At the annual Beyond the Bars conference in New York last month, Angela Davis observed that the increasingly crowded “bandwagon” against mass incarceration has nevertheless managed to leave some of our most pernicious narratives about race and poverty, criminality and punishment intact. In considering Davis’s point, perhaps it’s worth taking a closer look at those whose encounters with the criminal justice system have — and have not — been embraced by this consensus.

Kalief Browder’s harrowing, much-publicized ordeal is an instructive case in point. Since his prolonged confinement and subsequent suicide last June, Browder has become the face of prison reform. As Jennifer Gonnerman recounted in the article that first brought his saga to public view, Browder was arrested in the spring of 2010, just shy of his seventeenth birthday, after being falsely accused of stealing a backpack. That led to over a thousand days spent on Rikers Island, where he suffered beatings and languished in solitary confinement.

Drawing the attention of everyone from President Obama to Rand Paul to the hosts of ABC’s The View, Browder’s story has gone on to sear itself into the national imagination, reverberating beyond the notoriously cruel, and in this case fatal, dysfunction of New York’s correctional system to reshape the ongoing debates about mass imprisonment in the United States.