About this item
Prison Industrial Complex For Beginners is a graphic narrative project that attempts to distill the fundamental components of what scholars, activists, and artists have identified as 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.
About the Author
James Braxton Peterson, Ph.D. is a writer, educator and consultant. He is a columnist for the Philadelphia Citizen and the author of several books, including: The Hip Hop Underground and African American Culture, Prison Industrial Complex for Beginners and Hip-Hop Headphones: A Scholar's Critical Playlist. He has written for Fortune.com, Newsweek.com, The Guardian, The LA Times, Reuters, The Huffington Post, The Daily Beast and The Grio. Dr. Peterson is also a professional wordsmith who has ghostwritten and edited projects for a variety of individuals and corporate entities across a wide spectrum of professions.
