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651 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 6 (2014)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0651 and id is 1 raw text is: INTRODUCTION Detaining Democracy? Criminal Justice and American Civic Life By VESLA M. WEAVER, JACOB S. HACKER, and CHRISTOPHER WILDE MAN Keywords: criminal justice; civic life; prison; citizen- ship; mass incarceration; crime l e Mail Books to Prison. So reads the sign adorning the window of a book- shop tucked away in a struggling corner of Trenton, New Jersey. It communicates the obvious-an available service-but also some- thing less innocuous: many of the shop's cus- tomers have loved ones in prison. It communicates something else, too: the effects of prison are not as distant from this troubled neighborhood as the prison itself might be. Following the opposite course of the books, the effects of incarceration feed back into the com- munities from which prisoners come and to which most of them will return. In a nation where the capacity to punish and surveil has witnessed stunning expansion over the last gen- eration, We Mail Books to Prison is a reminder that the state's role as arbiter and enforcer of criminal law now represents one of the most powerful influences on the social and civic fab- ric of communities across the nation, affecting everything from the socialization of children to the political participation of residents. We live in the midst of what may be the most visible and transformative government inter- vention since the 1960s. The number of prison- ers has multiplied fivefold in just 35 years. At Vesla M. Weaver is an assistant professor of African American studlies and political science at Yale University and affiliated with the Institution for Social and Policy Studies. Along with Jennifer Hochschild and Traci Burch, she is the author of Creating a New Racial Order: How Immigration, Multiracialism, Genomics, and the Young Can Remake Race in America (Princeton University Press 2012). She and Amy Lerman are authors of Arresting Citizenship: The Democratic Consequences of American Crime Control (University of Chicago Press 2014). DOI: 10.1177/0002716213504729 ANNALS, AAPSS, 651, January 2014 6