Professor Jeff Baker's Book Chapter "Legal Foundations of the Business of Incarceration" Published in The Business of Incarceration: Theological and Ethical Reflections on the Prison-Industrial Complex
Professor Jeffrey R. Baker has contributed the chapter "Legal Foundations of the Business of Incarceration" to the newly published book, The Business of Incarceration: Theological and Ethical Reflections on the Prison-Industrial Complex. The book is a collection of essays addressing mass incarceration, capitalism, and pressures of profit on human dignity and justice in the criminal legal system. Professor Baker's chapter identifies the broad policy decisions and narrow discretionary choices that drive mass incarceration and through which governments and private companies extract profit from the bodies and labor of the people the state imprisons.
Description of The Business of Incarceration: Theological and Ethical Reflections on the Prison-Industrial Complex
There has been perhaps no political issue in contemporary America able to garner as widespread agreement as the need to end our system of mass incarceration. Racial justice advocates, fiscal conservatives, prison abolitionists, and more believe that America incarcerates far too many of its people. This book provides tools for Christians seeking to understand this massive social injustice, its theological and historical origins, and faithful ways of resisting and ending this system. The Business of Incarceration places the political-economic system that is the prison-industrial complex at the center of the story it tells, the analysis it provides, and the engagement it recommends. The second volume in The Business of Modern Life series, this book extends the groundbreaking theo-ethical analysis in The Business of War: Theological and Ethical Reflections on the Military-Industrial Complex to another social sphere that is supposedly oriented to the common good but is now dominated by logics of market and profit-making.
Additional information may be found at Wipf and Stock Publishers