This course will trace the historical origins of what has been called the United States’ ‘prison industrial complex,’ or the U.S. ‘carceral state’—that intricate and elusive web of relations between state and corporate power that currently holds over 2% of the U.S. population under correctional control (which includes prison, parole, and probation). In the five decades since the notorious New York state Rockefeller Drug Laws were passed in 1973, the United States has undergone an explosive growth in the number of prisons being built, and prisoners being locked up, unparalleled in world history. The trend of mandatory sentencing for drug-related crimes that began with the Rockefeller Laws has swelled the ranks of U.S. prisons with millions of non-violent offenders, some serving life sentences (among these many juveniles tried as adults), and the majority of whom are poor men and women of color. In more recent years, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has erected an architecture of detention and surveillance that has well over 200,000 people (many fleeing violent conflicts that have causal strands which tie back to U.S. foreign policy and intervention in the Americas during and after the Cold War) caught in its maw. While recent moves to decrease the number of people in cages for low-level non-violent drug offenses has dropped the U.S. from #1 to #6 on the list of countries with the highest per capita rates of incarceration, the U.S. still has the largest prison population overall in the world.

To understand the historical processes behind the rise of this carceral state we will explore a number of theories that seek to explain its origins and rise. These are not competing explanations per se, but varied ways of looking at the same complex phenomenon—one that is irreducible to a simple logic (i.e., ‘tough on crime’ laws, the state-corporate-prison nexus, etc.). We will examine a number of scholarly approaches to the problem of mass incarceration from different disciplinary perspectives, among them history, the law, public health, political science, and cultural geography. We will also interrogate a number of approaches taken to address the crisis from mainstream criminal justice reform, to calls for the abolition of police and prisons. You will end the course with a fuller and more nuanced understanding of one of the most pressing issues facing our society.

We will meet as a class weekly on Zoom to discuss readings, participate in small group work, and to give short presentations. Your presence and robust participation in our virtual meetings is an essential component of the course, and will help foster a sense of intellectual community that is essential to doing the rigorous scholarly work of thinking deeply and critically about our topic. We will also meet in-person 3-5 times throughout the course to build class community, for field trips, and to engage with guest speakers.

  UC Approved: History / Social Science     

About the Instructor

Jason Chang – College Prep School
Jason joined the history department at College Prep in 2021, and teaches ninth grade Asian Worlds and a senior seminar on the History of Capitalism. Before arriving at CPS, he taught for ten years at Bentley, where he covered topics that ranged from ninth grade world history to seminars on the prison industrial complex, the Cold War in a global context, the global revolutions of 1968, race in American legal history, the history of capitalism and slavery, and many others.

Originally from Berkeley, Jason obtained his BA in American Studies with a concentration in Ethnic Studies from UC Santa Cruz, and earned his PhD from the University of Michigan in American Studies, where his broad area of research focused on the intersecting histories of racial formation, capitalism, and empire. He is a passionate classroom teacher who believes deeply that having a strong historical understanding of the ways that race, gender, sex, class, ability, and other markers of difference and identity have shaped our present is a prerequisite for radically reimagining how we want our shared future to look. Whenever he has some down time, Jason loves nothing more than to read, eat delicious food, and cook.

NOTE: The following testimonials are from Jason’s previous BlendEd course Comparative Ethnic Studies.