James Braxton Peterson. Illustrated by John Jennings.

Prison Industrial Complex For Beginners is a graphic narrative project that attempts to distill the fundamental components of what scholars, activists, and artists have identified as the Mass Incarceration movement in the United States. As far back as the early 1990s, activist critics of the US prison system, marked its emergence as a “complex” in a manner comparable to how President Eisenhower identified modern developments in military contractual arrangements and the monetary incentives that were poised to over-determine the ethics of warfare and the purpose of arms development – the Military Industrial Complex. Like its institutional “cousin,” the Prison Industrial Complex features a critical combination of political ideology, far-reaching federal policy, and the neo-liberal directive to privatize institutions traditionally within the purview of the government.