This book talks about the big business of prison building. It also disects the racist and unjust U.S legal system. ( )

Review from Amazon.com of second edition with the same title, published 11/1/15

The first edition of this superb book brilliantly deconstructed a gathering nightmare of state vengeance and oppression.
Now that we have social movements taking on the nightmare, it is profoundly important that Mark Lewis Taylor has updated and revised this book, a cry of the heart expounding a theology of the cross." --Gary Dorrien, Author of Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit and The New Abolition. "Mark Taylor correctly identifies mass incarceration as the logical result of a ruthless capitalist system that has impoverished and abandoned the poor, especially poor people of color. The bodies of the poor are surplus labor on the streets of our decrepit cities. But once these bodies are placed in cages they can generate $ 50,000 or $ 60,000 a year for the prison industrial complex where they are abused, tortured and exploited in a system of neoslavery. Taylor knows that reforms are useless. We are called as Christians to mobilize to destroy the predatory machine of corporate capital itself and liberate the captives." --Chris Hedges, Author of Wages of Rebellion

"After police brutality in Ferguson and in other cities, this courageous book, updated and expanded, is most timely and needed. It should be studied in churches, seminaries, and classrooms to help develop a counter-politics based on a prophetic reading of the way of the cross against American imperialism." --Kwok Pui-lan, Episcopal Divinity School
About the Author
Mark Lewis Taylor is the Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Theology and Culture at Princeton Theological Seminary. Among his numerous books are The Theological and the Political: On the Weight of the World (Fortress Press 2011), Religion, Politics, and the Christian Right: Post-9/11 Powers in American Empire (Fortress Press 2005), and Remembering Esperanza: A Cultural-Political Theology for North American Praxis (2005). ( )