The Prison and the Gallows

Toward the end of my two-year stint teaching in Xian, China, in the 1980s, I thought I was inured to shocking scenes. And then I was shopping at the local outdoor produce market on a glorious sunny day in late spring when I heard a racket of loudspeakers. I looked up to see an aging flatbedded truck slowly winding its way through the crowded streets. In the back were about a half-dozen men with shaved, bowed heads, nondescript baggy uniforms, and blank faces. Watched over by crisply dressed police officers, each man slowly shuffled forward as his name was called. The blaring loudspeakers recited his alleged crimes and pronounced his sentence: death.

Over the previous months, my students had told me stories about witnessing executions at crowded outdoor stadiums. And Xian had been peppered with posters with big red X's scrawled across the mug shots of people rounded up in the “strike hard” campaign against crime, some for violations as egregious as petty larceny. Yet witnessing the punitive, unforgiving, and seemingly invincible arm of the state directly in action in the everyday setting of a bustling market deeply unsettled me.

After working for more than six years on this book about mass imprisonment in the United States, I remain similarly shocked and unsettled. The United States today has an incarcerated population that dwarfs that of China, a country that is several times larger and has at best only democratic aspirations and pretensions.