Introduction: Constructing the Carceral State

Abstract

The United States holds the world’s largest prison population, caging more humans than any other nation on earth. In a situation that is not only internationally unparalleled but also historically unprecedented, every day more than 2 million people are barred somewhere within this nation’s vast archipelago of prisons, jails, and immigrant detention centers. Another 7.2 million are on probation, on parole, or under a deportation order. This is not just any population. The majority of those confined in a U.S. correctional facility are black or brown, and poor. Indeed blacks and Latinos make up 72 percent of the federal prison population and the majority of the state prison populations. By the end of this year, one in three young African American males and one in six young Latino males will be locked away from society. The numbers for women of color versus white women are also stark: 133 of 100,000 African American women and 77 of 100,000 Latinas are locked up as compared with only 47 of 100,000 white women.1 The racial demographics of immigrant detention are equally dire. More than 80 percent of immigration detainees are Latinos, namely Mexicans or Central Americans. The policing apparatus that fills the nation’s carceral facilities is even more capacious. Having been subject to arrest, an estimated 65 million people in the United States have criminal records.2 Scores more have been stopped and interrogated but not arrested. For example, the nation’s largest police force, the New York Police Department (nypd), has conducted nearly 5 million “stop and frisk” investigations from 2003 to 2012. Less than 12 percent of such street interrogations have resulted in arrest, but close to 90 percent of those stopped and frisked in the city are young black and Latino men. Throughout urban