An essay by Peter Monaghan in the Chronicle of Higher Education traces the rise of a new generation of scholars who are rebuilding the academic field of prison studies. Monaghan begins by discussing the dramatic escalation of the American prison system over the last few decades:
"Some 2.3-million people are incarcerated in the United States. From the 1920s to 1975, the imprisonment rate hovered around 110 per 100,000 U.S. residents; it has since rocketed to 760—proportionally five to 12 times as high as any other industrialized nations.
The annual bill: $64-billion.
Reacting to that scale and to increasingly harsh methods of imprisonment, scholars across the social sciences and humanities are energetically studying incarceration, reviving a research interest of the 1960s and 1970s that was inspired by prison-reform efforts."
Meanwhile a new article by David Cole in the New York Review of Books, taking its cue from three new books about the crisis of incarceration in the U.S. asks, "Can Our Shameful Prisons Be Reformed?"
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