The United States imprisons more people per capita than any comparable society, past or present. It is alone among advanced countries in putting its citizens to death, in commonly sentencing prisoners to life without the possibility of parole, in its use of solitary confinement, and in annually killing hundreds of civilians in police encounters.

For the richest society in world history, these are staggering facts.

Conventionally, mass incarceration is explained by reference to the right-wing turn in American politics — to a revanchist, Nixon- and then Reagan-led revolution in criminal justice. Leading accounts, notably Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, argue that this punitive turn reestablished a system of social control over black Americans that had been challenged by the Great Migration and the civil rights movement. In Alexander’s account, a white and mainly Southern elite overturned black gains by means of mass incarceration and policing. Others, noting that rich African Americans have mostly escaped this disciplinary trend, have argued that the objects of social control are not black Americans in general but the poor in particular.