New Books In Critical Theory

How does a Black man in Austin get sent to prison on a 70-year sentence for stealing a tuna sandwich, likely costing Texas taxpayers roughly a million dollars? In America, your liberty--or even your life--may be forfeit not simply because of what you do, but where you do it. If the same man had run off with a lobster roll from a lunch counter in Maine it's unlikely that he'd be spending the rest of his life behind bars. The U.S. incarcerates more people than any other industrial democracy in the world. We have more ex-prisoners than the entire population of Ireland, and more people with a felony record than the populations of Denmark, Norway, New Zealand and Liberia combined. Why did the United States become the world's biggest jailer? And, just as importantly, what has it done to us? What are the costs--socially, economically, and politically--of having the world's largest population of ex-prisoners? And what can we do about it? In The Jailer's Reckoning: How Mass Incarceration Is Damaging America (Rowman &