February 18, 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
Karli Cadel / The Glimmerglass Festival
In December 2020, the Washington Post called Blue “the best new opera that barely anyone saw.” The opera was meant to begin performances in March of 2020 but had to cancel at the first significant wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. Tazwell Thompson, director and playwright, said the story of Blue is one that deeply connects to the daily realities faced by the Black community. Blue centers on the strained relationship between a Black law enforcement officer and his son who views policing as a symbol of oppression. Kenneth Kellogg, who plays the father, expressed how true the actions and emotions of the scenes felt as his authentic tears fell in some of the saddest scenes. Kellogg also recounted the audience members who approached him after the show to confide their struggles with community inequalities, such as giving their young Black sons “the talk” about protecting themselves. Blue plans to return to the stage in late February, where the cast hopes the story will foster new social commentary related to the current and past injustices of policing. 

Rebecca Hogue
Rebecca Hogue was sentenced to sixteen months in prison for the death of her toddler Jeremiah “Ryder” Johnson, though a jury recommended that she receive life in prison due to her “failure to protect” her son. In 2019, Hogue’s boyfriend Christopher Trent was suspected of having taken Ryder’s life while Hogue was away. Hogue later discovered Ryder and contacted the police but could not find Trent. Trent was found a few days later after an apparent suicide next to a message reading, “Rebecca is innocent.” However, even though Rogue had no involvement in the crime, she was still prosecuted under Oklahoma’s “failure to protect” law. Many states have adopted a similar ideology of law which faults the parents and guardians for any failure in their abilities to protect a child from harm. In Oklahoma alone, this law has been used against hundreds of mothers, and some have received longer sentences than the individual that committed the harmful act. Samantha Michaels points out that the law should theoretically apply to any parent or guardian regardless of gender. Still, the punishments are generally reserved for mothers due to the societal expectation that mothers are responsible for protecting their children “no matter what.”
R.J. Lozada
Mount Tamalpais College has become the first formally accredited two-year college to serve incarcerated individuals exclusively. Mount Tamalpais is housed in San Quentin State Prison and stands as a college that has succeeded without the assistance or partnership of any other educational institution. Instead, the college is funded through private philanthropy to provide classes, textbooks, and supplies to students for free. Mount Tamalpais has served over nearly four thousand incarcerated students and has an enrollment capped at three hundred. Monique Ositelu, a higher education policy analyst, believes the accreditation of prison education programs is vital to improving social conditions after release. Ositelu states that a degree “signals to the market that they can do the job” and “they have the content knowledge to do it.” Ositelu elaborated further by explaining that education has “an impact greater than the degree. It has an impact on who they are, on their family, on their children.” 
Rae Gomes
In this interview, Rae Gomes has a conversation with Georgetown professor and author Marcia Chatelain about her research on how civil rights are coupled with corporate history. Using McDonald’s as a framework, Chatelain explains how the pro-civil rights actions of the company are less meaningful than the public thinks, and these actions are still heavily outweighed by the food injustices of Black capitalism. From Chatelain’s viewpoint, the fast-food industry may tout the number of minority franchise owners and social justice initiatives. Still, these actions are only possible by exploiting the minority communities they are housed within. Chatelain states, “the fundamental problem with Black capitalism is that it suggests that there can be a strategy for equal access and equal opportunity within the current structure,” but no matter how much the individual “hustles,” Black capitalism advertises the impossible. McDonald’s continues to take advantage of franchise owners and laborers by utilizing the public infrastructure to retain their percentage of the franchise, but it is the community that pays for McDonald’s existence through their wallets, labor, and health. Chatelain concludes the interview by presenting this relationship as one of consumer citizenship. One only matters so long as they participate in the economy, and organizations will do whatever social action they can to sustain that connection. 
Featured Scholarship
Please share recent research you would like to see featured, including your own!
Send it to carceralstudies@ou.edu
ABSTRACT: The school-to-prison pipeline is a theoretical construct that explains how disproportionate discipline and exclusionary punishment of Black and Brown students ultimately pushes youth out of mainstream schools and into the criminal justice system (Basford and Lewis in From education to incarceration: dismantling the school to prison pipeline, Peter Lang Publishing, New York, 2018; Heitzeg in Forum Public Pol Online, 2009; Lewis and Basford in Six lenses for anti-oppressive education (counterpoints: studies in the postmodern theory of education), Peter Lang Publishing, New York, 2014; Morris and Perry in Soc Problems 63(1):68–86, 2016). While the research has documented the existence of the school-to-prison pipeline and its impact on families, less has been done to study schools that have worked to successfully interrupt the pipeline. The authors respond to this void in the literature by using Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (Motivation and personality, Harper, New York, 1987) and Noddings’ ethic of care (Caring: a feminine approach to ethics and moral education, University of California Press, Berkely, 2003) to interpret the successful efforts of one charter high school focused on dropout recovery, specifically targeting youth who have experienced or are at risk for the school-to-prison pipeline. Findings from this case study suggest that the school embodies what we call institutional plasticity through innovative programming, carefully selected and trained staff, a family-like atmosphere, wrap-around services, and flexible planning for intermittent attendance. Implications identify elements of institutional plasticity for consideration in other settings. 
EXCERPT: The intractability of crime proved a boon to Bolsonaro’s candidacy. His life-long approach to public safety had been to offer simplistic solutions to a complex problem. Relaxing gun control legislation to enable “self-defense” by “good citizens” and removing obstacles for the police to “crack down” on crime––among which was the protection of basic rights of the criminally accused––had always been at the tip of his tongue. As the specter of crime made the electorate fearful and distressed, his demagoguery could finally sit well and generate political dividends. 
ABSTRACT: The number of people incarcerated for extremist actions has grown over the past decades. The resulting prospect of prison radicalization has contributed to widespread risk responsibilitization [increasing responsibilities] among prison staff. Low-level correctional officers now perceive themselves as being directly responsible for detecting radicalization on their units. Consequently, radicalization has become a meaningful topic for prison staff, one which shapes their daily actions and perceptions. However, officers’ understandings of radicalization may not conform with accepted definitions. Through 131 semistructured interviews with Canadian correctional officers, we demonstrate how radicalization functions as a floating signifier in prison, influencing officer thought and behavior in meaningful ways while eluding easy definition. Officers redefine radicalization to fit interpretive frames around religion and race, gang membership, and mental health, irrespective of whether stereotypical extremists exist in a given prison. We demonstrate how radicalization, when operating as a floating signifier, can significantly influence officers’ perceptions and front-line prison operations.   

ABSTRACT: The murder of George Floyd by police in May 2020 sparked international protests and renewed attention in the Black Lives Matter movement. Here, we characterize ways in which the online activity following George Floyd’s death was unparalleled in its volume and intensity, including setting records for activity on Twitter, prompting the saddest day in the platform’s history, and causing George Floyd’s name to appear among the ten most frequently used phrases in a day, where he is the only individual to have ever received that level of attention who was not known to the public earlier that same week. Further, we find this attention extended beyond George Floyd and that more Black victims of fatal police violence received attention following his death than during other past moments in Black Lives Matter’s history. We place that attention within the context of prior online racial justice activism by showing how the names of Black victims of police violence have been lifted and memorialized over the last 12 years on Twitter. Our results suggest that the 2020 wave of attention to the Black Lives Matter movement centered past instances of police violence in an unprecedented way, demonstrating the impact of the movement’s rhetorical strategy to “say their names.” 
  
Updates, Events & Opportunities
New Carceral Studies Board Members

The Carceral Studies Consortium is pleased to welcome our newest board members:
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.
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The University of Oklahoma is an equal opportunity institution. ou.edu/eoo