America the Unfree: How the Politics of Race and Region Built a Prison Nation

Abstract

This essay argues that criminal justice is vital to understanding the paradoxical state of American race relations at the start of a new century. Although the election of Barack Obama represents, in one sense, the culmination of the nations long black freedom struggle and seems to portend the emergence of an age of colorblindness, by some criminal justice measures, the United States is dispensing less equal justice now than at the height of Jim Crow segregation. By investigating the breathtaking expansion of imprisonment in the late twentieth century and by tracing its roots to a white conservative backlash against youth rebellion and racial integration, this essay argues that what sociologists are calling mass imprisonment is rolling back key gains of the civil rights movement and that President Obama will have to address the countrys prison crisis if he wants to be a transformational leader.