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Michael Javen Fortner is assistant professor and academic director of Urban Studies at the Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies at the City University of New York. He is the author of Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment.
Mass incarceration is so politicized that we can't talk about its origins.
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For National Poetry Month, sign up for our newsletter and get a digital copy of our out-of-print chapbook Poems for Political Disaster.