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651 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 6 (2014)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0651 and id is 1 raw text is: INTRODUCTION
Detaining
Democracy?
Criminal Justice
and American
Civic Life
By
VESLA M. WEAVER,
JACOB S. HACKER,
and
CHRISTOPHER WILDE MAN

Keywords: criminal justice; civic life; prison; citizen-
ship; mass incarceration; crime
l     e Mail Books to Prison. So reads the
sign adorning the window of a book-
shop tucked away in a struggling corner of
Trenton, New Jersey. It communicates the
obvious-an available service-but also some-
thing less innocuous: many of the shop's cus-
tomers    have  loved    ones   in  prison. It
communicates something else, too: the effects
of prison are not as distant from this troubled
neighborhood as the prison itself might be.
Following the opposite course of the books, the
effects of incarceration feed back into the com-
munities from which prisoners come and to
which most of them will return. In a nation
where the capacity to punish and surveil has
witnessed stunning expansion over the last gen-
eration, We Mail Books to Prison is a reminder
that the state's role as arbiter and enforcer of
criminal law now represents one of the most
powerful influences on the social and civic fab-
ric of communities across the nation, affecting
everything from the socialization of children to
the political participation of residents.
We live in the midst of what may be the most
visible and transformative government inter-
vention since the 1960s. The number of prison-
ers has multiplied fivefold in just 35 years. At
Vesla M. Weaver is an assistant professor of African
American studlies and political science at Yale University
and affiliated with the Institution for Social and Policy
Studies. Along with Jennifer Hochschild and Traci
Burch, she is the author of Creating a New Racial
Order: How Immigration, Multiracialism, Genomics,
and the Young Can Remake Race in America (Princeton
University Press 2012). She and Amy Lerman are
authors of Arresting Citizenship: The Democratic
Consequences of American Crime Control (University
of Chicago Press 2014).
DOI: 10.1177/0002716213504729

ANNALS, AAPSS, 651, January 2014

6

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