ABSTRACT
The outset of the twenty-first century, the United States (US) prison population has reached the historically unprecedented number of 2.3 million individuals, confined inside a carceral archipelago of almost five thousand penal institutions. The penal statistics shows that African Americans constitute the majority of the US prison population, they represent only 12 per cent of the general population. As twenty-first century unfolds, the result of the ongoing trajectory of punitive governance is that the US is the world leader in punishment and spends more on prisons than on higher education. The common sense perspective on crime and punishment, the obvious catalyst for any change in punitive 'reactions' be a concomitant change in criminal 'actions', has popularized by mainstream criminologists, embraced by politicians in search of populist consent and amplified by mass media. However, a growing body of critical literature in the sociology of punishment shows that crime is not a plausible explanation for the advent of mass-imprisonment in the US.
