Summary Of Promise Of The Prison By Joan Didion

In Joan Didion’s excerpt ‘The Promise of the Prison’, from The People and Promises of California, Didion talks about California and the hopes residents were instilled by the building of prisons. The prisons being built were going to provide protection and a substantial amount of job opportunities for residents. Didion mentioned that by the year 2000 California had over “33 penitentiaries and 162,000 inmates,the largest in the western hemisphere.” This number has increased since then not just in California but all over the United States; this accounts for twenty-two percent of the world’s prison population. California’s prisons are overpopulated and exceed the expected capacity of inmates that should be housed.

Mass incarceration is a relatively