‘Mass incarceration’, a phrase that has gained much purchase in the last two decades, features prominently in the title of ‘Marking Time’ and a book published by Harvard University Press. Both are the culmination of more than ten years of effort by Nicole R. Fleetwood, Professor of American Studies and Art History at Rutgers University. Describing a phenomenon that began in the late 1960s – in which the prisons system ballooned exponentially – the term ‘mass incarceration’ is sometimes poorly interpreted, taken to mean that the problem is only one of scale or degree, not of kind. Today, many are convinced that there are too many prisons and too many people in them; far too few are convinced that there should be no prisons at all. —