Prison

A sweeping history of American prisons, showing how they have shaped the US from the founding to the present.

The land of the free is the home of the prisoner. The United States today incarcerates nearly two million people, amounting to almost a quarter of the world’s prison population. America’s prisoners are overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately Black, serving sentences far longer than they would receive for similar crimes in most other countries. This is not a new problem. This nation has always preferred captivity as the solution to its social disorders, its population’s changes, and its people’s inconvenient demands. The prison has fueled America’s rise from the very beginning.

Prison looks through the eyes of incarcerated rebels, unionists, journalists, and incorrigibles to chronicle how the rickety wooden jails of colonial America gave way to the supermax prisons of the present. Along the way, prisons supplied the labor that built a young nation, contained unruly workers who demanded change, and magnified racist policies. At the same time, the prison has never succeeded in silencing its captives. Indeed, they have been among the nation’s clearest thinkers of freedom.

Recovering the voices of incarcerated people across centuries of history, Prison reveals that the story of America is a story of prisons.