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Come, Madam But I don't have my shoes on. Come, Madam.

Correctional library staff are essential to fulfilling the rehabilitative mission of prisons, but their work is too often misunderstood and neglected. The Colorado Department of Corrections (CDOC) Libraries have a 272% turnover rate and struggle with many long-term vacancies. Despite being the lowest-paid staff in CDOC, library staff are asked to fulfill two distinct sets of responsibilities: that of running a library, and facility safety and security tasks.

Based upon original research, the Colorado State Library (CSL) has created a standard for minimum staffing levels for CDOC Libraries and a formula that can be applied no matter what service model a correctional library uses. CSL has found that to improve recruitment and retention of its library staff, CDOC needs to (1) improve pay and the librarian promotional path by changing staff to a class series which more appropriately reflects the job duties and level of decision-making and (2) create more library staff positions statewide in order to meet the minimum staffing levels.

Prior to the passage of the 20th amendment to the US Constitution in 1920, several states had extended the suffrage to women. Helen Laura Sumner (later Woodbury), a student of John R. Commons at Wisconsin, undertook a statistical study of the political, economic, and social impacts of the granting of voting rights to women in the state of Colorado, and subsequently defended the results against numerous attacks. In this paper, we present a brief account of the struggle for women’s equality in the extension of the suffrage and examine Sumner’s critical analysis of the evidence as to its effects, as well as the counterarguments to which she responded.

In 1985 the Colorado State Legislature mandated, in Article 13 of HB 1187, that institutions of higher education become “accountable for demonstrable improvements in student knowledge, capacities and skills between entrance and graduation” (Colorado Revised Statutes, 1988). As a result, the University of Northern Colorado Libraries became involved in the assessment process. In 1988 the UNC Libraries formed the University Libraries Assessment Committee, comprised of library faculty, classified staff and an administrator in an ex officio position. The Assessment Committee conducted the first survey to assess user satisfaction in the fall of 1988. Since that time, the committee has conducted an assessment program on an annual basis. Today, the UNC Libraries are evaluated in three areas: collections, services, and instruction. Over time, the assessment tools and survey methodologies have evolved, and a variety of program changes have resulted. In this article, we will summarize the history of the assessment program at the UNC Libraries, track selected questions through the years, and describe the resulting changes in the UNC Libraries programs.

As a tenured associate professor whose career has engaged various social justice issues, this chapter discusses the collaborative and shared decision-making process used to found and maintain basketball teams for seven years. The chapter also focuses on personal reflections of coaching club basketball as part of an auto-ethnography. The chapter explains the experiences that influenced a praxis focused on social justice as an attempt to infuse principles of equality and inclusiveness in opposition to harsh traditional coaching practices. Youth embraced an approach with little yelling, but some parents disapproved. Finally, this work discusses the limitations and successes of utilizing a social justice approach, including professional and health consequences.

As a sustainability initiative with the backing of civil society, business, or government interests, urban agriculture can drive green gentrification even when advocates of these initiatives have good intentions and are aware of their exclusionary potential for urban farmers and residents. I investigate this more general pattern with the case of how urban agriculture became used for green gentrification in Denver, Colorado. This is a city with many urban farmers that gained access to land after the Great Recession but faced the contradiction of being a force for displacement and at risk of displacement as the city adopted new sustainability and food system goals, the housing market recovered, and green gentrification spread. I argue that to understand this outcome, it is necessary to explain how political economy and cultural forces create neighborhood disinvestment and economic marginalization and compel the entrance of urban agriculture initiatives due to their low-profit mode of production and potential economic, environmental, and social benefits. Central to how urban agriculture initiatives contribute to green gentrification is the process of revalorization, which is how green growth machines repurpose such initiatives by drawing on their cultural cachet to exploit rent gaps. I conclude with a set of hypotheses to help other scholars test the conditions under which urban agriculture is more or less likely to contribute to green gentrification. Doing so may help nuance convictions about the benefits of urban agriculture within the context of entrenched inequalities in rapidly changing cities.

This chapter explores the ways in which a large-scale accounting system, known as Marijuana Enforcement Tracking Reporting and Compliance, contributes to the construction and organization of a new market for recreational cannabis in the US state of Colorado. Mobilizing the theoretical lenses provided by the literature on market devices, on the one hand, and infrastructure, on the other hand, the authors identify and unpack a changing relationship between accounting and state control through which accounting and markets unfold. The authors describe this movement in terms of a distinction between knowing devices and thinking infrastructures. In the former, the authors show that regulators and other authorities perform the market by making it legible for the purpose of intervention, taxation and control. In the latter, thinking infrastructures, an ecology of interacting devices is made and remade by a variety of intermediaries, disclosing the boundaries and possibilities of the market, and constituting both opportunities for innovation and domination through “protocol.”

This study theorizes about the development of dominant tactics within social movements, as certain tactics within a tactical repertoire are used frequently and imbued with ideological significance. Little research has been done on hierarchies within tactical repertoires, assuming that all tactics within a repertoire are equal. Between 1974 and 2008, the US Religious Right attempted over 200 anti-gay referendums and initiatives to retract or prevent gay rights laws. This research examines how the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) movement developed campaign tactics to fight these direct democracy measures. This research expands the existing literature on tactical repertoires by theorizing about the mechanisms by which tactics become dominant, namely, their affirmation by victories, responsiveness to countermovement escalation, and involvement of institutionalized social movement organizations to disseminate tactics. This research contradicts existing movement–countermovement literature that suggests that movements do not develop dominant tactics when mobilizing in opposition to a countermovement.

In this article, I trace the slow evolution of the contemporary idea of “academic freedom” through two court cases of the early twentieth century. Unfortunately for academics, this history does not end with a ringing endorsement of the right of academics to speak freely without being afraid of losing their teaching jobs. Rather, the courts have tended to agree that while faculty do have freedom of speech under the first amendment, they do not necessarily have the right to keep their jobs no matter what they say. This chapter illustrates the court’s early validation of punishing the “free speech” of employees if it promotes a “bad tendency” in Patterson v. Colorado in 1907 and concludes with Oliver Wendell Holmes’ ruling in 1919 that introduces the concept of the “marketplace of ideas” to evaluate speech even though the defendants were convicted of espionage as they exercised their “freedom of speech.” For the educator, freedom of speech is essential in having the academic freedom to pursue their discipline.

Supermaxes across the United States detain thousands in long-term solitary confinement, under conditions of extreme sensory deprivation. Almost every state built a supermax between the late 1980s and the late 1990s. This chapter examines the role of federal prisoners’ rights litigation in the 1960s and 1970s in shaping the prisons, especially supermaxes, built in the 1980s and 1990s in the United States. This chapter uses a systematic analysis of federal court case law, as well as archival research and oral history interviews with key informants, including lawyers, experts, and correctional administrators, to explore the relationship between federal court litigation and prison building and designing. This chapter argues that federal conditions of confinement litigation in the 1960s and 1970s (1) had a direct role in shaping the supermax institutions built in the subsequent decades and (2) contributed to the resistance of these institutions to constitutional challenges. The history of litigation around supermaxes is an important and as-yet-unexplored aspect of the development of Eighth Amendment jurisprudence in the United States over the last half century.