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Race, Incarceration, and American Values

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"Based on the 2007 Tanner lectures on human values at Stanford."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.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.

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Detail Information

Series Title

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Call Number

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Publisher

Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press., 2008

Collation

1 online resource (86 pages).

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780262278577

Classification

NONE

Content Type

text

Media Type

computer

Carrier Type

online resource

Edition

-

Subject(s)

United States
Criminal justice, Administration of
Prisons and race relations
Prisoners
Race discrimination
Imprisonment
Justice, Administration of
Crime and race

Specific Detail Info

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Statement of Responsibility

Glenn C. Loury ; with Pamela Karlan, Loic Wacquant, and Tomie Shelby.

Other Information

Cataloger

reva

Source

https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/3257/Race-Incarceration-and-American-Values

Validator

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Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8015.001.0001

Journal Volume

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Journal Issue

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Subtitle

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