Davis begins her examination of prison reform by comparing prison abolition to death penalty abolition. She argues that although most people can imagine punishment without the death penalty, the prison is “an inevitable and permanent feature of our social lives” (9) and that few can imagine life without it. Even fellow prison activists, therefore, don’t take abolitionists seriously. Davis hopes that her book will help change people’s perspective on the prison system by exposing how outdated and ineffective it is. Davis emphasizes the exponential growth in the US prison system in the 20th century. From the 1960s to 2003, US prison populations grew from 200,000 to 2 million, and the US alone holds 20% of the world’s prison population. Davis cites a study of California’s prison expansion from 1852 to the 1990s that exemplifies how prisons “colonize” the American landscape.

Davis thought the public would resist the rampant expansion of prisons because crime rates don’t indicate a demand for that much expansion, but the public generally accepts the developments. She asserts that most people believe they won’t go to prison, so they don’t think about prisons at all. Popular media about prison leads people to believe that they know what happens behind bars, even though the images are sensationalist distortions.