The book is about the many ways that mass incarceration has changed the social life of the city. The prison and policing and the courts, probation and parole have filtered into our most intimate relationships, changing how grandmothers, partners and children relate with one another. I try to trace those changes nationally, drawing from my research over the last decade and a half, and my own experiences as the son and brother of formerly incarcerated men. 

My hope is to change the conversation about the work mass incarceration does in the social world, and to think more carefully about the many ways that social life has been altered by our impulse to punish people we’re afraid of and people that we’ve thrown away.

45,000 laws and policies dictate where people with criminal records may live, work and with whom they may spend their time, shape their family dynamics and dictate which neighborhoods they must avoid. They compel them to participate in programming that would be voluntary for other Americans, and they restrict those same people from full participation in the political economy and culture. This doesn’t just affect the 2.3 million people held in a cage, but the 19.6 million Americans estimated to have a felony record—a full third of whom are black, almost all are poor. But this doesn’t stop at the threshold of the black family. Poor white men represent a third of the prison, and over a third of white men will be arrested by their 23rd birthday. Mass incarceration is an American problem, and the supervised society draws millions of Americans into its ambit.

Sociology gives me a language and a set of methods to ask questions about the larger operations of society and empirical tools to answer them. I was drawn to sociology because of the scholars I read—Loïc Wacquant, WEB DuBois, C Wright Mills, Barbara and Karen Fields. Sociology’s macro social focus allows me to connect the dots between my experiences caring for loved ones in and out of prison with changes in the larger political economy and culture and it helps me locate my fieldwork (reporting) and the narratives I’ve uncovered for my fellowship project within a broader history and set of social practices.