March 4, 2022
Welcome to the University of Oklahoma Carceral Studies Consortium Newsletter. The Carceral Studies Consortium strives to build a community for intellectual exploration that includes faculty, staff, graduate students, community members, practitioners, and organizers.

Carceral Studies is concerned with the independent function and nexus of the political and social systems that organize, shape, sustain, and entrench practices of punishment, surveillance, incarceration, and harm.
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Today's News
Spring 2021 Carceral Studies Consortium micro-grant recipients, Sharee Asberry and Bailey Hoffner, have begun the process of developing food sovereignty through gardening for the women of the Mabel Bassett Correctional Center (MBCC). MBCC, located in McLoud, Oklahoma, is a medium security facility where over 1200 people are incarcerated. Click the link to read on for an update and statement on the recent progress of their gardening project (Feb. 2022), as well as a poem about the project by Sharee. The link also includes a photo gallery of this project at the bottom of the post. 
  
Christopher Lee / New York Times
On February 22nd, Texas Governor Greg Abbott sent a letter to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services with an order requiring “all licensed professionals who have direct contact with children” to report gender-affirming treatments to state officials. According to the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, gender-affirming care/treatment is classified as instances where parents of transgender teenagers provide puberty-suppressing drugs or other medically accepted treatments. Although Abbott’s order has affected the lives of many Texan families, the order itself does not change Texas law. Indeed, multiple county attorneys and district attorneys stated that they would not prosecute families regarding Abbott’s directive. Families in Austin, Texas protested the order and voiced their concerns about interruptions to these medical treatments at the Texas State Capitol. One father at the rally told the New York Times that “hiding feels like that would be the worst solution…and although it’s scary, the last thing we want to do is be silenced.” Paul Castillo, senior counsel at Lambda Legal, stated that Abbott was waging “a politically motivated misinformation campaign with no consideration of medical science and seemed determined to criminalize parents seeking to care and provide for their kids.”   
Brandon Harris
Brandon Harris, a senior at Davidson College in North Carolina, started a semester-long independent study project last January titled Telling Stories of the Ignored and Forgotten, which focused on the lives of those behind bars. The inspiration for this project came when Harris reconnected with a childhood friend, Sura Sohna, who had been incarcerated multiple times since the friends had separated right before high school. The two ended up in different social circumstances: Harris was accepted into a prestigious private high school, and Sohna lived in an affordable-housing community. In this community, Sonha witnessed multiple acts of violence and social instability. Harris concluded: “if our life circumstances were flipped, I might also be behind bars.” Harris reconnected with Sohna and was even able to get a Zoom broadcast approved by Maryland Governor Larry Hogan so that Sohna could publicly tell his story of pain and growth. These efforts culminated in Sohna pleading his case before the same judge that sentenced him to fifteen years. , After hearing from Harris, Sohna, and all the people in attendance, the judge told the court that Sohna would be going home today. 

Abigail Dollins / Argus Leader
In 2015, South Dakota passed the Juvenile Justice Public Safety Improvement Act (JJPSIA), which reduced juvenile commitments to correctional facilities and provided alternative interventions to keep children from being incarcerated. However, SB 198, currently under consideration in the South Dakota legislature, aims to repeal JJPSIA. SB 198’s support largely is based on the testimonies of some educators that claim that deviant juvenile behavior is still heavily affecting their classrooms. One of the major changes named in the bill would extend the current limit of detention from 7 days to 90 days. Opposition to the SB 198 comes from state senators such as Troy Heinert, who explains that most of the students in correctional facilities are Native American students and the churning of students through the system leaves them with no skills and a lack of options. Heinert stated further that “if we wanna fix juvenile justice, let’s put some money in to get these kids the help and the resources that they need. I would much rather spend money on that, than locking them away.” The South Dakota Department of Corrections is also a strong opponent against SB 198. It referred to the latest data, which found lower rates of recidivism and a high success rate for the diversion programs. 

ER Productions Limited / Getty Images
A recent article in Science Advances found a relationship between exposure to “excessive force by police” and health disparities in Black women. According to lead co-author Alexa Freedman, “We found that Black women living in neighborhoods where complaints about excessive use of force by police are more common are more likely to deliver preterm and to develop cardiovascular disease, even after accounting for neighborhood disadvantage and crime.” The data collected found that Black women had a likelihood of exposure to complaints of excessive force by police of 27.6% versus 13.9% for their white counterparts. Additionally, for the sample group of pregnant women, Black women were more than twice as likely to deliver preterm compared to white women. Luz Maria Garcini, from the University of Texas, San Antonio, elaborated on the study by focusing on how “violence is associated with increased health risk, and this can be particularly taxing on the health of historically marginalized women who likely experience compounded stressors from many other additional sources of stress.” Hassan Yahaya explains that the new study adds to prior research findings that where Black women in the U.S. are “unevenly burdened with chronic health conditions, such as [cardio vascular disease], diabetes, and obesity.” 

Featured Scholarship
Please share recent research you would like to see featured, including your own!
Send it to carceralstudies@ou.edu
ABSTRACT: We provide a unifying empirical framework to study why crime reductions occurred due to a sequence of state-level dropout age reforms enacted between 1980 and 2010 in the United States. Because the reforms changed the shape of crime-age profiles, they generate both a short-term incapacitation effect and a more sustained crime-reducing effect. In contrast to previous research looking at earlier US education reforms, we find that reform-induced crime reduction does not arise primarily from education improvements. Decomposing short- and longrun effects, the observed longer-run effect for the post-1980 education reforms is primarily attributed to dynamic incapacitation. 

ABSTRACT: There are substantial, unexplained racial disparities in women’s health. Some of the most pronounced involve elevated rates of preterm delivery (PTD) and cardiovascular disease (CVD) among Black women. We hypothesized that stress associated with excessive use of force by police may contribute to these disparities. In two prospective cohorts derived from electronic health records (pregnancy cohort, N = 67,976; CVD cohort, N = 6773), we linked formal complaints of excessive police force in patients’ neighborhoods with health outcomes. Exposed Black women were 1.19 times as likely to experience PTD [95% confidence interval (CI): 1.04 to 1.35] and 1.42 times as likely to develop CVD (95% CI: 1.12 to 1.79), even after adjustment for neighborhood disadvantage and homicide. The excess risks of PTD were also observed in maternal fixed-effects analyses comparing births to the same woman. These findings suggest police violence may be an unrecognized contributor to health inequity for Black women. 

ABSTRACT: Scholarship on prison masculinities to date has primarily centered on the most revered, dominant, or hegemonic forms, with little attention to how subordinated prisoners negotiate masculinities at the bottom of prisoner hierarchies. This article, drawing from a wider qualitative study on “revolving door” imprisonment, charts the shift from normative to subordinate masculinity for a group of men housed in a segregated Vulnerable Prisoner Unit (VPU) in an English prison. I show how these men, influenced by their previous prison status and criminal history, adopted different—more costly and high-risk—situationally adaptive strategies in negotiating their masculinities at the bottom of prison hierarchies. Exploring their subordinated prison identities reveals the dynamic, relational, fragile, and spatial elements of their masculinities. I conclude by suggesting that a greater focus on subordinated carceral masculinities adds a much-needed divergence from the preoccupation with hegemonic or dominant prison masculinities. This divergence offers researchers a new opportunity to shape and to inform policy debates on how, in extreme environments like the prison, alternative ways of “being a man” might be opened up to those who have suffered at the most brutal end of prison hierarchies.    

ABSTRACT: WhatsApp Neighbourhood Crime Prevention (WNCP) groups are popular in the Netherlands. As a basic assumption, this kind of digital neighborhood watch could prevent crime, but what is the evidence? Drawing on a mixture of qualitative research and a review of additional publications, we conclude that WNCP groups stimulate social cohesion rather than prevent crime. We reach our conclusion by applying the evaluation EMMIE framework – an acronym for Effect, Mechanisms, Moderators, Implementation and Economics – to the available data. A point for further discussion is the limited scope of the economic dimension. Moral costs must be calculated, too, as WNCP groups tend to deepen divisions between groups of citizens and fuel exclusionary practices in the name of community safety. 
  
Updates, Events & Opportunities
The OU Department of International & Area Studies and the Department of History at Texas Tech University Present a Zoom Event for The Stalinist Gulag and its Legacy: A Teach-in. 

The Zoom panel will include Judith Pallot (emerita professor of geography from Oxford University), Irina Flige (Director of the Research and Information Center “Memorial” in St. Petersburg), Jeff Hardy (associate professor of history at Brigham Young University), Alan Barenberg (associate professor of history at Texas Tech University), Melissa Stockdale (professor of history at OU), and Emily Johnson (Carceral Studies Consortium member and professor of Russian at OU). The zoom event is planned for March 24th, from 10:30-12:00. 
The 1619 Project Seeks a New Cohort

The 1619 project is inviting “educators, administrators, content specialists, and curriculum supervisors for K-12 schools and school districts” as well as those “working with adults and youths in jails, prisons, or youth detention facilities” to apply for their second cohort. Each team in the cohort will receive $5,000 grants to “support exploration of key questions of racial justice and other pressing issues in communit[ies].” Applications should be submitted by March 23rd, 2022. 

Russell Sage Foundation Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration Grant 

The Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration grant is offering individual funding up to $175,000 for research that addresses the “severe consequences of the Covid19-pandemic, including its economic disruptions, and the recent mass protests to combat systemic racial inequality in policing and other institutions have reaffirmed the importance of social science research examining economic, political, racial, ethnic, generational, and social inequalities relevant to public policy and social change.” 
Reimagining the American Carceral State Seminar 

The Oklahoma Scholar-Leadership Enrichment Program is hosting a week-long (in person) seminar that focuses on "how the modern police state developed, how everyday Americans respond politically to the carceral state, and explore the possibility of reimaging criminal justice." The seminar is primarily for upper-division undergraduate students, but graduate students can take the seminars with permission from their departments. 
OU Libraries and Carceral Studies Consortium Assemble “Racial Capitalism” Library Guide 

In a collaborative effort between OU Libraries and the Carceral Studies Consortium, a library guide on “Racial Capitalism” is now available for all students, staff, and faculty. Racial capitalism contends that racist oppression is central to how capitalism operates. Racial subjugation is not one specific manifestation of a larger capitalist system, but rather, capitalism itself is a racial system. The guide includes resources (written, audiovisual, and contacts) for information about the carceral state, crimmigration, and race and labor.  
2021-2022 Carceral Studies Consortium Student Work Prize

The Carceral Studies Consortium is inviting original student essays or creative works developed as part of any course in any discipline during the 2021-2022 academic year that engages the topic of Carceral Studies, broadly conceived. Submissions are not limited to essays, but may be in any creative or scholarly format, including but not limited to art in any medium, story maps, and more. 

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The Consortium Newsletter will offer a roundup of a few selected articles that reflect today’s news, organizing, and thinking related to the carceral state. We understand that freedom work is built on education and engagement. Education requires an understanding of contemporary issues informed by their historical context. We hope that these curated articles will help you analyze the issues that we face and understand the community that we strive to construct.

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Land Acknowledgment

The University of Oklahoma is on the traditional lands of the Caddo Nation and the Wichita & Affiliated Tribes. This land was also once part of the Muscogee Creek and Seminole nations. It also served as a hunting ground, trade exchange point, and migration route for the Apache, Cheyenne, Comanche, Kiowa, and Osage nations. Today, 39 federally-recognized Tribal nations dwell in what is now the State of Oklahoma as a result of settler colonial policies designed to confine and forcefully assimilate Indigenous peoples.

The University of Oklahoma is an equal opportunity institution. ou.edu/eoo