News! FESTER Available for Preorder

We’re live! FESTER, my book with Chad Goerzen about the COVID-19 catastrophe in California prisons and jails, is available for preorder on the UC Press website and on Amazon. The official publication date is March 2024.

From the back jacket:

The mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic in California’s prisons stands out as the state’s worst-ever medical catastrophe in a carceral setting. In Fester, socio-legal scholar Hadar Aviram and data scientist Chad Goerzen offer a cultural history of the COVID-19 correctional disaster through hundreds of first-person accounts, months of courtroom observations, years of carefully collected quantitative data, and a wealth of policy documents. Bearing witness to the immense suffering wrought on people behind bars through dehumanization, fear, and ignorance, Fester explains how the carceral system’s cruelty threatens the health and well-being not only of those caught in its grasp, but all Californians—and stands as a monument to the brave coalition of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people, family members and loved ones, advocates and activists, doctors, journalists, and lawyers who fought to shed light on one of the Golden State’s correctional system’s darkest times.

If you’d like us to come to your campus or bookstore in Spring 2024 and beyond, please contact us and we’ll make it happen.

FESTER Blurb from UCI’s Keramet Reiter

Another great endorsement for FESTER comes from Prof. Keramet Reiter of UC Irvine, one of the nation’s most respected and productive scholars of extreme punishment and incarceration and the author of 23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and the Rise of Long-Term Solitary Confinement. Keramet is the director of UCI LIFTED, a phenomenal higher education program granting incarcerated people access to, and degrees from, UC Irvine, and also spearheaded the Prison Pandemic project, which collected first-hand accounts of COVID-19 in prisons and was one of our best primary sources.

Here is Keramet’s endorsement for FESTER:

Aviram, with Goerzen, has produced another tour de force unpacking a new legitimation crisis in California’s punishment infrastructure. Marshalling evidence from litigation, first-person narratives, administrative data compilations, and their own advocacy work, Aviram and Goerzen meticulously analyze how COVID-19 outbreaks in California prisons and jails cruelly terrorized incarcerated people and also exacerbated health risks in the surrounding communities. Impressively, the book reads like a true crime thriller – about the horrors wrought not by the people inside prisons but by the people running and overseeing those prisons. Poignant details of everyday life in prisons in crisis make vivid the book’s pointed policy critiques: information gaps about criminal legal system practices, in combination with dangerously inaccurate assumptions about the impermeability of prisons and jails, produce dangerous incarceration conditions. And dangerous incarceration conditions put us all at risk.

FESTER Blurb from the Chronicle’s Jason Fagone

I’m very pleased to share the first book blurb for FESTER, from star journalist and author Jason Fagone. As a reminder, Jason was part of the San Francisco Chronicle team that broke the story of the San Quentin outbreak. He is also the author of a terrific nonfiction book, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America’s Enemies.

Here is what Jason has to say about FESTER:

Myths can kill, and FESTER dissects a vicious one: the idea that prisons are worlds apart, isolated from their surrounding communities. With passion, rigor, and a flair for storytelling, Aviram and Goerzen show how California’s fealty to this myth placed whole cities at risk during the coronavirus pandemic, transforming the state’s overcrowded prisons into virus bombs that exploded outward. An indictment of a failed system and the politicians and judges who prop it up, this stunning book is also a call to action, laying out reforms that could save lives the next time a deadly virus proves that we’re all connected.

First Peek at the Cover Art for FESTER

Last night we were ecstatic to receive the cover art for FESTER. UC Press has always done right by me–we had a back-and-forth about Yesterday’s Monsters that was very productive, and to this day people remember Cheap on Crime as “the one with the stripes”–but I think this is the best cover they’ve designed for me so far. I like it for three main reasons:

(1) The color. THE COLOR! I love it! Sickness green. You can’t avoid it. You can’t ignore it. It’s so sick. It’s so sickening. It’s the color of miasma and nausea. It evokes with such visceral precision the story we tell in the book. And, people will remember “that green one.”

(2) The map. This was my proposal to the press, and I’m really glad they took me up on it; the execution, of course, is much nicer and cleaner than anything I could’ve possibly produced. You’ll notice it is a map of California, with coronaviruses indicating the locations of CDCR prisons. Inside the book, in Chapter 5, you’ll see another version of this map, which overlays the prison locations on the entire state’s COVID-19 map, which we think drives home the point we make there, and throughout the book: when and where people get sick behind bars, everything around them is sick, because prison is not isolated from its surroundings, but rather along a continuum. I love that this spatial idea, according to which we are not safer when our fellow Californians age and ail behind bars, made it to the cover in such a neat, communicative way.

(3) The font and the way the word breaks down the middle. They could’ve written it on the diagonal, or in smaller print, but they wanted it to be HUGE.And it *should* be huge. We’ve been spelling FESTER in all-caps for a reason, and I’m so glad they kept it that way for the cover. It is only now, presented with the cover art, that friends of mine are finally “getting” the title: it’s not just the disease that is festering. It’s the massive neglect and dehumanization that festered there for decades. The outbreak is nothing more than a trigger that activated existing vulnerabilities. And don’t forget how the coronavirus permeates not only the state map, but also the letters. Everything about this cover is overlaid and permeable.

We are told that FESTER copies will be at the warehouse in January and available in bookstores, brick-and-mortar and online, in March. I will keep you all posted as to developments and as to the book party and tour.