David Stein: Can you give a brief overview of the narrative of Prison Capital ? Lydia Pelot-Hobbs: My book traces Louisiana’s unprecedented expansion of its capacity to police, jail, and imprison from the 1970s to about 2020. In all but one year between 1998 and 2020, Louisiana held the title of having the highest per capita rate of incarceration in the nation, and thus the world. It has been commonly stated that Louisiana is the most incarcerated place in the world. New Orleans is the most incarcerated city in the world. Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary, is the largest state maximum security prison in terms of population. I wanted to understand why and how all this happened. Often people make these pretty simplistic assumptions: that it’s just that the South is racist, or that it’s a simple repetition of racial slavery. There isn’t actually a consideration of what it takes for a state to rework, restructure, and pivot its state capacities toward locking people up en masse.…