ABSTRACT
The American prison boom repudiates the mission of rehabilitation and the model of mutual obligation on which that mission is built. This chapter argues by tracing the roots of mass imprisonment to fundamental shifts in the American polity and economy. It explores the inequalities in contemporary patterns of incarceration and discusses their significance for the quality and extent of American citizenship. Mass imprisonment of the late 1990s can be traced to a rightward shift in American politics and the collapse of urban labor markets for low-skilled men. The right-turn in American politics took punitive criminal justice as a key element. America’s earliest prisons, charged with the task of moral correction, expressed a democratic ambition. In the mission of the nineteenth-century penitentiary, even those who had fallen into crime could be reformed and returned to society. The social inequality produced by mass imprisonment is a creature of the post-civil rights era.
