Merging the evocative power of poetry with scholarly research, this text provides both a critique of the prison industrial complex and a method of qualitative research. Based on 10 years of teaching in, writing about and protesting at prisons across America, the author weaves together the hopes of prisoners, their families and friends, with the stories of activist communities struggling against the death penalty, the war on drugs and a culture that treats prisoners as commodities. Containing material from philosophers, poets and historians, the book uses the power of ethnographic poetry to give voice to the hopes and horrors of a generation confronted by the mass-production of criminality.