Critical Prison Studies: Review of a Field

[...]prison history is American history, CPS scholars might say, echoing historians of African-America who proclaimed "Black history is U.S. history" to haul a related, marginalized subject out of the off-stage wings of academe—or something global such as "prison history is world history," as the field continues to elaborate its budding awareness of transnational currents.1 Despite the parade of shameful policies—"law and order" politics, ghettoes and suburbs, the supermax, the carceral city, militarized and broken windows policing—the book is fundamentally optimistic. The United States worked to place the logic of human rights at the foundation of the global institutions created after the war such as the United Nations and the World Bank, ensuring the individualism necessary for market capitalism and its hogtied version of democracy. Berger also explores the synergy between this and gender-based social movements, as feminist and gay activists theorized their shared vulnerability to state violence, and coalitions developed around prominent cases of female political prisoners and struggles over prison conditions including rape of gay-identified men. Jen Manion, Liberty's Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). Because I reviewed this book for the JAH, the book review editors and I did not include it in this review essay. 3.