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Over the past four decades, the U.S. prison population has sky-rocketed-jumping from about 250, 000 in the early 1970s to more than 2.3 million today-so that now, the country's incarceration rate towers above that of every other country in the world.
The story of how this hap-pened-and the effects it has had-has been told by a number of prominent writers and filmmak-ers in recent years, from Michelle Alexander in The Nov Jim Crow to Eugene Jarecki in the documen-tary "The House I Live In." But a new book imagines the history of mass incarceration in an entirely new way-as a graphic novel.
Race to Incarcerate: A Graphic Retelling is an adaptation of Marc Mauer's seminal 1999 work by the same name, and uses text and il-lustrations by political cartoonist Sabrina Jones to explain how the United States became the global leader in incarceration and to Prison, highlight the impact on commu-nities of color.
Mauer, who is executive direc-tor of The Sentencing Project and widely considered one of the coun-try's leading experts on the criminal justice system, says the idea for the graphic novel came from a prisoner...