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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Spring 2021 Carceral Studies Consortium micro-grant recipients, aurelius francisco and Erin Simpson, have begun the process of meeting with and educating local communities on the social issues of carceral feminism. Follow the link to read on for an update and statement from aurelius on the recent progress of their project (Mar. 2022). The link also contains a photo gallery of this project at the bottom of the post.
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2017 LMPD firearms training presentation |
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In 2017, the Louisville Metro Police Department used a Bible verse in their firearms training that has sparked controversy due to the criticisms that it likens officers to being avengers for God. The verse, Romans 13:4, reads, "for he is God's servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God's wrath on the wrongdoer." Other departments have faced similar criticism for the use of religion in a position of public service. For example, in 2016, complaints were filed against a police department in Kansas over the use of "Romans 13:4" decals on patrol vehicles by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, resulting in the removal of the problematic decals. Andrew Whitehead, co-author of Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States, believes the usage of the verse dangerously "inculcate[ed] this idea that they are agents of God and God's wrath." Whitehead further questioned, "if there are police officers that see themselves as agents of God's wrath, will they be more likely to turn to violence in a situation rather than not?" Senior pastor F. Bruce Williams at Bates Memorial Baptist Church concurs that the use of scripture in law enforcement is "more evidence of what's kind of in the DNA of America. And that is a history of weaponizing scriptures to justify violence."
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Malte Mueller / Getty Images |
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According to Denzel Tongue, the rate of intimate partner violence has risen since 2020 because the pandemic has perpetuated "economic distress, increased time indoors with abusive partners, and worsening mental health issues." While intimate partner violence pervades nearly every demographic, Mark Philpart of the Alliance for Boys and Men of Color asserts that "those with lifelong exposure to violence, economic instability, and marginalization are at greater risk" of being a victim and/or a perpetrator of violence. Yet, while these issues disproportionately affect the most vulnerable communities, the proposed solution for these violent events has been to incarcerate offenders and require court-imposed rehabilitation classes costing offenders up to one hundred and fifty dollars a week. Marcel Woodruff, a grassroots organizer, believes a better answer to the issue lies in a shift from "punitive to community-centered and restorative" solutions. Woodruff and his organization utilize "a combination of restorative justice practices, mentorship from local elders, and violence prevention strategies to promote a form of community healing for the young man while also promoting true accountability and addressing the concerns of the abuse survivor." Although a shift from the punitive may appear to perpetuate unchecked harm, Tongue clarifies that "the goal of these programs is not to absolve perpetrators of violence. Rather, they are meant to offer survivors a greater say in the response process and a more satisfactory path to healing than that currently provided by the criminal justice system. The goal is to address the deep wounds that led perpetrators to abuse in the first place and, in doing so, proactively prevent future violence."
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Prison officials and vested companies argued that introducing digital tablets to incarcerated populations would provide them greater access to loved ones, educational resources, and digital entertainment. However, even when the tablets are provided to incarcerated individuals for free, the predatory pricing for its features is debilitating. Tablet users in jail and prison are charged for every email, video call, song, and movie. JPay, a corrections services company, faced public pressure to reduce services costs after the company was found charging incarcerated individuals for e-books from a free database. As one incarcerated individual stated, Tablet companies know that they have a "captive consumer base." He further elaborated that the captive consumer base is placed in a survival situation dependent on the tablet where "if you want it, or feel you need it for your mental health, you are going to have to buy it from [tablet service companies]." According to the New York State's Department of Corrections, JPay is expected to net nearly nine million dollars in profit before August 2022 after assigning new tablets to fifty thousand incarcerated people.
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Jennifer Redfearn, an Oscar-nominated director, was inspired to uncover the stories of incarcerated women after examining how the number of women in jail and prison had grown by over eight hundred percent since 1980. In February, Redfearn and Tim Metzger released a documentary titled Apart, which they hope "encourages audiences to grapple with how incarceration impacts mothers, children, families, and, as a result, entire communities." The documentary follows three formerly incarcerated mothers and their support group leader, who was also formerly incarcerated. The mothers in this documentary all had different pathways to incarceration, but the outcomes followed the same script of strained family ties and upended relationships. Perhaps the most difficult outcomes from incarceration were the disconnect and loss of trust between mothers and their children. Redfearn challenged the audience to consider the perspective of an incarcerated mother by asking, "so what do you tell a child? When do you tell her the truth, and how do you break it to her? And how do you rebuild trust, if trust is broken, when you're stuck inside where communication is so difficult and expensive? [It's] a very tough moment." With the exponential growth of incarcerated women, Redfearn brings attention to these questions and the harsh punishments that are becoming all too familiar to families across the United States.
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Please share recent research you would like to see featured, including your own!
Send it to carceralstudies@ou.edu
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Congratulations to Carceral Studies Consortium member Dr. Emily Johnson (OU; Modern Languages) on the release of Rethinking the Gulag: Identities, Sources, Legacies (Indiana University Press, 2022), a volume she co-edited with Dr. Alan Barenberg (Texas Tech University; History). Drawing on documentary evidence, Rethinking the Gulag: Identities, Sources, Legacies explores the Soviet penal system from various disciplinary perspectives. Divided into three sections, the collection first considers "identities"—the lived experiences of contingents of detainees who have rarely figured in Gulag histories to date, such as common criminals and clerics. The second section surveys "sources" to explore the ways new research methods can revolutionize our understanding of the system. The third section studies "legacies" to reveal the aftermath of the Gulag, including the folk beliefs and traditions it has inspired and the museums built to memorialize it. While all the chapters respond to one another, each section also concludes with a reaction by a leading researcher: geographer Judith Pallot, historian Lynne Viola, and cultural historian and literary scholar Alexander Etkind.
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A recent special issue of Food and Foodways investigates the many ways that food and carcerality intersect. See below for highlights from the issue.
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ABSTRACT: Carceral spaces—such as neighborhood zones of police surveillance and plantation prisons that exploit incarcerated labor—reflect and reproduce systems of oppression that are also present in the food system. The state regularly polices poverty instead of addressing how racial capitalism perpetuates the lack of access to basic needs like healthy food. Conversely, the food system relies on carceral practices to secure disciplined labor by weaponizing the possibility of deportation and wielding the threat of violence to maintain control over racialized undocumented workers. But there are also seeds of struggle for the abolition of penal logics and institutions by incarcerated people and their allies on the outside. These include efforts to transform eating and food work in prison, reimagine food justice as an anti-carceral social movement, and use resistance tactics like hunger strikes. In this special issue introduction, we address these connections and set the stage for all the articles by asking: What does carcerality offer to theorizing and understanding the food system, food cultures, and food relations? And, what does a critical look at food offer toward understanding—and eventually abolishing—carceral systems? We offer theoretical touch points that connect food justice work to long-standing prison abolition organizing while introducing the major themes and contributions of each article included in the issue. We end with a reflection on our aspirations for the future of food studies.
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ABSTRACT: This article examines the spatial history of U.S. food production through the evolution of two carceral spaces: rural penitentiaries and Indian reservations. These sites have long provided opportunities to spatially fix surplus labor and capital in U.S. agriculture: from the confinement of Indians during settler colonialism, through the regulation of labor surpluses after Reconstruction, to the present-day expansion of convict leasing to backfill migrant labor shortages. This article challenges traditional framings of prisons and reservations as peripheries excluded from core landscapes of food production and consumption. Instead, these “carceral fixes” participate in specially mediated relationships with “free” agriculture—relationships that respond to the crisis-driven demands of capital and currents of racism and nativism. Within the U.S. food system, this flexibility has made prisons and reservations indispensable for spatially fixing not only capital and labor, but racial violence. Through these relationships, the indirect violence of falling farm prices is translated into the direct violence of physical and mental abuse, exploitation, alienation, diabetes, and malnutrition. Critically, this state-mediated violence is redirected from white to nonwhite bodies.
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ABSTRACT: In this article, we focus on the agro-environmental dimensions of plantation agriculture in the U.S. South, examining the ways carceral relations constrain foodways through the interrelated control of human and non-human life, the racialized monopolization of land, and the production of hunger. Through a focus on the chemicalization of cotton plantation agriculture and the transformation of chicken to poultry, we show how the racialized control of life and labor has been extended temporally and spatially by means of agricultural technologies. In the decades following the abolition of slavery, white landowners enrolled legal structures of racialized coercion and agricultural technologies in the service of continued plantation production. Combining archival and ethnographic methods, we trace these dynamics in cotton and poultry production in the 20th century, we show how technologies putatively oriented toward agricultural “productivity” extended the carceral dynamics of prisons through agro-environmental racism, the control of land and labor, and the production of hunger. Cotton chemicals and poultry plant speedups, we argue, represent racial and spatial relations of material and ideological control and containment that displace nourishing and liberatory ways of living and relating.
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ABSTRACT: Based on a case study of Washington State prison food policy and practice, this article traces the use of nutritionism as an enabling epistemology of mass incarceration in the neoliberal era in the United States. To develop this argument, the author develops the concept of carceral nutrition, or ideologies of food and eating that reduce complex relations of nourishment to biopolitical calculations of nutrition in the interests of discipline, punishment, control, and confinement. Under the pressures of neoliberal austerity, narrowly defined nutritionism ensures cheap sustenance and biopolitical control while maintaining a veneer of scientific legitimacy and liberal beneficence. This article also considers recent efforts to improve prison food through state-based reform and enhanced nutritional standards. These reforms, however, reinforce reductionary nutritionism and cede epistemic authority over “good” food to the carceral state. Drawing on the political theory of prison abolitionism, the author calls for non-reformist approaches to food justice that foster non-carceral relations of food and eating and support collective liberation and human flourishing.
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ABSTRACT: A recipe can function as a list of ingredients and instructions, a method of preserving traditions, and a historical record. These guidelines for cooking particular foods can reveal a longing for the past, using flavors and materials to conjure up memories of people and places, and a sense of possibility, suggesting the potential to achieve something that is currently out of reach. Cookbooks comprised of recipes written by incarcerated individuals work in all of these ways – simultaneously serving as reminders of the oppression people face in carceral spaces, demonstrating their ability to improvise, and reflecting their commitment to resist the State. In this paper, I examine incarcerated food writers’ cookbooks, looking specifically at their content and design choices, including specific themes and topics, photographs and art, and types of food. By highlighting their personal experiences with cooking, eating, and writing, imprisoned individuals have begun to create a distinct culinary discourse. Their cookbooks and recipes operate as pedagogies of resistance that can be employed as tools to imagine abolitionist possibilities. Sharing these texts will amplify the voices of incarcerated food writers and foreground everyday moments of freedom building.
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ABSTRACT: Hunger strikes appear to occupy a liminal position within the literature of power and resistance, constituting a contradictory means of empowerment — weakening the body while politically strengthening the subject. As such, this tactic eludes classification, in fact operating as an impure form of contestation. Scholars have also revealed that food refusal operates as a primarily symbolic form of resistance. I extend these conclusions to understand how hunger strikers use impure and contradictory discourse to frame their food refusal, a tactic understood best through Chela Sandoval’s (2003) the notion of differential consciousness. Just as hunger strikes constitute an impure means of resistance, they also appear to prefigure opportunities for dynamic and impure modes of discursive contestation. Through analysis of social media communications, detainee letters, and press releases, I unpack efforts to engage and challenge the dynamic, overlapping, and seemingly contradictory hegemonic discourses of deservingness, rights, and family. I also elucidate how differential consciousness allows incarcerated hunger strikers and their supporters to build legitimate authority within recognizable relations while building space for alternative logics — drawing on hegemonic discourses to construct alternative possibilities. Hunger strikes offer unique insight into how the study of carceral foodways is not only about consuming food, but also about refusing it.
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ABSTRACT: In recent years, communities invested in transformative food politics in the United States have seen the framework food justice become widely accepted as a core framework for anti-racist practice. Critical food scholars often recognize food justice in practices that: underwrite coalitions and solidarities across difference, tend to collective and historical trauma, and expand land-based political imaginations. This paper argues that abolitionist thought can position these elements within in a relational, historical framework that enables organizers to name the underlying racial capitalist logics of food apartheid—including the destruction of Black, Indigenous, and poor peoples’ senses of place, and white supremacy culture’s dehumanization of people who fall outside the norms of liberal individualism—in order build strategic alliances with those who struggle against other manifestations of the same logics, including mass incarceration. Citing work at the intersection of food and carceral justice in New York’s Hudson Valley, this paper humbly affirms what abolitionist organizers already know: that life is possible and is already flourishing well outside of racial capitalism and settler colonialism’s death dealing logics. Abolitionist thought may be an essential tool for strengthening our relationships to and analyses of food and food justice, such that we may organize more effectively to end food apartheid.
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Updates, Events & Opportunities |
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New Carceral Studies Board Member
The Carceral Studies Consortium is pleased to welcome our newest board member:
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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.
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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.
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Students of any Level Invited to Apply for Zoom Study Group, "Reimagining Educational Work for Collective Freedom: The Labor Strike as a Portal"
The inclusive student-focused study group "will convene across eight months, punctuated by three public symposia that take up complex questions of labor and freedom. These interrelated projects will take shape around the question of the strike: What can it teach us about the possibilities for radical educational praxis?" Those that are interested should apply by April 6th, 2022.
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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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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
If anyone you know is interested in receiving this newsletter and other information from the Carceral Studies Consortium, please forward them this email and they may click this link to subscribe.

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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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