The Punitive Turn

The Punitive Turn offers scholarship with a purpose. The ten articles in this interdisciplinary collection aim to intervene in one of the great historical missteps of the late twentieth century: the rise of mass incarceration in the United States. Expanded from a conference held at the University of Virginia in 2009, the anthology tackles this problem from a variety of perspectives, including history, economics, and sociology, and using the testimony of former prisoners. The statistics are stunning if depressingly familiar. Today the United States incarcerates a greater percentage of its citizens than any other industrialized nation, including nations commonly derided as “authoritarian” or “undemocratic.” The burden of that mass incarceration falls disproportionately on African Americans. In one of the most sobering articles in this collection, the sociologists Christopher Wildeman, Anna R. Haskins, and Christopher Muller show that black children in the United States are more likely to have a parent in prison than to have a father who has completed college. Black children are also far more likely than children of any other race to see their mothers imprisoned

Authoritarianism · Criminology · Democracy · Mass incarceration · Political science · Politics · Prison · Punitive damages · Race (biology · Scholarship · Sociology · Vagrancy · Variety (cybernetics · Gender Studies · Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics · Homelessness and Social Issues · Law · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies