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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Carceral Studies Conversations Podcast |
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"Legal System Contacts and Trauma" with Dr. Constance Chapple |
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On this episode, Dr. Constance Chapple discusses how trauma from contacts with the criminal justice system manifest in families, the gender deviance gap, and what a research project conducted at a correctional facility at the onset of COVID-19 reveals about systemic inequalities. Chapple is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Oklahoma. She does research on families and crime, gender and crime, child abuse and neglect, and the consequences of incarceration for children, youth and adults. She is a member of the editorial board of Violence and Victims and has published research in outlets such as Justice Quarterly, Social Science Research, Deviant Behavior and the Journal of Criminal Justice.
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The Boston Regional Intelligence Center, which is a unit of the Boston Police Department, has nearly 4,000 people with active status in its gang database. The director of the center admitted in a hearing that the gang database has not helped solve a murder. The information in the database is accessible to federal and local law agencies, such as the Department of Homeland Security, Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department, and Boston Housing Authority. School resource officers have much discretion in deciding whether youth are put in the database. There is no way to check if one’s own name is in the database, and it is nearly impossible to contest one’s existence in the database. The database is 2.3% White, 75% Black, and the rest Hispanic and other races.
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After Oklahomans advocated for racial justice through mass protests over the last year, Oklahoma’s legislature, according to Carmen Forman, “is doubling down on its support for local law enforcement.” Legislators have introduced measures to limit protests, such as protecting drivers who hit protesters with a vehicle, painting blue lines on streets to show support for law enforcement, and making it illegal to post personal information about law enforcement officers online. Sen. Kevin Matthews argues that these bills criminalize protest: “It is evident this session that the majority caucus is extremely pro-law enforcement without any consideration for those who have been hurt or harmed by law enforcement officers.” Critics argue that these bills could have a chilling effect on free speech.
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After the April 1995 Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing that killed 168 people, Congress enacted the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which included reform on federal habeas corpus—the right of prisoners to have their convictions reviewed in court. Robert Macy, Oklahoma City’s district attorney, supported the federal habeas reform provisions by arguing that he needed the law to prevent the OKC bombers from abusing the system with frivolous appeals. The law, Radley Balko argues, “was a boon for cutthroat prosecutors.” Macy was one such prosecutor—sending fifty-four people to death row. Macy, however, was found to have committed misconduct in about one-third of the death sentences he won. The law, according to Balko, protected these corrupt prosecutors: “Under the law, federal courts can’t even consider new evidence — including exculpatory evidence withheld by prosecutors — until it has first been raised and adjudicated in state court. And the federal courts must show enormous deference to state courts’ decisions.”
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The Movement for Black Lives opposes the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act because “the bill doubles down on reform strategies that have historically failed to center marginalized communities and address police violence nationwide.” The movement, a coalition of 150 organizations across the nation, wrote a letter to Congress demanding legislation to confront disinvestment, mass incarceration, and systemic racism. The letter argued: “Justice in Policing, by its very name, centers investments in policing rather than what should be front and center — upfront investments in communities and people.” The movement believes that the bill fails to address the root causes of police violence against Black people. The movement is advocating for the BREATHE Act to overhaul policing and enact systemic change, such as by abolishing the Drug Enforcement Agency, the use of surveillance technology, and mandatory minimum and life sentences.
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In the wake of the recent murders in Georgia, Red Canary Song, a grassroots collective of Asian and migrant sex workers, released a statement “reject[ing] the call for increased policing in response to this tragedy." The organization, along with over eighty other co-signing organizations, argued: “Policing has never been an effective response to violence because the police are agents of white supremacy. Policing has never kept sex workers or massage workers or immigrants safe. The criminalization and demonization of sex work has hurt and killed countless people--many at the hands of the police both directly and indirectly. Due to sexist racialized perceptions of Asian women, especially those engaged in vulnerable, low-wage work, Asian massage workers are harmed by the criminalization of sex work, regardless of whether they engage in it themselves.” Decriminalization of sex work, they argue, is the only way that these workers and sex trafficking survivors will ever be safe.
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Black people arrived in Oklahoma before the push for statehood, and by the late nineteenth century Oklahoma had become, according to Victor Luckerson, “an unusually egalitarian place” with “a vision at odds with America’s increasingly capitalist ideals.” However, corruption and graft became widespread in Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory as white agents “continued a wide-ranging effort to dismantle [B]lack wealth in the region.” The racism against Black people was compounded by internal divisions, such as how Black migrants and freedmen did not see themselves as sharing a racial identity despite others around them doing so with notions of blood quantum. Simultaneously, Jim Crow laws codified inequity and lynching became more common. Luckerson argues: “The battle over Oklahoma’s constitution represented a bellwether for how legally sanctioned racism would be tolerated in the United States at the dawn of a new century.” In the end, “Statehood would cement white political power as the land allotment process had guaranteed white economic power.” The state constitution, hailed as progressive, spurred a united Black identity that led to activism and repressive reaction in the coming decades.
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In the aftermath of the storming of the U.S. Capitol, Kimberlé Crenshaw argues, “many political leaders and mainstream pundits across the political spectrum have assiduously sought to displace white supremacy’s starring role in the attack.” These stories reflect a denialism of the enduring legacies of American racial terror that, Crenshaw notes, “bespeaks a broader failure to face up to the real nature of white supremacy across the political spectrum.” A racialized construction of law enforcement throughout history explains how actions perceived to be dismantling White supremacy are seen as threatening to the social order. Crenshaw argues: “we must grapple with the fact that whiteness—not a simplistic racial categorization, but a deeply structured relationship to social coercion and group entitlement—remains a vibrant dimension of power in America.” This history reveals itself in the juxtaposition that those who have questioned and challenged white supremacy like Martin Luther King Jr. and Fred Hampton were martyred while “white supremacist agitators and murders lived long lives as their suit-and-tie enablers brokered power in an unrepentant republic.”
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"Library of Congress accepts OU task force petition to update subject heading to 'Tulsa Race Massacre,'" Caleb McCourry (OU Daily, 3/22/21) |
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The Library of Congress will change the subject heading of “Tulsa Race Riot” to “Tulsa Race Massacre.” An OU task force, including the OU Libraries, played a pivotal role in petitioning the Library of Congress to make this change. Karlos Hill argues: "In making this small but significant shift, the Library of Congress is helping to bring forward a more historically accurate perspective of what actually occurred.”
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Announcements & Opportunities |
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UCI PrisonPandemic Digital Archive
UCI is bringing greater transparency to the COVID-19 crisis in prisons with this digital archive of stories. This is an ongoing initiative to collect stories from people incarcerated in California prisons, their family members and loved ones, and the staff/employees who work in these facilities.
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Carceral Studies: Federal Funding Workshop (1 of 2)
Led by Lewis-Burke
April 16, 2021 | 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm CT
Led by Bill Ruch of Lewis-Burke, this will be an overview of federal funding opportunities that may be of interest to consortium members. Ruch will focus on Department of Justice funding streams
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Carceral Studies: Federal Funding Workshop (2 of 2)
Led by Lewis-Burke
April 30, 2021 | 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm CT
Led by Beeta Rasouli and Kari McCarron of Lewis-Burke, this will be an overview of federal funding opportunities that may be of interest to consortium members. Rasouli and McCarron will focus on NSF, NIH/HHS, NEH/NEA funding streams.
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Carceral Studies Student Work Prize
Submissions Due May 1st, 2021
The Consortium is pleased to announce a Carceral Studies Student Work Prize. OU students may submit an original essay or creative work produced as part of any course in any discipline during the 2020-2021 academic year that deals with the topic of Carceral Studies, broadly conceived. Submissions are due May 1st, 2021.
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ABOUT

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.
Join the conversation!
We encourage feedback, suggestions, and article suggestions. Please reach out to carceralstudies@ou.edu with any ideas, thoughts, or recommendations.
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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.

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