Particularly in the United States, race has always played a central role in constructing presumptions of criminality. - Angela Davis

While jails and prisons have been dominant institutions for the control of men, mental institutions have served a similar purpose for women. That is, deviant men have been constructed as criminal, while deviant women have been constructed as insane.

The color line about which Du Bois spoke is not nearly as clear as it was at the time. Racialization processes are now far more complicated. Class is an important category to consider as it intersects with race and gender. The prominence of Black middle classes today combined with the putative eradication of racism within the legal sphere means that we have to think in a much more complicated way about the structures of racism and how they continue to inform US society. We need to develop an analysis that incorporates gender and class and sexuality, as well.

The prison has become a black hole inti which the detritus of contemporary capitalism is deposited. Mass imprisonment generates profits as it devours social wealth, and thus it tends to reproduce the very conditions that lead people to prison