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.

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.

Legislation: Racial Impact Statement Legislation Advances
Federal Safety Valve Act
Research: Race Disparity in Marijuana Charges
Disproportionate Incarceration of Latino Youth
More Black Men in College than in Prison?
Policy: Interrupting the School-to-Prison Pipeline

Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, was interviewed by Mark Karlin of Truth-out.org in a wide-ranging conversation about how the United States became the world leader in incarceration and Mauer’s new book: "Race to Incarcerate: A Graphic Retelling." 

The conversation ranged from how people who are incarcerated had become “commodities,” the connection between incarceration the drug war and race, the role of the rapidly emerging for-profit prison industry in "filling beds," and how substantial funds spent on incarceration could be redirected to the communities most heavily affected by mass incarceration.