This symposium comes at a time in which the myriad social costs associated with the policies of mass incarceration are gaining popular attention. Although many scholars and advocates have labored for decades against what has since been termed the" prison-industrial complex,"'their critiques have only recently moved into the mainstream. 2 This greater attention to mass incarceration has been

1. There is a voluminous literature associated with these efforts. Representative of the insurgent contours of this literature are works by Angela Davis and Mike Davis. They prompted critical thinking about prisons beyond the typical liberal-conservative debates that foregrounded questions about the prevalence of bias, or the tensions between reform-or retribution-based justifications. Angela Davis's description of the prison-industrial complexdrawing links between the earlier work of WEB Du Bois's assessment of the perverse incentives associated with imprisonment of Blacks during and after Reconstruction in the South and the modern prison-industrial machine-framed the skyrocketing incarceration rates in the United States as having dear historical ties to the Jim Crow era. ANGELA Y. DAVIS, WOMEN, RACE &