The stern edifices and high security control of penal enclosure seem, in many ways, antithetical to the promises of any American dream of freedom, opportunity and even new beginnings. Yet, a staggering investment of more than $36 billion annually in the construction of prisons and the care of prisoners and the sheer human “storage” of nearly 2 million men and women in jail suggests prisons nonetheless have become central features of early twenty-first century American culture. Indeed, rates of imprisonment in the US are higher than any country except Russia and far exceed rates that preceded the Second World War. This has stimulated intense debates over the nature of crime and control (including capital punishment and its efficacy or juvenile justice and gangs), divisions of race and class that are reified by this system and the meaning and rights of prisoners within American life. At the same time, prisons have also become businesses, whether as private investments, outsourced by governments or as vital components of the economies of depressed localities competing for new construction and jobs.

American prisons have emerged from a variety of jurisdictions and philosophies.

Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary, for example, incorporated Quaker reflection and individual solitude into a panoptic model. Other prisons represented the needs of small towns and burgeoning industrial states as well as military and federal security.

Some names became legendary in history as well as mass media—Sing Sing, Leavenworth, Alcatraz, Attica.

Such mass imprisonment has not been shown to have a clear causal relationship with reduced crime. Yet, prisons also reflect attitudes about crime, especially given demographic and ideological shifts in American cities and society since the 1960s. Rules imposed for the drug wars—“three strikes and you’re out”—have resulted in mandatory sentences for the accumulation of minor offenses that have clogged prisons. Critics have argued that minor possession and sales offenses focused on crack have also fallen especially hard on minority populations. African American males in major cities face high probabilities of arrest and imprisonment that scar generations—between 1986 and 1995, the number of African Americans convicted of drug offenses rose 811 percent.

Here, we must also worry that prisons reproduce crime—60 percent of those released will be back in three years.

Prisoners have also constituted an awkward category in American society—deprived of rights for voting, gun ownership, etc. even after release, depending on state laws.

Federal decisions in the 1970s increased rights of education, legal counsel and activities for prisoners and forced reform of outmoded, overcrowded and unsanitary jails. Supreme Court decisions at the end of the twentieth century allowed states to curtail these rights.

Moreover, as prisons become private corporations, efficiency and cost-effectiveness replace rights.

Many in America realize that prisons do not work to curtail crime, which has declined in conjunction with economic growth. Yet, as a decentered system embodying competing political, social and cultural interests, it is not clear if prisons can be readily changed to participate in rather than reject the American dream.