The Business of Incarceration

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.

Justin Bronson Barringer is an independent scholar living and working in Little Rock, Arkansas. He is a coeditor of three books and of The Business of Modern Life Series.


Sarah F. Farmer is associate director of the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning. She is the author of Restorative Hope: Creating Pathways of Connection in Women's Prisons.


James W. McCarty is clinical assistant professor and director of the Tom Porter Religion and Conflict Transformation program at Boston University School of Theology. He is a coeditor of The Business of Modern Life Series.