With Intent?: The Malicious Consequences of Prison

The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, Children of the Prison Boom by Sara Wakefield and Christopher Wildeman, and Disrupted Childhoods by Jane A. Siegel are representative of a burgeoning focus within the academy on the deleterious effects of prisons. Given the differing disciplinary and methodological trajectories of these three texts, it is important to first map out the general terrain of the study of prisons. In plotting out the development of these works, such background is crucial in order to establish common ground in which to read the books as a part of a field of inquiry.

The past twenty years have borne witness to the emergence of critical work that addresses the problematics and key issues related to the prison system(s) in the United States. Prison as an object of study has become a key fixture within both the academy and planning efforts by communal organizations across the country. While not always in dialogue with each other, the coalescence of these two entities was marked by the 1998 Critical Resistance (CR) conference held on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. The collective impetus of the conference took on the spirit of two of the central figures within CR—Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis. Similar to their own life’s work as scholars and activists, the conference spanned across both disciplinary boundaries and the gulf between universities and the communities they reside within. In the wake of the 1998 conference, several key texts such as Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003) and Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Golden Gulag (2007) have set forth analytical and practical models to understand the complex dynamics of both prison development and, importantly, efforts to counter the violence that prisons continue to inflict upon communities across the country.

In addition to the development of the aforementioned critical texts, key organizations such as Incite! formed in the wake of the CR conference. Incite! directly addressed the crosscutting issues of gender, sex, race, and class with respect to violence enacted upon women of color. Incite!’s analytic gaze was particularly focused upon connections between prisons and the production of violence. One of Incite!’s founding members Beth E. Richie, whose text Compelled to Crime (1995) was instrumental in changing the academic discourse with respect to black women, became an important voice in making the connections between prison and violence against black women. Both Richie’s earlier and most recent work, Arrested Justice (2012), have set forth a new paradigm to understand the complexity of the prison system and provided needed nuance with respect to gender and sexuality.

It is within this context that the three texts, The New Jim Crow, Children of the Prison Boom, and Disrupted Childhoods, are situated. Ranging in methodological backgrounds, each of the texts offers a unique perspective into the vast impact that prisons have in the United States. When read collectively, the three works provide a disturbing snapshot of the rapid devastation imposed upon black people in particular as a result of prison expansion and related public policy. Alexander’s work is primarily situated within the field of legal studies. Culling the recent historical (post–civil rights) and contemporary legal record, Alexander asserts that because of the formation of a racially motivated criminal justice system, black people have been permanently affixed into a subaltern caste. She writes, “The current system of control permanently locks a huge percentage of the African American community out of the mainstream society and economy. The system operates through our criminal justice institutions, but it functions more like a caste system than a system of crime control” (13).

Alexander’s evidence overwhelmingly rests upon data that connects the “new Jim Crow” to masculinity. Alexander states, “In major cities wracked...