
Since the turn of the 21st century, a growing number of activists and scholars have sounded the alarm about the scope of mass incarceration and its relationship to a range of racially targeted punitive practices in the United States. What are the costs of the rise of the carceral polity—to citizens and immigrants who may have committed no crime, to civil society, to the state, and to the possibility of democracy itself? This essay approaches these questions by considering what the idea of reparations contributes to recent discussions of the interrelation of race, punishment, and democracy; and it explores how addressing questions about policing and prisons challenges and enhances arguments for reparations.