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Acknowledgments This book is the result of a long road that began at Jail North in Charlotte, North Carolina. The jail, located at 5235 Spector Drive, is where I underwent training as a detention officer and where I first interacted with inmates. It was my first experience with the criminal justice system, but not my last. I worked at Jail Central, an eight-story complex in Uptown Charlotte I’ve been inside prisons and jails in Kentucky and Pennsylvania, but the journey really began at Jail North. Through movies and television, I was taught that jails and prisons were filled with violent predators and monsters. At Jail North, most of the inmates I interacted with were poor, young men. The most dan- gerous people I interacted with had mental illnesses that rendered communi- cation difficult. For the most part, I felt that they were people in need of medical care and were not super predators. The jails in my hometown of Charlotte were full of vulnerable people, and I assumed that Charlotte couldn’t be too different from the rest of the country. Like many people who find themselves in jail, I sought my escape. Although I write this mostly in jest, two people enabled my escape from Jail North to academia. John Szmer and Martha Kropf represent many things to me. They are mentors, graduate assistant advisers, a source of income (they declared that my detention guard experience made me uniquely equipped to babysit their children), friends, and, most importantly, family. John and Mar- tha encouraged me to go back to school and get my PhD. They have sup- ported me emotionally and intellectually for over a decade. My debt to them cannot be expressed in words. I hope they enjoy this book and that they feel proud. I love them both, even if John argues too much. Next, I need to thank those who have trained and guided me. I had the pleasure of studying under Richard Waterman, Richard Fording, Mark Peff- ley, and Nicolai Petrovsky at the University of Kentucky. Richard Fording was my first intellectual hero, and his work on incarceration made me think that a political scientist could study prisons. I am not sure if I can claim to be