"I mentioned earlier the deplorable epidemic of lynching in the South in the 1890s and in the three decades following (the subject of the book David Garland is currently working on). Has imprisonment now become the covert but official method of dealing with "disorderly" blacks in America, with capital punishment its extreme expression? Is "indifference" to the huge imbalance of blacks in our prisons less an expression of "indifference" than of denial, of wanting to turn away from the problems of race in America? After all, the Supreme Court affirmed the principle of integration in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954: it's up to "them" now. To paraphrase Loïc Wacquant's remark, mentioned earlier, yes, we build prisons to provide housing for the black poor. And yes, of course, we have come to accept better-educated blacks who have made it. Prison is for the blacks who haven't. Is this progress?