My dissertation examines literary and cultural representations of the US prison regime from the 1980s to the present. Although the majority of work done on US prison literature covers the 1970s prison movement, my study begins in the 1980s as a means to discuss the massive prison building project that began in 1980 and that currently incarcerates 2.4 million people. This unprecedented increase in incarceration occurred, and could only occur, with narratives powerful enough to influence the public to support legislation necessary to enact such drastic changes to our system of criminal justice. Within the genres of autobiography, literary fiction, film, television, and radio, my project searches for representations that—instead of repeating the narratives that allowed the prison growth—produce solutions that will change our current understanding of the prison and push for decarceration. The dominant narratives of incarceration are structural in that they deem deviancy to be best controlled through physical separation. Cultural representations of the prison become invaluable in that they re-imagine spatialized relationships. For this reason, I have organized my dissertation by genre as a means to focus on the structural nature of prison representations as they (re)present the separation caused by incarceration. For example, in my examination of prison films, I concentrate on the genre's conventional entrance and exit of the protagonist so as to show the ways in which the viewer witnesses the cinematic prison. Throughout the dissertation, I use this method of analyzing form in order to determine the effectiveness of various types of cultural and literary representations as they strive to challenge the power of the dominant narratives that allow the prison to maintain class and racial boundaries within the United States.