Introduction

With the highest incarceration rate for any Western industrialized country, over two million and growing in prisons and jails, the United States has 5% of the world’s total population yet possesses 25% of the world’s incarcerated. The number of people under state control in the United States jumps to almost seven million if the four million on probation and the 750,000 on parole are included, and still this figure does not include those housed in Immigration and Naturalization detention facilities or U.S. prisons that are not in the United States. African American women are 8 times more likely and Latinas are 4 times more likely to be imprisoned than white women, and 75% of all women are incarcerated for nonviolent offenses. This addiction to prison expansion has individual and national consequences beyond the abject warehousing of our nation’s poor. One in 50 citizens are barred from voting as a result of their incarceration and in southern states nearly one third of African American males cannot vote (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2005; Critical Resistance Publications Collective, 2000; Mauer & Chesney-Lind, 2002).