Prison "was never a tool to fight crime. It is an instrument to manage deprived and dishonored populations, which is quite a different task," says Loie Wacquant, a renowned ethnographer and social theorist who teaches at the University of California at Berkeley. Still, speaking by email, Wacquant warns that the journey between slavery and mass incarceration must include two other "peculiar" institutions created to define and confine Blacks: "Jim Crow and the urban ghetto." Now, he say?, "in the postCivil Rights era, the penal system has gradually been recast to mean Black-and increasingly. Latino."

"The explosive prison growth of the past 30 years didn't happen by accident, and it wasn't driven primarily by crime rates or broad social and economic forces beyond the reach of state government," according to a report by the PEW Center on the States entitled, "One in 31: The Long Reach of American Corrections." The report states, "It was the direct result of sentencing, release and other correctional policies that determine who goes to prison and how long they stay."

"I grew up with a father who was very conscious about the responsibility of the Black middle class to helping Black people in general," says Rev. Dr. [Madeline McClenney-Sadler], who calls herself an "abolitionist" She is founder of Exodus Foundation. Org, an organization that works to stop the flow of AfricanAmericans to prison. "It's not easy work. It means picking up the pieces and being family to people shipped to our states: being parents to the youth whose parents are incarcerated. As hokey as it sounds, it is all about love and the power of love to heal.

The shipment of flesh, the pipeline that nearly guarantees Black children go from the cradle to the prison; the insane profits made by warehousing human beings; the burden borne forever by those labeled as "convicts." " "The explosive prison growth of the past 30 years didn't happen by accident, and it wasn't driven primarily by crime rates or broad social and economic forces beyond the reach of state government," according to a report by the PEW Center on the States entitled, "One in 31:

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