Stephen Tourlentes

Mass incarceration forms a network of thousands of institutional units of various scales—prisons, courts, private corporations, and a host of government agencies whose tentacles reach across states and outside the borders of the United States. This system is so vast and sprawling it has achieved a sublime dimension that is beyond the comprehension of those Americans not engulfed by its inner workings. Stephen Tourlentes’s serial photographic study, (1996–ongoing), documents how this