Melanie D. Newport

Melanie D. Newport is associate professor of history at the University of Connecticut. She is author of This Is My Jail: Local Politics and the Rise of Mass Incarceration. Newport is a series editor for University of Chicago Press’s Chicago Visions and Revisions series and coeditor of The Cambridge Companion to American Carceral History. Author photograph © Kathryn Deane.


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Writing on Public Books

Slavery Is Not a Metaphor: Rethinking Mass Incarceration with John Bardes

In the aftermath of the American Revolution, slaveholders in the South were thinking about what a prison should look like for a society that was economically and socially dependent on slavery.