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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"Carceral Logics and Surveillance" with Dr. Matthew Guariglia |
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On this episode, Dr. Matthew Guariglia discusses carceral logics, the international and imperial connections of surveillance and policing, and the consequences of surveillance. Guariglia is a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a visiting scholar at University of California-Berkeley. His research focuses on the intersection of racial and ethnic formation, state building and state power, and urban policing in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
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In the past year, Texas prisons banned visitation and curtailed prisoner mail to fight the spread of Coronavirus. Despite these restrictions, according to Jolie McCullough and Keri Blakinger, “guards are finding just as many drugs and writing up even more prisoners for having them.” According to employees and prisoners, staff is the main source of contraband within prisons. Prior to the pandemic, Texas had justified limiting visitation, increasing drug-sniffing dogs on visiting days, and restricting all mail except for plain white paper and a few photographs by arguing that these measures fought contraband. In the past year, the restrictions on mail have remained and visits ended, yet drugs continued to be present in prisons. McCullough and Blakinger note: “For advocates who have long fought against the argument that families are a large source of the prison drug supply, Texas’ accidental experiment was a success.” This data reveals that staff introduce the contraband.
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The criminal proceedings in the murder of George Floyd, argues Will Tchakirides, “reveal how much medical examiner assessments matter in cases of deadly police violence.” Thackirides argues that medical examiners’ reports “have helped to uphold [the carceral apparatus’] unchecked monopoly on racialized state violence.” After the July 1981 killing of Ernest Lacy by Milwaukee police, for example, medical examiners cited “fright” as the cause of death. In the aftermath of this framing of the death, blame shifted from the police to Lacy’s mental health and drug use, thereby allowing the police chief to exonerate the officers involved. Activists and family challenged these findings, which led to independent examinations and an inquest hearing, yet the county medical examiner ultimately minimized police responsibility. Tchakirides concludes: “Black mistrust of county medical examiners is well founded, given the historical proliferation of state reports and rulings that have removed police actions as primary causes of deaths.”
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This panel discusses the ways that the Black freedom movement has intersected and overlapped with the communist and socialist movements. The discussants offer examples of organizers and organizations that have pursued radical building for liberation. In discussing the long history of radical civil rights and labor organizing, Robin Kelley argues that “anti-Black racism is part of class domination.” Kelley argues that “internationalism is very, very important” to this movement building because being less parochial reveals the connections between these struggles and movements. These radical histories, according to Charisse Burden-Stelly, reveal “the importance of joining an organization and building organizations... We don’t need any more leaders, we need stewards, people who are rooted in organizations and in the community.” Barbara Smith shares that “the only way you change people’s relationship to these issues is to organize.”
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In the wake of narrow losses in Georgia, Republicans, according to an analysis of the new state voting law by Nick Corasaniti and Reid J. Epstein, “hamper the right to vote for some Georgians or strip power from state and local elections officials and give it to legislators.” The most significant changes to voting in the state include: less time for voters to request absentee ballots; stricter ID requirements for absentee ballots; offering food or water to voters waiting in line can bring misdemeanor charges; the legislature has more control over the State Election Board; and the legislature can suspend county election officials.
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LexisNexis, the legal research and data brokerage firm, signed a contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to sell them personal information. LexisNexis, according to Biddle, appears to offer a replacement for another risk industry service “that has been crucial to ICE’'s deportation efforts.” Under this contract, LexisNexis will provide ICE with records containing personal data aggregated from credit history, bankruptcy records, license plate images, etc. Recognizing LexisNexis’ access to technological information and the firm’s willingness to sell it to ICE, Biddle notes: “It’s hard to wrap one’s head around the enormity of the dossiers LexisNexis creates about citizens and undocumented persons alike...it’s exceedingly difficult to participate in modern society without generating computerized records of the sort that LexisNexis obtains and packages.”
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The prosecution is portraying defendant Derek Chauvin as a “bad apple,” but “this argument,” writes Marjorie Cohn, “obfuscates the racist violence inherent in the U.S. system of policing.” Despite officers testifying about Minneapolis police’s procedures on force, their officers receive “Killology training” in which “they are taught to kill rather than de-escalate conflict situations.” Framing Chauvin as an exception, moreover, hides the systemic racist violence: between 2015 and 2020, Minneapolis police used violence against Black people at seven times the rate they used violence against white people. “Officers know,” Cohn argues, “that they rarely face any semblance of accountability for killing Black people.” The officers involved in Floyd’s killing “are emblematic of the systemic racist police violence against Black people in the United States.”
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Professor Karlos Hill compiled images of the Tulsa Race Massacre to center the experience of Black survivors and contextualize images taken by white participants. This research project, “The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: A Photographic History,” includes “images depicting destruction, damaged buildings and, simultaneously, the wrecking of the hopes and dreams of a prosperous Black community.” Commenting on the picture that stood out the most in his research, Hill says: “And so it was certainly a massacre. We believe that nearly 300, if not more, Black people died as a result of the violence. But for me, the violence was about ‘Running the Negro out of Tulsa,’ it was about expelling Black people, not just killing them but putting fear and expelling them from Tulsa.”
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Three prosecutors from across the U.S. discuss their role within the criminal legal system and the progressive prosecutor movement. The prosecutor’s role is to decide when, what, and against whom to bring charges. In defining herself as a progressive prosecutor, Circuit Attorney Kim Garnder argues: “We’re doing what we should be doing originally—we're ministers of justice.” Chesa Boudin argues that the progressive prosecutor movement recognizes that mass incarceration has made us less safe. State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby contends that progressive prosecutors are fighting to reform a system within--“ensuring that we’re fighting a system that was designed to dehumanize poor, Black, and brown people.”
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The New Mexico Civil Rights Act, which was signed into law on April 7, 2021, bans qualified immunity—the “judicial doctrine that shields state actors, including law enforcement officials, from liability, even when they knowingly break the law.” Following Colorado, New Mexico now gives people the right to sue when their rights have been violated, which allows them to hold officials responsible. Innocence Project State Policy Advocate Laurie Roberts argues: “The new law puts a price tag on police misconduct and creates a strong incentive for agencies to adopt and enforce policies that prevent abuses which can lead to wrongful convictions.”
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Announcements & Opportunities |
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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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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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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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