Benjamin Weber with Moon-Ho Jung and Dan Berger

Tuesday December 12th, 2023 @ 7:00PM - 8:30 PM

Benjamin Weber discusses his new book American Purgatory: Prison Imperialism and the Rise of Mass Incarceration with authors Moon-Ho Jung and Dan Berger. The book is a groundbreaking look at how America exported mass incarceration around the globe, from a rising young historian.

In the explosive new book American Purgatory, historian Benjamin Weber reveals how the story of American prisons is inextricably linked to the expansion of American power around the globe. A vivid work of hidden history that spans the wars to subjugate Native Americans in the mid-nineteenth century, the conquest of the western territories, and the creation of an American empire in Panama, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, American Purgatory reveals how “prison imperialism”—the deliberate use of prisons to control restive, subject populations—is written into our national DNA, extending through to our modern era of mass incarceration. Weber also uncovers a surprisingly rich history of prison resistance, from the Seminole Chief Osceola to Assata Shakur—one that invites us to rethink the scope of America’s long freedom struggle.

Weber’s brilliantly documented text is supplemented by original maps highlighting the global geography of prison imperialism, as well as illustrations of key figures in this history by the celebrated artist Ayo Scott. For readers of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, here is a bold new effort to tell the full story of prisons and incarceration—at home and abroad—as well as a powerful future vision of a world without prisons.

Benjamin Weber is an assistant professor of African American and African Studies at the University of California, Davis. He has worked at the Vera Institute of Justice, Alternate ROOTS, the Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers Project, and as a public high school teacher in East Los Angeles. The author of American Purgatory (The New Press), he lives in Davis, California.

Moon-Ho Jung is Professor of History at the University of Washington and the author of Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation.

Dan Berger is professor of comparative ethnic studies and associate dean for faculty development and scholarship in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell. His book Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era won the 2015 James A. Rawley Prize. He lives in Seattle, WA.