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2013•Canadian Review of American StudiesRequires access

Control, Resistance, and Racism in the Contemporary Prison

Jason Demers

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Abstract

Abstract: By 2009, more than 2 million Americans were in prison and an additional 5 million were in jail, on probation, or on parole. Statistics such as these have resulted in a general unease with the way that the United States punishes its citizens, but the causes of America’s prison binge are specific, and the pains prison generates are not experienced uniformly across racial and gender lines. This essay reviews three books on contemporary trends in American prisons and imprisonment: Sharon Shalev’s Supermax: Controlling Risk through Solitary Confinement, Victoria Law’s Resistance behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women, and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Each of these three books identifies major structural problems within the current paradigm of mass imprisonment.

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Abstract: By 2009, more than 2 million Americans were in prison and an additional 5 million were in jail, on probation, or on parole. Statistics such as these have resulted in a general unease with the way that the United States punishes its citizens, but the causes of America’s prison binge are specific, and the pains prison generates are not experienced uniformly across racial and gender lines. This essay reviews three books on contemporary trends in American prisons and imprisonment: Sharon Shalev’s Supermax: Controlling Risk through Solitary Confinement, Victoria Law’s Resistance behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women, and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Each of these three books identifies major structural problems within the current paradigm of mass imprisonment.

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Available abstract

Abstract: By 2009, more than 2 million Americans were in prison and an additional 5 million were in jail, on probation, or on parole. Statistics such as these have resulted in a general unease with the way that the United States punishes its citizens, but the causes of America’s prison binge are specific, and the pains prison generates are not experienced uniformly across racial and gender lines. This essay reviews three books on contemporary trends in American prisons and imprisonment: Sharon Shalev’s Supermax: Controlling Risk through Solitary Confinement, Victoria Law’s Resistance behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women, and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Each of these three books identifies major structural problems within the current paradigm of mass imprisonment.

Key concepts: Prison, Imprisonment, Mass incarceration, Racism, Resistance (ecology), Criminology, Solitary confinement, Sociology

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