The Garden: Abolitionist Bookstore & Community Well

The Garden is an abolitionist bookstore and community well operating out of Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. We exist to reignite the collective imagination of our neighborhood in service of Black liberation. Below you'll find our curated booklists.

Whether you purchase something from our list or something else from the website, 30% of the proceeds will be returned to The Garden to support our inventory and programming!

Abolition 101 VIEW LIST (7 BOOKS)

Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom

We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice

Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition

Making Abolitionist Worlds: Proposals for a World on Fire

Abolishing Carceral Society

Are Prisons Obsolete?

Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?: Police Violence and Resistance in the United States

Understanding the Criminal Punishment System VIEW LIST (16 BOOKS)

Rethinking Punishment in the Era of Mass Incarceration

Unwarranted: Policing Without Permission

Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America's Prison Nation

Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

Incarceration Nation

The Evolution of the Juvenile Court: Race, Politics, and the Criminalizing of Juvenile Justice

Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World

Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II

Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, Second Edition

American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey Into the Business of Punishment

In the Place of Justice: A Story of Punishment and Redemption

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (Anniversary)

Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing Californiavolume 21

Solitary: A Biography (National Book Award Finalist; Pulitzer Prize Finalist)

VIEW ALL 16 BOOKS

Freedom from the Criminal Punishment System VIEW LIST (7 BOOKS)

Are Prisons Obsolete?

Burning Down the House: The End of Juvenile Prison

Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)

Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms

Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

Contesting Carceral Logic

Seeding Better Futures (Transformative Justice) VIEW LIST (7 BOOKS)

The Feminist and the Sex Offender: Confronting Sexual Harm, Ending State Violence

The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities

Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

Fumbling Towards Repair: A Workbook for Community Accountability Facilitators

Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl's Notes from the End of the World

Before Wakanda, was Oakland (The Black Panthers) VIEW LIST (7 BOOKS)

The Black Panther Party: A Graphic Novel History

Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination

A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story

The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland

Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party

Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton

My People Are Rising: Memoir of a Black Panther Party Captain

Historical & Contemporary Fiction VIEW LIST (10 BOOKS)

Walking on Cowrie Shells: Stories

When No One Is Watching: A Thriller

Lightseekers

How Beautiful We Were

Real Life

A Girl Is a Body of Water

The Rib King

Patsy

The Prophets

Homegoing

Poetry is Not a Luxury VIEW LIST (29 BOOKS)

If They Come for Us: Poems

1919

Hemming the Water

Citizen: An American Lyric

Life on Mars

Selected Poems

Mercurochrome

My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter

Electric Arches

Magical Negro

A Fortune for Your Disaster

They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

The Black Condition Ft. Narcissus

Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude

Wind in a Box

VIEW ALL 29 BOOKS

Black Futures (Liberation in Fantasy/Science Fiction) VIEW LIST (10 BOOKS)

Son of the Storm

War Girls

Brown Girl in the Ring

Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

The City We Became

Who Fears Death

Black Leopard, Red Wolf

How Long 'til Black Future Month?: Stories

Riot Baby

Jesus is an Abolitionist (Christian Case for Abolition) VIEW LIST (4 BOOKS)

The Fall of the Prison: Biblical Perspectives on Prison Abolition

Break Every Yoke: Religion, Justice, and the Abolition of Prisons

A Black Theology of Liberation: 50th Anniversary Edition

Rethinking Incarceration: Advocating for Justice That Restores

To Be Remembered (Black Memoir & Autobiography) VIEW LIST (17 BOOKS)

Black Boy Out of Time: A Memoir

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography

Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson

Black Boy [Seventy-Fifth Anniversary Edition]

This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer

All Boys Aren't Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto

Negroland: A Memoir

Dust Tracks on a Road: A Memoir

How We Fight for Our Lives: A Memoir

Soul on Ice

Just as I Am: A Memoir

Between the World and Me

The Fire Next Time

A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story

Die Nigger Die!: A Political Autobiography of Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin

VIEW ALL 17 BOOKS