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Built in the 1890s at the center of the nation, Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary was designed specifically to be a replica of the US Capitol Building. But why? The Prison of Democracy explains the political significance of a prison built to mimic one of America’s monuments to democracy. Locating Leavenworth in memory, history, and law, the prison geographically sits at the borders of Indian Territory (1825–1854) and Bleeding Kansas (1854–1864), both sites of contestation over slavery and freedom. Author Sara M. Benson argues that Leavenworth reshaped the design of punishment in America by gradually normalizing state-inflicted violence against citizens. Leavenworth’s peculiar architecture illustrates the real roots of mass incarceration—as an explicitly race- and nation-building system that has been ingrained in the very fabric of US history rather than as part of a recent post-war racial history. The book sheds light on the truth of the painful relationship between the carceral state and democracy in the US—a relationship that thrives to this day.  

Sara M. Benson is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at San Jose State University and teaches at Oakes College at the University of California, Santa Cruz. 

"Sara Benson’s brilliant study of Leavenworth Penitentiary persuasively argues that what is represented as a contemporary project of mass incarceration has very deep historical roots, that the prison has always been the unacknowledged center of U.S. political history. Most importantly, Benson’s work challenges political scientists and activist intellectuals alike to generate new conceptions of democracy unfettered from the anchoring idea of the prison."—Angela Y. Davis, Distinguished Professor Emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz

"The imaginative rereading, through primary sources, of Fort Leavenworth and a host of other subjects including abolitionism, border prisons, North-South relations, and the campaign against Native Americans adds up to an original and exceptionally significant piece of research and scholarship. I enthusiastically recommend Prison of Democracy to scholars and students of US history, political science, and sociology."—Desmond King, author of Separate and Unequal: African Americans and the US Federal Government

"A significant contribution to the literature regarding race, crime, and punishment. The analytical insight that the author provides through a rereading and recentering of Leavenworth is both a contribution to and an immanent critique of racialized notions of mass incarceration."—Daniel Kato, author of Liberalizing Lynching: Building a New Racialized State