Ben Fleury-Steiner, Phd: Home

My latest book with former Birmingham News investigative reporter, Carla Crowder, 'Dying Inside: The HIV/AIDS Ward at Limestone Prison' is forthcoming in September of 2008 from the University of Michigan Press.

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Advanced praise for 'Dying Inside'

"This is a close-up, unblinking study of how prisoners sick with HIV/AIDS suffer the effects of public policies focused more on cost-cutting than on rehabilitation and humanity. Dying Inside effectively shows how oppressive practices evolve, and also, how they can be challenged and changed."

---Doris Marie Provine, Professor, School of Justice and Social Inquiry, Arizona State University

"In Dying Inside, Benjamin Fleury-Steiner takes us to the fundamental contradiction at the heart of mass imprisonment in America: our prisons hold not the most dangerous offenders, but the most disadvantaged Americans. The looming prison health crisis, documented here at its extreme, is a shocking stain on American values and a clear opportunity to rethink our carceral approach to security."

---Jonathan Simon, Associate Dean for Jurisprudence and Social Policy and Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley

"In this readable and important book, Fleury-Steiner makes a compelling case that inmate health care in America's prisons and jails has reached the point of catastrophe. Anyone who cares about the way we treat the people we put behind bars should read this book."

---Sharon Dolovich, Professor of Law, University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law

"The HIV+ men incarcerated in Limestone Prison's Dorm 16 were put there to be forgotten. Not only do Benjamin Fleury-Steiner and Carla Crowder bring these men to life, Fleury-Steiner and Crowder also insist on placing these men in the middle of critical conversations about health policy, mass incarceration, and race. Dense with firsthand accounts, Dying Inside is a nimble, far-ranging and unblinking look at the cruelty inherent in our current penal policies."

---Lisa Kung, Director, Southern Center for Human Rights

"Dying Inside is a thorough and informative analysis of penal health care policy and practice in America. Fleury-Steiner's persuasive argument not only exposes the sins of commission and omission on prison cellblocks, but also does an excellent job of showing how these problems are the natural result of our nation's shortsighted and punitive criminal justice policy."

---Allen Hornblum, Assistant Professor, Geography and Urban Studies, Temple University and author of Sentenced to Science: One Black Man's Story of Imprisonment in America

"Dying Inside takes the reader deep into the capillaries of an American prison where health care personnel and members of nonprofit organizations struggle heroically against the forces of a broken health care system. It is a riveting account of a health crisis in a hidden prison facility that also connects to other dots of neglect related to returning veterans and Katrina victims to paint a panoramic view of America's health care crisis and what we as citizens must do to get out of it."

---Michael Musheno, Professor of Criminal Justice Studies at San Francisco State University and co-author of Deployed: How Reservists Bear the Burden of Iraq

"An important, bold, and humanitarian book."

---Alison Liebling, Professor in Criminology, Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge

"This fresh and original study of the abusive, degrading, and inadequate treatment of segregated prisoners with HIV/AIDS in Alabama's Limestone prison should prick all of our consciences about the horrific consequences of the massive carceral state the United States has built over the last three decades."

---Marie Gottschalk, University of Pennsylvania, author of The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America