Special Issues: "Historians and the Carceral State" (June 2015)
The United States holds the world's largest prison population, caging more humans than any other nation on earth. In a situation that is not only internationally unparalleled but also historically unprecedented, every day more than 2 million people are barred somewhere within this nation's vast archipelago of prisons, jails, and immigrant detention centers. The June 2015 issue of the Journal of American History featured 14 articles by leading scholars engaging with the history of mass incarceration in the United States. This issue is freely available to the public.
- Introduction: Constructing the Carceral State by Kelly Lytle Hernández, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, and Heather Ann Thompson
- African American Women, Mass Incarceration, and the Politics of Protection by Kali Nicole Gross
- Less Crime, More Punishment: Violence, Race, and Criminal Justice in Early Twentieth-Century America by Jeffrey S. Adler
- Youth of Color and California's Carceral State: The Fred C. Nelles Youth Correctional Facility by Miroslava Chávez-García
- Queer Law and Order: Sex, Criminality, and Policing in the Late Twentieth-Century United States by Timothy Stewart-Winter
- We Are Not Slaves: Rethinking the Rise of Carceral States through the Lens of the Prisoners' Rights Movement by Robert T. Chase
- Guns and Butter: The Welfare State, the Carceral State, and the Politics of Exclusion in the Postwar United States by Julilly Kohler-Hausmann
- “A War within Our Own Boundaries”: Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and the Rise of the Carceral State by Elizabeth Hinton
- Flocatex and the Fiscal Limits of Mass Incarceration: Toward a New Political Economy of the Postwar Carceral State by Alex Lichtenstein
- Impossible Criminals: The Suburban Imperatives of America's War on Drugs by Matthew D. Lassiter
- Deportability and the Carceral State by Torrie Hester
- Objects of Police History by Micol Seigel
- Crack in Los Angeles: Crisis, Militarization, and Black Response to the Late Twentieth-Century War on Drugs by Donna Murch
- The Unintended Consequences of the Carceral State: Chicana/o Political Mobilization in Post–World War II America by Edward J. Escobar
Additional digital content relating to these articles and to the history of the American carceral state, including conversations with the issue's contributing editors and authors, is available at the JAH's blog Process.
