ABSTRACT
Taking a scene from James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room as a starting point for discussion, this introduction examines how the gaze of the viewer bestows meaning and establishes a narrative about complex social structures like the prison industrial complex and provides an overview of how popular culture helps (or hinders) the building of our views of prisons and structure of incarceration. This introduction also examines the background of mass incarceration and provides a basic discussion of policies pertinent to the arguments of the chapters that follow before providing an overview of those chapters.
