Every year between 1998 to 2020 except one, Louisiana had the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the nation and thus the world. Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana (UNC Press) is the first book to track the multiscalar formation and contestation of the Louisiana carceral state. Through extensive research, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs illuminates how policy makers enlarged Louisiana’s carceral infrastructures with new prisons and jail expansions alongside the bulking up of police and prosecutorial power. Understanding Louisiana’s carceral crisis extends our understanding of the interplay between the crises of mass criminalization and racial capitalism while highlighting the conditions of possibility for dismantling carceral power in all its forms.

Lydia Pelot-Hobbs is an Assistant Professor of Geography and African American & Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky where she teaches and researches on the carceral state, racial capitalism, and grassroots social movements. She is the author of Prison Capital: Mass Incarceration and Struggles for Abolition Democracy in Louisiana (UNC Press) and co-editor of The Jail Is Everywhere: Organizing Against the New Geography of Mass Incarceration (Verso Books).