Incarceration is the detention of a person in prison, typically as punishment for a crime (custodial sentence).

People are most commonly incarcerated upon suspicion or conviction of committing a crime, and different jurisdictions have differing laws governing the function of incarceration within a larger system of justice. Incarceration serves four essential purposes with regard to criminals:

Incarceration rates, when measured by the United Nations, are considered distinct and separate from the imprisonment of political prisoners and others not charged with a specific crime. Historically, the frequency of imprisonment, its duration, and severity have varied considerably. There has also been much debate about the motives for incarceration, its effectiveness and fairness, as well as debate regarding the related questions about the nature and etiology of criminal behavior.

Wilkenson (2004) notes that overall heterogeneity of a society may provide a meta-explanation for the variance in incarceration rates: There may be a multi-directional causality where close-knit societies are least likely to commit some forms of offenses against one another.

Angela Davis (born January 26, 1944) is an American political activist, scholar, and author. Davis emerged as a nationally prominent activist and radical in the 1960s, as a leader of the Communist Party USA and Black Panther Party, and through her association with the Civil Rights Movement. Prisoner rights have been among her continuing interests; she is the founder of "Critical Resistance", an organization working to abolish the prison-industrial complex. She is a retired professor with the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz and is the former director of the university's Feminist Studies department. Her research interests are in feminism, African American studies, critical theory, Marxism, popular music and social consciousness, and the philosophy and history of punishment and prisons.

Her membership in the Communist Party led to Ronald Reagan's request in 1969 to have her barred from teaching at any university in the State of California. She was tried and acquitted of suspected involvement in the Soledad brothers' August 1970 abduction and murder of Judge Harold Haley in Marin County, California.

Michelle Alexander (born c. 1968) is an associate professor of law at Ohio State University, a civil rights advocate and a writer.

Alexander is a graduate of Stanford Law School and Vanderbilt University. She served for several years as director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California, which spearheaded a national campaign against racial profiling by law enforcement. Alexander directed the Civil Rights Clinic at Stanford Law School and was a law clerk for Justice Harry Blackmun at the U. S. Supreme Court and for Chief Judge Abner Mikva on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. As an associate at Saperstein, Goldstein, Demchak & Baller, she specialized in plaintiff-side class action suits alleging race and gender discrimination.

Alexander now holds a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State.

Alexander has litigated numerous class action discrimination cases and worked on criminal justice reform issues. She is a recipient of a 2005 Soros Justice Fellowship of the Open Society Institute.^{[citation needed]}

Adam Charles Kokesh (born February 1, 1982) is an American activist and talk radio host. Kokesh was a Corporal in the United States Marine Corps Reserve and is a veteran of the Iraq War. He is an outspoken opponent of the U.S. military intervention in Iraq and has received media attention related to anti-war protest activities. He is the son of Charles Kokesh, a Santa Fe venture capitalist, founder of a firm called Technology Funding and owner of the Santa Fe Horse Park.

Kokesh attended the Native American Preparatory School in San Ysidro, New Mexico. He enlisted in the United States Marine Corps in 1999. In 2004, he served in Fallujah. He was a liaison between the U.S. military and Iraqi civilians as a member of the 3rd Civil Affairs Group. He also worked a security checkpoint while in Iraq. He brought home a pistol from Iraq in 2004 in violation of military rules, which prevented his return for a second Iraq tour. Kokesh "had risen to the rank of sergeant after three-and-a-half years in the Reserves" and "was demoted to corporal and soon thereafter discharged honorably with a re-enlistment code that basically said, 'you can't re-enlist.'" Having experienced combat in Fallujah, Kokesh received the Combat Action Ribbon and the Navy Commendation Medal after his honorable discharge from active duty.

Marianne Evelyn Faithfull (born 29 December 1946) is an English singer, songwriter and actress whose career has spanned five decades.

Her early work in pop and rock music in the 1960s was overshadowed by her struggle with drug abuse in the 1970s. During the first two-thirds of that decade, she produced only two little-noticed studio albums. After a long commercial absence, she returned late in 1979 with the highly acclaimed album, Broken English. Faithfull's subsequent solo work, often critically acclaimed, has at times been overshadowed by her personal history.

From 1966 to 1970, she had a highly publicised romantic relationship with Rolling Stones' lead singer, Mick Jagger. She co-wrote "Sister Morphine", which is featured on the Stones' Sticky Fingers album.

Faithfull was born in Hampstead, London. Her father, Major Robert Glynn Faithfull, was a British military officer and professor of psychology. Her mother, Eva von Sacher-Masoch, Baroness Erisso, was originally from Vienna, with aristocratic roots in the Habsburg Dynasty and Jewish ancestry on her maternal side. Erisso was a ballerina for the Max Reinhardt Company during her early years, and danced in productions of works by the German theatrical duo Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. Faithfull's maternal great great uncle was Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the nineteenth-century Austrian nobleman whose erotic novel, Venus in Furs, spawned the word "masochism". In regard to her roots in nobility, Faithfull commented in March 2007 prior to beginning the European leg of her tour, "I'm even going to Budapest, which is nice because I'm half English and half Austro Hungarian. I've inherited the title Baroness Sacher-Masoch—it comes from one of my great uncles who gave his name to masochism."