Joshua A. Miller – “The new issue (vol. 23, no. 1) is devoted to a single symposium on the intersection of mass incarceration and democracy. It’s available on Project MUSE for institutional subscribers, and on JSTOR, where all the articles will be open access for the next two months

• Albert Dzur introduces the issue in “Penal Democracy.” Many of the authors responded to his account of the mistake in believing we incarcerate large numbers of people because democratic polities have chosen more punitive laws in Punishment, Participatory Democracy, and the Jury.
• Bernard Harcourt discusses Foucault, Tocqueville, and the political temporality of prisons in “The Invisibility of Prisons in Democratic Theory.”
• Rebecca Thorpe articulates the atrocious economic geography of white rural prison sites and black urban prisoners in “Urban Divestment, Rural Decline and the Politics of Mass Incarceration.”
• Richard Dagger asks if there’s a just explanation for excessive incarceration (spoiler alert: there isn’t) in “Playing Fair with Imprisonment.”
• Christopher Bennett analyzes the problem of expertise-driven incarceration and calls for common ownership of the procedures of incarceration in “What is the Core Normative Argument for Greater Democracy in Criminal Justice?”
• Lynne Copson defends utopian thinking against the supposed pressures of penal pragmatism in “Penal Populism and Mass Incarceration: The Promise of Utopian Thinking.”
• David Green criticizes politician’s efforts to combine tough-on-crime rhetoric with ameliorative policies in “Penal Populism and the Folly of ‘Doing Good by Stealth.’”
• Liz Turner criticizes the foundation of “penal populism” in the construction of non-deliberative public opinion in demographic polling in “Penal Populism, Deliberative Methods, and the Production of ‘Public Opinion on Crime and Punishment.”
• Elizabeth Anderson summarizes the current state of affairs for large classes of people from whom the state has withdrawn the protection and benefit of law, which is the problem of extrajudicial punishments and status crimes in “Outlaws.”
• Ian Loader and Richard Sparks summarize the findings of these papers and offer a useful way forward in “Beyond Mass Incarceration?”