First published in 1999, Marc Mauer’s Race to Incarcerate, a seminal work which explains the exponential growth of the U.S. prison system, has just been published as Race to Incarcerate: A Graphic Retelling.

Mauer collaborated with graphic artist Sabrina Jones to adapt and update the original text to produce a vivid and engaging comics narrative that chronicles four decades of prison expansion and its corrosive effect on generations of Americans and the implications for American democracy.

The United States’ rate of incarceration is the highest in the world. Why and how did this happen? Marc Mauer’s Race to Incarcerate,first published in 1999, has become an important text for understanding the growth of the US prison system and a canonical work for those active in the US criminal justice reform movement.

Now Sabrina Jones, a member of the World War 3 Illustrated collective and an author of politically engaged comics, has collaborated with Mauer to adapt and update the original book into a comics narrative, Race to Incarcerate: A Graphic Retelling, designed to reach new audiences. Listen here.

An Arizona Quaker group that has been advocating against prison privatization in the state is organizing a demonstration and press conference today, protesting the Corrections Corporation of America on its 30th anniversary.

Organizers of the rallies are protesting for-profit prisons around the country like CCA, because of problems including prisoner abuse, cost overruns, staffing problems, lawsuits, and violence.

The event features Grassroots Leadership's Kymberlie Quong Charles; Nicole Porter of The Sentencing Project; Isabel Garcia, Pima County Legal Defender and member of Derechos Humanos; and Alma Hernandez, a member of Fuerza! and Corazón de Tucson.

At the 2011 Princeton University conference "The Imprisonment of a Race," Danielle Pingue learned that nearly half of the 2.3 million people incarcerated in the United States are African Americans. The statistic startled the Princeton sophomore, igniting an interest in the criminal justice system that would later help define her senior thesis topic.

The conference “sparked something in me to research more," Pingue said.

Pingue spent a day with conference panelist, Marc Mauer, founder and executive director of The Sentencing Project in Washington, D.C.  She learned how policymakers and legislators use the nonprofit's research.

Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, discusses the racial disparity of convictions between black and white men in Wisconsin.  Listen here.