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Introduction
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Introduction Caring about people in prison is difficult. We can easily picture incarcerated people as dangerous and dirty, as despicable, as animals in cages. People behind bars are there for good reason—to protect us law-abiding, tax-paying, upstanding citizens from them. We are better off without these people. Good riddance. I have spoken with many people in my family, classroom, and church who have asked me why I care about people in prison. They seem baffled that anyone would care. Some people even suggest to me that it is wrong to care for people in prison. To them, it seems that extending care to incarcerated people somehow denies the seriousness of their crimes and undermines the rule of law. I do not know whether I would have ever come to care about people in prison had not someone I already cared about ended up being one of them. While my relationship with my incarcerated loved one had been strained by a long series of disappointments, mostly rooted in her drug use, I could not look at her as dangerous or dirty; I could not despise her. I could not see how the prison protected anyone else from her—her crime was a nonviolent drug offense and the person she harmed most was herself. I knew that her family was not better off without her, as I saw her children struggle in poverty and wrestle with the stigmatization and isolation of having a mother in prison. And I saw no way that the prison would better enable her to reenter society and to do well as a mother, employee, or citizen. My recognition that prison offered nothing in terms of rehabilitation or reintegration into society proved true, as years after my loved one’s release, she reestablished herself and stopped using drugs—not because of any assistance or guidance from our criminal justice systems, but because of her grit and perseverance alone. Even still, she continues to struggle in poverty, existing always on the edge of survival for herself and her family. Prison did not improve my loved one, her family, her community, or her society. When I came to care about one person in prison, it was difficult for me to remain indifferent to the plight of anyone in prison. In the United States, caring about people in prison entails the acknowledgment, first, that they are indeed people, human persons; that we now hold more people in prison than any other nation and more people than we ever have incarcerated in our history; that our practices of incarceration equate to throwing these people away; that relatively few people in prison need to be there to ensure public safety; and that the 1 reasons we throw so many people away is tied up with social injustice. My loved one is white, female, and from a middle-class background. Young, black men who grow up impoverished socioeconomically are much more likely to be incarcerated, especially in comparison with their representation in the general population. Caring about people in prison in our context requires recognizing that our criminal justice systems uphold what civil rights attorney Michelle Alexander calls “the New Jim Crow,” what director of The Sentencing Project Marc Mauer calls “mass incarceration,” and what social theorist Loïc Wacquant calls “the first genuine prison society.”1 Our criminal justice systems are in crisis, and this crisis both reflects and helps sustain a broader crisis of social justice. Since the early 1970s, our criminal justice systems have grown at an unprecedented rate. To explain this growth, many people assume that the cause is an unprecedented rise in crime rates. Our prison populations, however, have consistently become larger while our crime rates have periodically fluctuated. Growing crime rates cannot explain the creation of the first genuine prison society. In fact, while prison populations have continued to grow, crime rates have at times dropped significantly. Instead several social, cultural, economic, and political factors rooted in social injustice have led to the advent of mass incarceration in the United States, independently of crime rates. In turn, locking up ever more people in our country exacerbates social injustice. While mass incarceration has contributed only a small amount to falling crime rates since the late 1990s, it has worsened conditions in neighborhoods that see many of their residents cycle in and out of prison. Prisoners, their families, and their communities experience greater levels of poverty, political exclusion, and social isolation, as well as potentially even higher...