Research Guides: Mass Incarceration: Articles

Finding Articles on Mass Incarceration

Looking for articles on mass incarceration? The NYU Libraries can help.

NYU Libraries has access to over 1,200 databases that cover a wide range of topics. Use the Articles & Databases tab on the NYU Libraries website to find articles.

Not sure where to start? Bibliographies give an overview of a topic and annotated citations for relevant sources. The Mass Incarceration entry on Oxford Bibliographies would be useful at any point in the research process.

Featured Databases

Criminal Justice Abstracts with Full Text This link opens in a new window
Criminal Justice Abstracts contains bibliographic records and select full text of leading journals and magazines in the fields of criminal justice and criminology. It covers a wide range of topics, including corrections and prisons, policing, history of crime, criminal investigations, forensic sciences and investigations, forensic psychology, substance abuse and addiction, probation and parole, criminal law, and more.
National Criminal Justice Reference Service Abstracts This link opens in a new window
NCJRS contains summaries of U.S. and international publications, including federal, state, and local government reports, books, research reports, journal articles, audiovisual presentations, and unpublished research related to criminal justice, juvenile justice, and substance abuse. Dates of coverage: 1975 to present.
Legal Source (EBSCO) This link opens in a new window
Legal Source provides access to an extensive range of full-text legal content. It offers information centered on the discipline of law and legal topics, such as criminal justice, international law, federal law, organized crime, medical law, labor and human resource law, ethics, and the environment. Legal Source includes the Index to Legal Periodicals Retrospective and the Index to Legal Periodicals & Books.
Sociological Abstracts This link opens in a new window
Sociological Abstracts represents the core database for sociological scholarship, covering literature in sociology and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences. It indexes scholarly journals, dissertations and theses, books, and conference papers and proceedings, and is international in scope.
SocINDEX with Full Text This link opens in a new window
SocINDEX covers the sociology literature, encompassing all sub-disciplines and closely related areas of study. It indexes scholarly journals, books, monographs, and conference papers.

Archival and Primary Source Materials

Mass Incarceration and Prison Studies This link opens in a new window
Mass Incarceration and Prison Studies is part of the Global Issues Library, this curated database provides a study for students to investigate both crucial global trends in mass incarceration, and the detailed prison infrastructure of specific countries. The database is organized around a selection of key historical and contemporary events and themes, bringing together archival and reference materials, court cases, first-hand accounts, videos, Supreme Court audio files, research on rehabilitation, training materials and artistic works.

American Prison Newspapers, 1800-2020: Voices from the Inside
On March 24, 1800, Forlorn Hope became the first newspaper published within a prison by an incarcerated person. In the intervening 200 years, over 450 prison newspapers have been published from U.S. prisons. Some, like the Angolite and the San Quentin News, are still being published today. American Prison Newspapers will bring together hundreds of these periodicals from across the country into one collection that will represent penal institutions of all kinds, with special attention paid to women's-only institutions. Development of the collection began in July 2020 and will continue through 2021, with new content added regularly.

Strategic Searching

There are three standard operators that can be used to connect these search words: AND, OR, and NOT.

Use AND to narrow down results and tell the database that the search terms used on either side of AND must all be present.
- Example: ("mass incarceration" AND recidivism AND "racial bias")
Use OR to broaden search results and tell the database the results should contain any of the terms included.
- Example: ("mass incarceration" OR "prison industrial complex" OR "prison pipeline")
Use NOT to exclude a word or phrase from the search results.
- Example: ("prison labor" NOT "prison labour")

Check for tips on searching provided by the database (i.e., ProQuest Central has a Search tip link that helps turn a basic search into a more strategic one). Remember to try various keyword combinations, synonyms and alternative spellings (i.e., person of color or person of colour).

Research Reports

U.S. government reports and statistics are available online through the NYU Libraries catalog and in print at Bobst Library. The U.S. Government Documents research guide explains how to find government publications.

Publications from non-governmental organizations are available through the organizations that publish them. Some historical reports from non-governmental organizations are in the library catalog.

The Impact of Incarceration and Mandatory Minimums on Survivors: Exploring the Impact of Criminalizing Policies on African American Women and Girls
In 2015, the Office on Violence Against Women at the United States Department of Justice convened a meeting of survivors, scholars, advocates, and community activists who focus on sexual assault and intimate partner violence against women to examine how criminalization policies impact the lives of African American women and girls. This report was released in January 2017 to summarize key points and recommendations from the roundtable.
Drug Offenders in Federal Prison: Estimates of Characteristics Based on Linked Data
This study, published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, is based on 94,678 offenders in federal prison at fiscal yearend 2012 who were sentenced on a new U.S. district court commitment and whose most serious offense (as classified by the Federal Bureau of Prisons) was a drug offense.
Boxed In: The True Cost of Extreme Isolation in New York’s Prisons
This report, published by the New York Civil Liberties Union, is the product of an intensive, year-long investigation that involved communication with more than 100 people who have spent significant amounts of time – in one case, more than 20 years – in extreme isolation. The authors interviewed prisoners’ family members and corrections staff, and analyzed thousands of pages of Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) records obtained through the state’s open records laws.
It's War in Here: A Report on the Treatment of Transgender and Intersex People in NYS Men’s Prisons
Since opening in 2002, the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP) has provided free legal services to over 700 intersex, transgender, and gender non-conforming people. To create this report, the author corresponded with and gathered detailed narratives from twelve SRLP clients who are currently or were formerly imprisoned in various New York State men’s prisons. In addition, the author interviewed a range of New York City-based advocates and service providers who work with transgender communities.

Spotlight on Student Journalism & Activism

Some of the articles and features found in databases with national news coverage refer to stories originally reported by student-run newspapers:

Washington Square News: "University Confirms, Aramark Out, Chartwells In," by Victor Porcelli
Daily Princetonian: "Missing the (Ara)mark on divestment," by Amanda Eisenhour
Columbia Spectator: "Barnard No Aramark Wants a More Ethical College. Will the Administration Listen?" by Megan Evershed
The Chicago Maroon: "Student group protests Aramark's role in prisons," by Alex Ward

Google Scholar

Google Scholar searches for scholarly literature in a simple, familiar way. You can search across many disciplines and sources at once to find articles, books, theses, court opinions, and more. For more tips on using Google Scholar, read the Advanced Google Searching research guide.

Mass Incarceration

Key terms