“A truly indispensable book, especially for educators across the disciplines. One cannot understand America today without understanding the monstrosity that is the Prison Industrial Complex, and this slim volume helps readers not simply understand the PIC but feel righteous rage about it.”
—BAZ DREISINGER
Associate Professor of English, John Jay College of Criminal Justice; Founding Academic Director, Prison-to-College Pipeline; author, Incarceration Nations (2016)
“In his penetrating Prison Industrial Complex For Beginners, Dr. Peterson shines a bright and relentless spotlight on the social catastrophe that is America's sprawling criminal justice system. As only an educator with a deep and personal knowledge of their subject material can, Peterson topples the myths and reveals the racist machinery that lies at the heart of that system. For too long, liberals and conservatives alike have labored under the delusion that the Prison Industrial Complex—when they even acknowledge its existence—is merely an unfortunate accident of history. It's as if it were a sort of natural disaster that, despite our best intentions, we've wandered aimlessly into. In clear and persuasive writing, Dr. Peterson argues that the human-ravaging machinery of the carceral state is the result of deliberate and racist policy, developed and strengthened at every level of government. Prison Industrial Complex For Beginners is essential reading for anyone curious about the origins of the harrowing path we've walked and hungry for the sort of clarity needed to lead the way out.”
—GLENN E. MARTIN
JustLeadershipUSA
“Dr. James Braxton Peterson's Prison Industrial Complex For Beginners seamlessly patches together the complex development of the PIC, which is an overwhelming social and political force with many complicated causes and contributors. As a roadmap for understanding the United States' path to becoming known as Incarceration Nation, the book tracks why and how the US chose the road for implementing increasingly harsh punitive responses to crime instead of the route of embracing social solutions to address crime. Peterson's analysis illustrates how racism drove the choice to create and sustain a PIC that uses prisons for punishment and oppression as opposed to rehabilitation or social justice. By identifying policies related to the war on drugs, solitary confinement, life sentences for juveniles, exploitative inmate labor, prison privatization, as well as political verbiage that refers to prisoners as animals, Peterson's work highlights the dehumanization of people who are incarcerated as a central theme of American correctional policy.”
—CAITLIN J. TAYLOR
Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice La Salle University
“In a highly engaging and straightforward manner, James Peterson locates, narrates, and critiques the massive apparatus that is today's American carceral state—one that has contained more black bodies, and has ensnared more black lives, than at any other point in U.S. history. For scholars and lay readers alike, Peterson's book makes clear that our nation's staggering rate of incarceration is not rooted in a disinterested policy response to violence or crime, nor has it become just some “rite of passage” for black youth. In short, mass incarceration's origins are deeply rooted in our nation's racialized past and, as importantly, it is today but one part of a massive Prison Industrial Complex that serves very specific interests, devastates communities, and therefore must be dismantled.”
—HEATHER ANN THOMPSON
Historian, University of Michigan, and author, Blood in the Water: The Attica Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy (2016)