Building the prison state: race and the politics of mass incarceration

The United States incarcerates more people per capital than any other industrialised nation in the world - about 1 in 100 adults - while national spending on prisons has catapulted 400 percent.

Given the vast racial disparities in incarceration, the prison system also reinforces race and class divisions.

Reframing the story of mass incarceration, Heather Schoenfeld illustrates how the unfinished task of full equality for African Americans led to a series of policy choices that expanded the government's power to punish, even as they were designed to protect individuals from arbitrary state violence.

Examining civil rights protests, prison condition lawsuits, sentencing reforms, the War on Drugs, and the rise of conservative Tea Party politics, Schoenfeld explains why politicians veered from skepticism of prisons to an embrace of incarceration as the appropriate response to crime.