I hate Adam Gopnik.
Championed most effectively by Angela Y. Davis’s “Are Prisons Obsolete?” (2003), the cause may seem no more realistic than the defund-the-police movement that sang so loudly four years ago, at a cost to progressive candidates.
Indeed, in a political moment like this one, worrying about the niceties of progressive reform at all may appear as self-distracting as a beachgoer worrying about sandcastle architecture as the sea pulls back on the brink of a tsunami.
Oh, fuck you.
It is also Du Boisian, it must be said, in the way that it gravitates toward class and economic explanations for phenomena not always well suited to them. Davis and others insist that the real villain of mass incarceration in the U.S. must be late capitalism or neoliberalism. In truth, we could empty our prisons tomorrow, and Apple and Google and Amazon and the rest atop the high heap of American enterprise would scarcely notice.
Writer for magazine whose logo is a fop with a monocle really hates class reductionism for some reason
Products from prison labor may slip into the supply lines, but corporations, as a rule, would prefer that they didn’t, since this results in more bad publicity than profit. Inmate labor tends to be done in the service of prisons themselves or government clients like state D.M.V.s. (There’s also the private-prison business, but it’s a shrinking one and houses a small fraction of the incarcerated population.)
The free market would never allow slave labor! 
And, hey, did you know that private prisons are irrelevant because they don’t have the market valuation that Apple does?
There are, in any event, a great many free-market countries in the world, and very few are marked by overstuffed prisons. Mass incarceration remains a distinctively American problem. On the other hand, plenty of anti-capitalist societies have turned to mass incarceration—we speak of the “American Gulag” in honor of another, and nobody looks to Pyongyang for models of penal enlightenment.
There are more incarcerated people per capita in the United States than there were in any non-WWII portion of the gulag’s existence. And those incarcerated have a lower life expectancy. (Right? I need help verifying this; I think it’s a combination of two studies rather than a single unified study.) EDIT: See this post by @[email protected]
Pre-capitalist societies lacked mass imprisonment, but then—what with all the beheadings, beatings, and banishments—the people they considered criminals weren’t around long enough to be imprisoned.
As usual, the experiences and practices in indigenous cultures are ignored, because the arc of history is a semicircle that only includes Europe. 
Sered’s points are sometimes vitiated by the weight of her pieties; her prose suggests someone constantly looking over her shoulder, like a driver going well below the speed limit but still glancing back nervously in fear of a traffic stop, or, anyway, reproach from a captious political ally. What sin might this next sentence commit?
Any problems with the prose of this book must be because of cancel culture!
. . .
Reminder that Adam Gopnik wrote a book about how sad he is that his daughter has better politics than he does. : “A specter is haunting the straight white liberal sixtysomething American dad—the specter of his damn socialist kids. A generation that grew up eating Cold War propaganda with their cornflakes confronts one in which socialism regularly outpolls capitalism, and it’s happening across the breakfast table. New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik’s new book, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism, is a manual for the dad side, a work of rousing reassurance for open-minded men who are nonetheless sick of losing political debates to teenagers whose meals they buy.”