In early 2012, the literary journal n+1 plunged headfirst into the Occupy Wall Street era with a six-thousand-word article entitled “Raise the Crime Rate.” Written by Christopher Glazek, the essay attracted modest attention at the time but would go on to become an influential provocation.

The editorial was a bold call for a progressive movement to radically switch gears from prioritizing “health care, abortion, gay rights, early education, progressive taxation, and any number of other worthy objectives” to instead abolishing the US prison system. Glazek backs this up by describing the unacceptable barbarism of prison life in America, shocking readers with horrific examples of the mass rape, beatings, and solitary confinement endemic to incarceration.

Glazek’s argument is that the relatively low level of crime in America from the late 1990s on was achieved by simply displacing that crime from civil society to the unfree shadow world of the seven million Americans who live under the direct control or surveillance of the correctional system.