Introduction to the special issue.

• Author: Hinck, Edward A.

In 2002 I participated in a National Communication Association pre-conference entitled, "Communication in prisons: Taking action through teaching, scholarship, and activism." Since the Fall of 1996, I had been taking students into regional prison facilities to deliver a modest program of teaching public speaking and debate skills and was hoping to find other members of the communication discipline who might be engaged in similar activities. I discovered a community of communication scholars, activists, and teachers was organizing around the problems posed by increasing incarceration rates, the "war on drugs," the "prison-industrial complex," the death penalty, and other issues related to the problem of seeking social justice and a more just social order. The interests of those who participated in the pre-conference led to the creation of PCARE (Prison Communication Activism Research and Education), a group that has continued to meet and work together on projects since 2003.

This special issue grew out my belief that the problems so obvious to me in my limited contact with prisons, prisoners, and to other teachers, scholars, and activists pursuing social justice, could be examined productively through a study of the arguments that explained, supported, justified, or rationalized what some have described as a prison-industrial complex (PCARE, 2007). The devastating impact of policies associated with crime and punishment have been established in several studies across a number of disciplines; but the urgency for communication and argumentation scholars to take up these questions can be seen in Hartnett's (2008) review entitled, "The Annihilating Public Policies of the Prison-Industrial Complex; or, Crime, Violence, and Punishment in an Age of Neo-liberalism." If you have not engaged in activism or pedagogy involving contact with prisons (for examples of prison activism and pedagogy see Hartnett, Wood, & McCann, 2011; Hartnett, Novek, & Wood, 2013) it can be easy to dismiss concerns about social justice for those who have been convicted of a crime; compared to the rest of the world, we have one of the finest judicial systems to address allegations of wrongdoing.

After reading Michelle Alexander's (2011) well researched and compelling critique of the war of drugs, one cannot put her work down without seeing the criminal justice system and social order in a completely new light. Alexander describes how political, economic, and law enforcement...