon realized that he had an extraordinary opportunity to document a world whose harshness was so extreme that at least one prison had been declared unconstitutional. Allowed unsupervised access to prison farms in Texas and Arkansas, Jackson created an astonishing photographic record, most of which has never before been published in book form.
Inside the Wire presents a complete, irreplaceable portrait of the southern prison farm. With freedom to wander the fields and facilities and hang out with inmates for extended periods, Jackson captured everything from the hot, backbreaking work of hand-picking cotton, to the cacophony and lack of all privacy in the cell blocks, to the grim solitude of death row. He also includes some early twentieth-century prisoner identification shots, taken by anonymous convict photographers for the prison files, that survive as profoundly evocative human portraits. These images and Jackson’s photographs document, as no previous work has, the humanity of the people and the inhumanity of the institutions in which they labor and languish. As Jackson says, “sometimes kindness happens with prison, but prison itself is a cruel world outsiders can scarcely imagine. I hope nothing in this book suggests otherwise.”

Inside the Wire: Photographs from Texas and Arkansas Prisons

Arts & Photography

Photography & Video

University of Texas Press

Bored, dissatisfied, and engagingly imaginative, computer programmer Eddie Argo decides to strike back at the system and--together with a voluptuous counterculture cohort--reprograms into an anti-establishment Robin Hood fantasy

The Programmer

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Mystery

Ballantine Books

The programmer: A novel

DOUBLEDAY

Anthologizes over one hundred toasts, oral folk poems, with variants, collected from various sources, and examines their functions, themes, backgrounds, and methods of performance

Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me: Narrative Poetry from Black Oral Tradition

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Harvard University Press

Originally published in 1974, this work is considered one of the great collections of black literature and folk poetry known as "toasts"--probably the only living form of oral narrative poetry in the U.S. which represent a vital genre of black folklore. Includes an audio CD.

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Books by JACKSON, BRUCE