When James Sturm was growing up, one of the comics he read was “Dennis the Menace.” Rereading the strip recently, he said, he noticed that it frequently features the titular character, post-mischief, “sitting in a corner, being like, ‘I wish I met the guy who invented punishment.’”
That’s why he chose a Dennis-esque character, drawn in a retro style, to introduce the subject in the first panels of Beyond Punishment: A Guide to Mass Incarceration, the latest nonfiction comic published by the Applied Cartooning Lab at the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, where Sturm is director. Sturm said he thought the weighty topic would be easier to understand by starting “to think about punishment through a kid’s eyes.”
The result is a remarkably comprehensive yet concise exploration of the subject. In 32 pages, it covers not only the current state of the American prison-industrial complex and its history but also the ideas underpinning the institution, all the way back to the beginning — or rather, the Beginning. The first chapter opens with the punishment of Adam and Eve in the biblical book of Genesis. The Code of Hammurabi, Aristotelian philosophy, medieval wickedness trials, the Jim Crow era and the theoretical early 19th-century panopticon prison all make appearances.
Beyond Punishment points to alarming statistics: The United States has 4 percent of the world’s population but 20 percent of its incarcerated people; 45 percent of Americans have an immediate family member who’s been behind bars. The book’s blend of history, facts and narrative poses a foundational question rarely raised in modern discourse around crime and punishment: Why are we doing this?
Sturm began thinking about the project five years ago on a fellowship at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, where he met scholar Kaia Stern, who cofounded the Prison Studies Project and writes about incarceration. They brought in Sturm’s team at the Applied Cartooning Lab, a CCS offshoot that collaborates with organizations to produce mission-driven nonfiction comics on complex topics, such as Let’s Talk About It: A Graphic Guide to Mental Health in 2020 and Freedom and Unity: A Graphic Guide to Civics and Democracy in Vermont in 2022. Sturm tabbed Los Angeles cartoonist and tattoo artist Graham Chaffee for the new book’s final drawings.
The team also consulted with formerly incarcerated people, including their voices directly in the form of reproduced letters from the American Prison Writing Archive. “It was also very important that we saw their handwriting,” Sturm said. “That allows for a greater connection.”
One notable absence in Beyond Punishment is the newest development in U.S. incarceration: the vast system of immigration detention centers popping up all over the country that currently hold an estimated 70,000 people.
“We try to take a broad view of the issue,” Sturm said, explaining that not pinning the comic to one political moment helps maintain its relevance for longer. “There’s no surprise, for most of us that worked on the comic, that what’s happening with ICE happened in a country that will allow our system of mass incarceration.”
That said, the story is not all grim. With funding from Vermont Humanities, Sturm was able to attend a Chicago conference on the topic hosted by Illinois Humanities. (Both orgs partnered with CCS to produce the project.) “I was expecting a very bleak and dark convening, and the opposite was true,” Sturm said. “There was so much hope, and there was so much joy and creativity.”
The experience inspired him to rewrite the last chapter, he said: “By the time you get to the end of the comic, we’re offering solutions.” ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “In Beyond Punishment, the Center for Cartoon Studies Tackles Mass Incarceration”
This article appears in April 29 • 2026.
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