Few social dynamics have altered the landscape of communities in the United States as profoundly as the buildup of a Prison Nation and the expansion of the carceral state. In this article, we will use the terms "carceral expansion," "carceral state," and "buildup of a Prison Nation" interchangeably. As the discussion will show, these concepts refer to the ways that ideology, economic policy, and legal/legislative initiatives have supported the growth of legal apparatuses associated with punishment. We have witnessed dramatic shifts in how this country understands, uses, responds to, and, in some sense, creates "crime" in contemporary society, from massive financial investments in law enforcement and surveillance technology; the amplification of deep ideological commitments to retributive justice; aggressive punishment regimes (including preemptive arrests); the swell in the number of the facilities that imprison over 7 million people (for longer periods of time, in harsher conditions) to the co-optation of major reform efforts, these shifts are comprehensive and welldocumented. The impact of this shift affects the communities that have been the focus of social work attention for decades; those that have been the most disadvantaged by historical patterns of discrimination and social policies of exclusion. Scholars, legal theorists, and community activists have used various conceptual frames to characterize this expansion of the carceral state. Included among those widely used and which have made it into professional discourse are the "prison industrial complex," "mass incarceration or imprisonment," and "hyper-criminalization." While there are slight distinctions between these concepts, there are three core elements of carceral expansion that are generally agreed upon. First is the critical understanding that the buildup of a Prison Nation does not correspond, necessarily, to changes in patterns of crime. That is, the investment in responses to crime does not correspond to actual shifts in what is considered "illegal behavior," and in some eras, we have seen crime rates go down but the allocation of resources to punishment go up. This inconsistency is important because it helps to show how carcerality actually operates as a set of political commitments that are independent from data about actual occurrences of lawbreaking. Similarly, responses

The movements for racial justice, health equity, and economic relief have been activated in the contentious and challenging climate of 2020, with COVID-19 and social protest. In this context, feminist scholars, anti-violence advocates, and transformative justice practitioners have renewed their call for substantive changes to all forms of gender-based violence. This article offers a genealogy of the battered women’s movement in the U.S. from the lived experiences of two longtime activists. These reflections offer an analysis of the political praxis which evolved over the past half century of the anti-violence movement, and which has foregrounded the current social, political, and ideological framing of gender-based violence today. We conclude with a view to the future, focusing on the possibilities for transformative justice and abolition feminism as a return to our radical roots and ancestral histories.

This review considers a range of literature that contributes to a critical conversation encompassing radical opposition to the Carceral State and its logics, practices, and technologies. The carceral concept has been adopted and applied to multiple areas of the social world. With few exceptions, the term “Carceral State” has been used by many scholars without a comprehensive or agreed definition of the concept. This review is an attempt to piece together various pieces of literature that offer theoretical explorations of mass incarceration, as well as, how punishment and the logics of prison have informed economic, political, and social landscapes, compromising what has been identified by many scholars as a Carceral State.

Mass incarceration of minorities has generated alarming attention. This concern is a result of the massive social injustice perpetrated by the ideologies that force mental and physical imprisonment on the poor. The outcome of this social injustice generates punitive inequalities that become entrenched in US social experiences. Once incarcerated, an individual carries a permanent label that brands him/ her as an eternal 'criminal' and deactivates him/her from mainstream society. This translates into exclusion from responsible educational and occupational participation. Disadvantaged members of minority groups caught in this unforgiving social imprisonment often turn to the underground economy, which, unfortunately, increases the possibility of arrest, or re-arrest. The imprisoning ideology that stereotypes the disadvantaged community, leads to increased incarceration, hypersegregation, social abandonment, and creates a theater for venomous law enforcement practices. The impact of mass incarceration and the ideologies that sustain them on disadvantaged minority communities is the focus of this examination.

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