South Africa’s participation in the prison industrial complex constitutes a major impediment to the creation of a democratic society. In the United States, we have already felt the insidious and socially damaging effects of prison expansion. The dominant social expectation is that young black, Latino, Native American, and Southeast Asian men—and increasingly women as well—will move naturally from the free world into prison, where, it is assumed, they belong. Despite the important gains of antiracist social movements over the last half century, racism hides from view within institutional
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