Prison Advocacy in a Time of Capital Disaccumulation

Any analysis of contemporary U.S. society must seek to explain the trends in the last two decades toward the confinement of more and more persons behind bars, toward harsher conditions of incarceration, toward indiscriminate use of the death penalty, and toward the disproportionate incidence of all of the above on blacks and Hispanics. In Ohio, for example, African Americans constitute about half of the 45,000 persons imprisoned, about half of the two hundred men on death row, and about two-thirds of the four-hundred-plus prisoners at the Youngstown supermax (a supermax prison is one in which prisoners are allowed virtually no contact with one another, and are subjected to constant and very sophisticated surveillance).This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website

Ancient history · Capital (architecture) · Criminology · Political science · Prison · Sociology · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis · History