This volume is the first to assemble the voices of that singular metropolis in a manner that serves as a testament to the lives lived by unprecedented numbers of people in cages. Practical, poetic, wise, informed, wounded, alive, in tones of despair and hard-earned hope, they illuminate the arc of everyday life in the world’s largest carceral regime with laser precision . . . This volume should be in classrooms, libraries, bookstores, prisons, and on the bookshelf of every citizen. —Michelle Brown, Department of Sociology, University of Tennessee, and Book Review Editor, Theoretical Criminology After decades of exploding prison populations, the Fourth City reaches into every part of America. These stories of its survivors are critical for anyone who wants to understand what mass incarceration has done to this country. —Jonathan Simon, Professor of Law, UC Berkeley Behind bars there is an alternative social order, and that twisted order has everlasting psychological effects on the person that has to endure/survive a segregated community with little or no rehabilitation. Larson has collected a mosaic of language that helps to explicate the failures and misconceptions of the Prison Industrial Complex in the United States. If it is true that one can always tell the state of a nation by the literature it produces, then the reader of Fourth City most certainly will come to understand what really goes on behind the circular razor wire. —Randall Horton, poet and author of The Lingua Franca of Ninth Street and Roxbury