Recommended

Glenn Loury, Race, Incarceration, and American Values (2008). The principal thesis of Loury's argument: "[W]e law-abiding, middle-class Americans have made decisions about social policy and incarceration, and we benefit from those decisions, and that means from a system of suffering, rooted in state violence, meted out at our request. We had choices and we decided to be more punitive. Our society--the society we have made--creates criminogenic conditions in our sprawling urban ghettos, and then acts out rituals of punishment against them as some awful form of human sacrifice."