Mass incarceration has emerged as one of the biggest stains on the fabric of American society in the early 21st century, an embarrassment for a country championing itself as a defender of freedom and human rights. With the exception of the world's genocides, we are witnessing the greatest wanton deprivation of human liberty since 1865. The human cost: fifty million years in prison, and counting. Not even Stalin locked up as many people as the United States does today, and the only countries that come close to the U.S. incarceration rate are dysfunctional, oppressive regimes, such as North Korea, Cuba, and Rwanda. The crime rate in the U.S. is in no way exceptional, so what is it about Americans that we feel the need to confine so many people? In this non-fiction narrative, author Ivan Denison takes the reader inside a maximum-security state prison, on a journey examining the lives and criminal cases of prisoners caught within the criminal justice system. He follows their mostly futile efforts to get their convictions overturned or their sentences reduced, always tying their individual struggles to the effects of the state apparatus used to imprison them. By examining the "quantum unit" of incarceration - the solitary prisoner - and expanding the focus outward, to the county, the state, and the nation, one can see a pattern emerge that explains why the incarceration rate has soared, and what can be done about it. The conclusions are atypical, but strongly supported by original research, and could lead to a dismantling of this modern gulag system that even Stalin would have envied.