Brandon Hasbrouck Publishes “Prisons as Laboratories of Antidemocracy” in the Yale Law Journal The article reviews Jeffrey Bellin’s "Mass Incarceration Nation" while analyzing the ways in which techniques for constraining incarcerated persons have been deployed outside prison walls.

By Law Communications
August 8, 2024

Washington and Lee law professor Brandon Hasbrouck has published an article in the Yale Law Journal. The article, “Prisons as Laboratories of Antidemocracy,” serves as both a review of Jeffrey Bellin’s book “Mass Incarceration Nation” and an examination of the ways in which various antidemocratic policies first tested in American prisons–including antilabor practices, censorship, and restrictions on bodily autonomy–have been deployed outside prison walls.

“Prisons are woefully ineffective as tools to protect society from violence and exploitation, yet America’s prison population exploded in the twentieth century. On the outside, this devastated Black communities, Black opportunities, Black economic power, and Black voting power. Yet a similarly insidious development came from inside prison walls: prison administrators honed antidemocratic techniques for constraining and oppressing incarcerated persons, techniques that would later be deployed against the ostensibly free population. Jeffrey Bellin’s “Mass Incarceration Nation” provides a robust analysis of the ways state and federal policies have combined to create an explosion in the scope of American prisons in the late twentieth century. This Book Review explores how prisons have served as laboratories of antidemocracy to perfect tactics to suppress access to information, protest, and bodily autonomy,” writes Hasbrouck.

The full article is available on the Yale Law Journal website.

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