Politics & Prose at Busboys and Poets, Brookland, presents James Kilgore to discuss his new book Understanding Mass Incarceration: A People's Guide to the Key Civil Rights Struggle of Our Time.
Once the “land of the free,” today the U.S. is the world’s largest jailer. Over the last 40 years, as Kilgore, author of We Are All Zimbabweans Now, documents in this well-illustrated People’s Guide, the country has witnessed an explosive growth in prison populations, especially of minorities and the poor. Seeking explanations for these demographics, Kilgore, a student activist and former SLA member who lived in South Africa for 27 years until his extradition and imprisonment in the U.S., combines history, economics, statistics, and prisoners’ own stories to show how the criminal justice system has been used to try to resolve issues of racial conflict, inequality, citizenship, gender and sexuality.
Kilgore will be in conversation with Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project.
