Over two million people are now incarcerated in the U.S.- a four-fold increase since 1980. Why, with violent crime on the decrease, are prison rates rising so rapidly? The prison industry is now the second-largest employer in the U.S. after General Motors. In this issue of the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons, U.S. and Canadian authors speak from jail to the effects of the prison-industrial complex, and to the distorted social values that it both feeds and feeds upon.