What's Prison For?

August 15, 2022
Former New York Times executive editor Keller debuts with a brisk and impassioned indictment of the U.S. prison system. Drawing on his experience at the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that investigates “the causes and consequences of mass incarceration,” Keller argues that “the American way of incarceration is a shameful waste of lives and money, feeding a pathological cycle of poverty, community dysfunction, crime, and hopelessness.” He shows how rehabilitation has been neglected, especially in the South, where Black prisoners became a source of unpaid labor after the Civil War, and compares American prisons to their foreign counterparts, noting that in Germany, prison staff are considered “less as jailors and more as therapists or social workers.” Keller also explains how “mass incarceration flows along the lines of social and economic inequality,” concentrating its effects “on low-income communities of color,” and contends that the privatization of the prison industry has allowed it to metastasize “into a large, little regulated, and often predatory industry of corrections services.” Among a handful of model reentry programs, Keller cites the Prison Entrepreneurship Program in Texas, which trains inmates in “the skills and attitudes necessary to start a business, or at least to find a secure foothold in an existing business.” Detailed and empathetic, this is an airtight case for reform.