through the exclusion of prisoners from civic life. The American practice of felon disenfranchisement is even more directly at odds with democracy.58 More abstractly, we might observe the harshness of mass incarceration, the mandatory minimum sentences, the aggressive policing tactics, and the relish with which politicians claim to be (and are

The contemporary American prison has become first and foremost a warehouse, a site of incapacitation and segregation. Penal confinement is carried out with an eye to removing the offender from society for as long as possible rather than with any pretense to “reform” or “correct.” This justification for imprisonment may be considered popularly

Demosthenes asks his audience forthrightly: What is the point of the prison if it cannot keep a wealthy criminal in check?

Almost every technique for penal confinement—from solitary confinement to prison labor to psychological counseling—has failed to reform or make penitent, at least in any empirically verifiable way.

The more punishment is brought to the fore of electoral politics, and the more control over punishment is placed in the hands of elected officials, the harsher punishment seems to get.

Neither of the intellectual resources on which the modern theory of the prison initially relied—the idea of reform and the value of incarceration for popular self-rule—can be plausibly endorsed in the United States in the age of mass incarceration.

penal reality of racist and classist oppression.41 In addition to radical arguments that reform was inherently paternalistic, voices from the center and the right attacked reform for the purely pragmatic reason that “nothing works” to rehabilitate criminals.42 For the first time in its two-hundred-year history, criminology began to lose faith in

intensive policing and high incarceration rates led to an increasing sense of political exclusion and anomie in marginalized communities, mass incarceration silently redefined who counted as a full member of the political community.