Prisons and jails seal people off from their communities; they are zones of isolation and containment. That's a common view, and one that Rashad Shabazz contests. He argues that prisons are in fact porous in a way that threatens the lives of many people living in poor neighborhoods and communities of color. Shabazz describes what he calls forced internal migration and the politics of HIV/AIDS.

Asylum seekers and migrants without papers are often arrested and taken to detention facilities purposely sited far from population centers -- and sometimes on remote islands. Alison Mountz discusses US, Australian, and other national policies to disperse and isolate detainees, often hiding their location from family members and potential advocates. She also describes efforts to find and assist detainees.

For those who reject police-and-prisons-dominated responses to violence, what's the alternative? Sujatha Baliga and Mia Mingus spoke about restorative and transformative justice at a recent symposium in Berkeley. Clarissa Rojas talked about feminism as an anti-imperialist project and about what she calls the medicalization of anti-violence work.

Should racial, sexual, and other forms of liberation be sought through legal change? Will enhanced criminalization, more hate crimes legislation, and demands for same-sex marriage get us to a just society? Dean Spade argues that these kinds of efforts distract and detract from efforts to achieve real racial and economic justice. He also suggests key elements of a critical trans politics.

If the problem is violence against women, is the solution the criminal justice system? Many anti-violence activists look to the police, prisons, and stepped-up criminalization for help and protection, but Beth Richie says that's a misguided approach, one that feeds the buildup of what she calls a prison nation. Richie describes the contours of the prison nation and the threats it poses to women on the margins.

What are the real reasons for this nation's unprecedented (in world history) boom in incarceration? Is the prison a tool to fight crime, or does it serve an entirely different purpose? And what about the notion of a prison-industrial complex: does that have any relation to reality? Loïc Wacquant analyzes the rise of the penal state in the context of sustained assaults on welfare and the collapse of the Black ghetto. (Encore presentation.)