"Prisons Make Us Safer" And 20 Other Myths about Mass Incarceration

In the United States—the nation holding only five percent of the world’s people yet nearly a quarter of its prisoners—journalist Victoria Law pulverizes comforting myths in “Prisons Make Us Safer” and 20 Other Myths about Mass Incarceration. She traces a scorching timeline from the post-Civil War Black Codes, which herded newly freed Black citizens back into forced labor, to the fear-laden 1980s War on Drugs that still scars urban streets, showing how racism and social control inflated the prison population by a staggering 500 percent in just forty years. Law’s interviews with incarcerated mothers, fathers, and youth puncture claims that private prisons or “broken systems” alone drive mass caging; instead, she exposes a web that links underfunded schools to courtrooms and cells, demanding urgent Criminal-Justice Reform and Racial Justice. Educators, faith leaders, and students receive accessible talking points, data snapshots, and abolition-minded action steps that can turn classroom debates or pulpit sermons into community campaigns. Will we keep trusting cages to solve poverty and addiction, or confront the hard work of building real safety together? Lift the bars of misconception—click to learn more and join the movement to end mass incarceration.