This symposium is a timely, welcome and valuable addition to the developing body of work that strives to draw productive linkages between accounts of the problems of contemporary democratic politics, the vagaries and extravagances of punishment in advanced capitalist countries today and efforts to sketch how these matters might be theorised, approached, and done differently. We therefore want to use these brief reflections on the papers to take stock of the forms of connection that are emerging between democratic theory and mass incarceration and to suggest some paths for future work. Why has this become an important challenge now? Why has it been missing until lately? Which kinds of work need to be so connected, and to what ends?
To say that this collection is timely, or that the work is now developing, is anything but a cause for (self) congratulation. Very often when we say that something is timely...
