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.

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, 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.

Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, was interviewed, along with Wisconsin State Sen. Lena Taylor, on NPR’s “Tell Me More” about why, according to a new study, African-American men in Wisconsin are incarcerated at a rate that's nearly twice the national average.  Listen here.