Document Type
Book Review
Publication Title
Yale Law Journal
Publication Date
2024
Abstract
Prisons are woefully ineffective as tools to protect society from violence and exploitation, yet America’s prison population exploded in the twentieth century. On the outside, this devastated Black communities, Black opportunities, Black economic power, and Black voting power. Yet a similarly insidious development came from inside prison walls: prison administrators honed antidemocratic techniques for constraining and oppressing incarcerated persons, techniques that would later be deployed against the ostensibly free population. Jeffrey Bellin’s Mass Incarceration Nation provides a robust analysis of the ways state and federal policies have combined to create an explosion in the scope of American prisons in the late twentieth century. This Book Review explores how prisons have served as laboratories of antidemocracy to perfect tactics to suppress access to information, protest, and bodily autonomy.
Recommended Citation
Brandon Hasbrouck, Prisons as Laboratories of Antidemocracy, 133 Yale L.J. 1966 (2024) (reviewing Jeffrey Bellin, Mass Incarceration Nation (2022)).
Included in
Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons, Criminal Law Commons, Criminal Procedure Commons, Law and Race Commons, Law Enforcement and Corrections Commons