picture of a baby in a prison uniform with a noose wrapped in a circle of barbed wire

Prison Industrial Complex for Beginners

by For Beginners Author, John Jennings Author, James Braxton Peterson Author and Stacey Robinson Author

Prison Industrial Complex For Beginners is a graphic narrative project that attempts to distill the fundamental components of the Mass Incarceration movement in the United States. Since the early 1990s, activist critics of the US prison system have marked its emergence as a “complex” in a manner comparable to how President Eisenhower described the Military Industrial Complex. Like its institutional “cousin,” the Prison Industrial Complex features a critical combination of political ideology, far-reaching federal policy, and the neo-liberal directive to privatize institutions traditionally within the purview of the government. The result is that corporations have capital incentives to capture and contain human bodies. Prison Industrial Complex For Beginners is a primer for how these issues emerged, and how we may yet address them. (Short Discount)