Join the Department of Organizational Leadership and Learning on Friday, Feb 22nd from 12.30-2:00 pm to discuss In Our Backyard: How the Prison Boom Transformed America with Professor John Eason, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. Register here. For additional questions, contact Dr. Shaista Khilji or Dr. Sandra Davis.
""In Our Backyard" reframes the PIMBY (Please in My Backyard Yard) question by offering new theories of prison building using data on all US Census Places to investigate the mechanisms causing prison building along with the multiple/conflicting ways prisons impact the political economy of towns, counties, and states. By expanding the scope and scale of prison building, this book investigates one of the most pressing social problems of our times—prison proliferation— the widespread expansion of prisons by linking the legacy of slavery and racial violence of Jim Crow to the modern political economy of underdevelopment in the rural South. While the power of past systems of racial domination and violence are salient, they do not alone explain why the US tripled prison facilities. Instead, “In Our Backyard" will demonstrate how the rise of the rural ghetto—poverty, residential segregation, and stigma, born out of the historical legacy of racial violence, is the modern incarnation of racial oppression in the rural South—and provides a powerful impetus for prison building across the US. Ultimately, because we built our way into mass incarceration—the annual rate of 2 million plus US citizens being deprived of their freedom—we can solve many of our most pressing social problems like the spread of infectious disease through decarceration."
