in 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne suggested that prison is a necessary but not entirely desirable social institution. He described prison as “the black flower of civilized society” and implied that prisons were durable weeds that refused to die. Over the past three decades, this black flower has proliferated in the United States as the country has built a carceral state that is unprecedented among Western countries and in U.S. history. Three features distinguish the U.S. carceral state: the sheer size of its prison and jail population; its reliance on harsh, degrading sanctions; and the persistence and centrality of the death penalty.

Nearly one in fifty people in the United States, excluding children and the elderly, is behind bars today. In a period dominated by calls to roll back the state in all areas of social and economic policy, we have witnessed a massive expansion of the state in the realm of penal policy. The U.S. incarceration rate has accelerated dramatically, increasing more than five-fold since 1973. Today a higher proportion of the adult population in the United States is behind bars than anywhere else in the world. The United States, with 5 percent of the world's population, has nearly a quarter of its prisoners. America's incarceration rate of 714 per 100,000 is five to twelve times the rate of Western European countries and Japan.