In the waning years of the Clinton presidency, academics began their deep dive into the nation's prison crisis. Reflecting on the period between the late 1960s and the dawn of the twenty-first century, scholars across the academy, from epidemiology to geography, examined prisons and the behemoth “prison industrial complex.” There has been no shortage of deep insights gleaned from these works. So much is to be understood from studying prisons because these institutions are, as Michel Foucault argued in his widely read and often-cited study of punishment and the birth of the prison in France, wedded to the social fabric of modern life; they are museums of power/knowledge, discipline, and punishment, whose impact bleeds beyond the walls and wire fencing that surround them (Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison [1995]).
Historian Robert T. Chase of Stony Brook University has contributed new research to this field of...
