Understanding Mass Incarceration:

A People’s Guide to the Key Civil Rights Struggle of Our Time

By James Kilgore

Advance Praise for Understanding Mass Incarceration:

“This important polemic from Kilgore presents a grim picture of the U.S. criminal justice
system...With stunning statistics and heartbreaking stories, the book reveals how the system
prevents individuals and their families from moving beyond incarceration.”—Publishers Weekly

“Useful for anyone with a horse in the race regarding law enforcement— in other words, most
American citizens.”—Kirkus

“An excellent, much-needed introduction to the racial, political, and economic dimensions of
mass incarceration.”—Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow

Understanding Mass Incarceration offers the first comprehensive overview of the

incarceration system put in place by the world’s largest jailer: the United States.

Drawing on a growing body of work across activism and academia, Kilgore describes the many
competing theories of criminal justice—from rehabilitation to retribution, from restorative justice
to justice reinvestment. Understanding Mass Incarceration illuminates the difference between
prisons and jails, probation and parole, laying out key concepts and policies such as the Waron
Drugs, broken-windows policing, three-strikes sentencing, the school-to-prison pipeline,
recidivism, and prison privatization.

Breaking down precisely how mass incarceration has been a strategy to respond to inequality and
unemployment, Understanding Mass Incarceration explores the movement of resistance to the
practices of mass incarceration, as well as how mass incarceration was borne of opportunity and
fast, inadequate solutions.

Informed by the crucial lenses of race and gender, this book is an essential resource for those
engaged in criminal justice activism as well as readers newly exploring this social justice issue
that affects all of us.

James Kilgore is a writer, an educator, and a social justice activist who teaches and works at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He spent six years in prison, during which time he drafted
his three published novels. He lives with his family in Urbana, Illinois.

The New Press

Publication Date: September 1, 2015
• $17.95 • Paper • 288 pages • ISBN 978-1-62097-067-6