The rules and reasons the political system employs to enforce status relations of any kind, including racial hierarchy, evolve and change as they are challenged.

Just providing information about how bad things are, or the statistics and data on incarceration by themselves, does lead to more depression and resignation and is not empowering. The information has to be presented in a way that's linked to the piece about encouraging students to think critically and creatively about how they might respond to injustice, and how young people have responded to injustice in the past.

Prison guard unions have become the powerful political forces in some states, particularly California.

Like Jim Crow (and slavery), mass incarceration operates as a tightly networked system of laws, policies, customs, and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined largely by race.

Most people seem to assume that this dramatic surge in imprisonment was due to a corresponding surge in crime, particularly violent crime.

The mass criminalization of white men would disturb us to the core.

Nothing has contributed more to the systematic mass incarceration of people of color in the United States than the War on Drugs