Dan Berger, the University of North Carolina Press/Chapel Hill.
1 edition.
xiv, 402 pages ;
25 cm.
Justice, power, and politics
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Preface -- Abbreviations -- Introduction -- The jailhouse in freedom land -- America means prison -- George Jackson and the Black condition made visible -- The pedagogy of the prison -- Slavery and race-making on trial -- Prison nation -- Epilogue: choosing freedom -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Acknowledgments -- Index.
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In this pathbreaking book, Dan Berger offers a bold reconsideration of twentieth century black activism, the prison system, and the origins of mass incarceration. Throughout the civil rights era, black activists thrust the prison into public view, turning prisoners into symbols of racial oppression while arguing that confinement was an inescapable part of black life in the United States. Black prisoners became global political icons at a time when notions of race and nation were in flux. Showing that the prison was a central focus of the black radical imagination from the 1950s through the 1980s, Berger traces the dynamic and dramatic history of this political struggle.