American Purgatory
Prison Imperialism and the Rise of Mass Incarceration
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A groundbreaking look at how America exported mass incarceration around the globe, from a rising young historian
“American Purgatory will forever change how we understand the rise of mass incarceration. It will forever change how we understand this country.” —Clint Smith, bestselling author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
In this explosive new book, historian Benjamin Weber reveals how the story of American prisons is inextricably linked to the expansion of American power around the globe.
A vivid work of hidden history that spans the wars to subjugate Native Americans in the mid-nineteenth century, the conquest of the western territories, and the creation of an American empire in Panama, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, American Purgatory reveals how “prison imperialism”—the deliberate use of prisons to control restive, subject populations—is written into our national DNA, extending through to our modern era of mass incarceration. Weber also uncovers a surprisingly rich history of prison resistance, from the Seminole Chief Osceola to Assata Shakur—one that invites us to rethink the scope of America’s long freedom struggle.
Weber’s brilliantly documented text is supplemented by original maps highlighting the global geography of prison imperialism, as well as illustrations of key figures in this history by the celebrated artist Ayo Scott. For readers of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, here is a bold new effort to tell the full story of prisons and incarceration—at home and abroad—as well as a powerful future vision of a world without prisons.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Weber connects the histories of mass incarceration and American imperialism in his wide-ranging and innovative debut. Noting that in the 19th century, the connection between America's domestic treatment of Black and Native residents and the nation's imperialism abroad was already clear (after Reconstruction, "many Black newspapers began increasingly to equate the denial of rights and white violence in the United States to a form of colonial rule itself"), he highlights how modern mass incarceration has its origins in the late 19th– and early 20th–century penal colonies founded during the U.S. occupations of the Philippines and Panama, and during the ongoing domestic Indian Wars. Fighters who resisted imperial rule were separated from their communities and interned in open-air prisons, such as Iwahig Penal Colony on the Philippine island of Palawan, which held Filipino rebels, and McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary off the coast of Washington State, which held Black, Native, Mexican, and white immigrant radicals. Weber traces other lines of connection between mass incarceration and imperialism, such as the post-Reconstruction South's convict labor system designed to bring Black men back into forced servitude, which was later exported to Panama. Throughout, Weber shows how these methods of incarceration traversed the border in unexpected ways, making a clear case for seeing them as part of one continuous project. It's an eye-opening and fresh perspective on a pair of hot-button issues.