State and local policies are key to understanding how to reduce prison populations. This anthology of critical and personal essays about the need to reform criminal justice policies that have led to mass incarceration provides a national perspective while remaining grounded in Michigan. Major components in this volume include a focus on current research on the impact of incarceration on minority groups, youth, and the mentally ill; and a focus on research on Michigan’s leadership in the area of reentry. Changes in policy will require a change in the public’s problematic images of incarcerated people. In this volume, academic research is combined with first-person narratives and paintings from people who have been directly affected by incarceration to allow readers to form more personal connections with those who face incarceration. At a time when much of the push to reduce prison populations is focused on the financial cost to states and cities, this book emphasizes the broader social and human costs of mass incarceration.

Lynn Orilla Scott is a retired Professor from James Madison College at Michigan State University who taught research writing classes on incarceration in the United States. She has published widely on the writing of James Baldwin and is a contributing editor to the James Baldwin Review.

Curtis Stokes is Professor of political theory and black politics in James Madison College at Michigan State University. He has edited and authored six books, including the award-winning Malcolm X’s Michigan Worldview: An Exemplar for Contemporary Black Studies and The State of Black Michigan, 1967–2007.