"[McCoy and Hoffman] went inside the walls, they looked, they listened, they learned, they sought to understand not just the kept but the keepers, and to pass on that understanding in words and pictures. . . . In these gripping pages they do not fail to make upon us the most human of claims—that there, save for the grace of an unfathomable God, might go any of us."
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Tom Wicker, from the foreword to the first edition
"Concrete Mama is an intensely human portrait of the inhumane practice of caging. In their powerful images and text, McCoy and Hoffman document the end of one era in the history of incarceration in America and the crushing onset of another. With Dan Berger’s brilliant introduction, the return of this classic is an important contribution to the critique of the prison today."
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Regina Kunzel, author of Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality
"Concrete Mama reveals the social life, power relations, and practices of intimacy in Walla Walla prison in the 1970s, a prison in the state of Washington known both for progressive reform and brutal acts of administrative violence. Through striking photographs and rich narrative text, Hoffman and McCoy offer a window into life inside the prison that has much to teach us about a critical moment in US prison history, as the book marks the eve of mass incarceration and the prison boom that would reshape and expand the reaches of the carceral state."
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Nicole R. Fleetwood, professor of American studies, Rutgers University–New Brunswick
"Nearly forty years after its original publication, Concrete Mama remains one of the most powerful accounts of life, power, and resistance behind bars. This timely edition, with an insightful new introduction by historian and activist Dan Berger, is essential reading for all of us."
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Elizabeth Hinton, author of From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America
