This book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of how contemporary American prison narratives reflect and produce ideologies of masculinity in the United States, and in so doing, compellingly engages popular culture in order to demonstrate the profound ways in which implicit understandings of prison life shape all Americans, and their reactions to people both incarcerated and not.

Prison narratives are an invaluable source for the study of minority positions or discourses of otherness in US culture. Particularly in the discourses of the US criminal justice system, politics and the visual media, criminals are represented as the other, from the perspectives of race, sexuality and moral inferiority. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this compelling study analyzes how American prison narratives reflect and produce ideologies of masculinity in the United States. For the first time, this book puts various subgenres of prison narratives into a dialogue in order to demonstrate a polar dichotomy in the institutional and public discourses of criminality. It draws together fascinating materials that have rarely, if ever, received careful attention and examines popular culture to demonstrate the profound ways in which implicit understandings of prison life shape all Americans, and their reactions to people both incarcerated and not.

This book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of how contemporary American prison narratives reflect and produce ideologies of masculinity in the United States, and in so doing, compellingly engages popular culture in order to demonstrate the profound ways in which implicit understandings of prison life shape all Americans, and their reactions to people both incarcerated and not.

In Prisons, Race, and Masculinity, Peter Caster demonstrates the centrality of imprisonment in American culture, illustrating how incarceration, an institution inseparable from race, has shaped and continues to shape U.S. history and literature in the starkest expression of what W.E.B. DuBois famously termed "the problem of the color line." A prison official in 1888 declared that it was the freeing of slaves that actually created prisons: "we had to establish means for their control. Hence came the penitentiary." Such rampant racism contributed to the criminalization of black masculinity in the cultural imagination, shaping not only the identity of prisoners (collectively and individually) but also America's national character. Caster analyzes the representations of imprisonment in books, films, and performances, alternating between history and fiction to describe how racism influenced imprisonment during the decline of lynching in the 1930s, the political radicalism in the late 1960s, and the unprecedented prison expansion through the 1980s and 1990s. Offering new interpretations of familiar works by William Faulkner, Eldridge Cleaver, and Norman Mailer, Caster also engages recent films such as American History X, The Hurricane, and The Farm: Life Inside Angola Prison alongside prison history chronicled in the transcripts of the American Correctional Association. This book offers a compelling account of how imprisonment has functioned as racial containment, a matter critical to U.S. history and literary study.

Why stigmatizing and confining a large segment of our population should be unacceptable to all Americans. The United States, home to five percent of the world's population, now houses twenty-five percent of the world's prison inmates. Our incarceration rate—at 714 per 100,000 residents and rising—is almost forty percent greater than our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). More pointedly, it is 6.2 times the Canadian rate and 12.3 times the rate in Japan. Economist Glenn Loury argues that this extraordinary mass incarceration is not a response to rising crime rates or a proud success of social policy. Instead, it is the product of a generation-old collective decision to become a more punitive society. He connects this policy to our history of racial oppression, showing that the punitive turn in American politics and culture emerged in the post-civil rights years and has today become the main vehicle for the reproduction of racial hierarchies. Whatever the explanation, Loury argues, the uncontroversial fact is that changes in our criminal justice system since the 1970s have created a nether class of Americans—vastly disproportionately black and brown—with severely restricted rights and life chances. Moreover, conservatives and liberals agree that the growth in our prison population has long passed the point of diminishing returns. Stigmatizing and confining of a large segment of our population should be unacceptable to Americans. Loury's call to action makes all of us now responsible for ensuring that the policy changes.

During the past two decades in the U.S., there has been a move toward incarceration, and one group in particular has been impacted by discriminatory and unjust corrections policies driven by the promises of politicians to "get tough on crime." Although this book is more about criminal justice policies than it is about race, it examines these policies in the context of their impact on the African American male population. This book examines prison conditions in the U.S. It also explores, among other issues, the business of prisons, including the positioning of prison guard unions as influential interest groups, the proliferation of prisons, and the role of prison labor in a cycle of capitalistic exploitation.

This book explores the frightening ways our prisons mirror the worst aspects of society-wide gender relations. It is part of the growing research on men and masculinities. The collection is unusual in that it combines contributions from activists, academics, and prisoners. The opening section, which features an essay by Angela Davis, focuses on the historical roots of the prison system, cultural practices surrounding gender and punishment, and the current expansion of corrections into the "prison-industrial complex." The next section examines the dominant or subservient roles that men play in prison and the connections between this hierarchy and male violence. Another section looks at the spectrum of intimate relationships behind bars, from rape to friendship, and another at physical and mental health. The last section is about efforts to reform prisons and prison masculinities, including support groups for men. It features an essay about prospects for post-release success in the community written by a man who, after doing time in Soledad and San Quentin, went on to get a doctorate in counseling. The contributions from prisoners include an essay on enforced celibacy by Mumia Abu-Jamal, as well as fiction and poetry on prison health policy, violence, and intimacy. The creative contributions were selected from the more than 200 submissions received from prisoners. Author note: Don Sabo, Professor of Social Sciences at D'Youville College in Buffalo, is author or editor of five books, most recently, with David Gordon, Men's Health and Illness: Gender, Power, and the Body and, with Michael Messner, Sex, Violence, and Power in Sports: Rethinking Masculinity. Sabo has appeared on The Today Show, Oprah, and Donahue. Terry A. Kupers, M.D., a psychiatrist, teaches at the Wright Institute in Berkeley. He is the author of four books, editor of a fifth. His latest books are Prison Madness: The Mental Health Crisis Behind Bars and What We Must Do About It and Revisioning Men's Lives: Gender, Intimacy, and Power. Kupers has served as an expert witness in more than a dozen cases on conditions of confinement and mental health services. Willie London, a published poet, is General Editor of the prison publication Elite Expressions. He is currently an inmate at Eastern Corrections. For nine years he was a prisoner at Attica.