Incarceration Archives - Public Seminar

Police Abolition — or Electronic Surveillance?

RoboCop returns

July 9, 2020 • by Micol Seigel

These moves may yield genuine improvements in public life in the United States, something other than the same old tired reforms -- civilian review boards, community policing, recruitment of Black and brown cadets, training and so on -- all of which have proven to be ineffective. But even as the nation ...

Police Abolition — or Electronic Surveillance?

Activism

What Will It Take for Black Lives to Matter?

Nonviolent, cross-racial coalitions are the way back to a decent America

July 9, 2020 • by Todd Gitlin

I wrote the article that follows three years ago. Since it first appeared in the American Prospect, Black Lives Matter (BLM) has generated the largest protest movement in American history. What has changed? And what hasn’t? It remains true that the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) is ill-defined. It has rough edges ...

What Will It Take for Black Lives to Matter?

Prisons and Police

Out of Jail and Homeless

City struggles to stop COVID-19’s spread among New York’s recently released prisoners

May 6, 2020 • by Abigail Kramer

Stefan Outlaw had just recovered from the worst of his COVID-19 symptoms when he learned that a charitable fund had paid to bail him out of the Rikers Island jail. It was mid-March, and much of the jail population was quarantined in cells for 24 hours a day. Outlaw, age ...

Migration

From Offshore Detention of Refugees to Indigenous Incarceration

December 18, 2019 • by Anne McNevin

Well before this crisis, conditions in Australia’s offshore camps were described as “torture” by medical professionals, Amnesty International, and refugees themselves. Médecins Sans Frontières reported “catastrophic effects on …mental health” that are “among the worst that MSF has ever seen.” Twelve refugees have died while held offshore. Benham Satah, a Kurdish refugee who witnessed ...

From Offshore Detention of Refugees to Indigenous Incarceration

New York City

Initiating Inmates

Closing Rikers Island without oversight will expose thousands of transferred inmates to new violence

December 2, 2019 • by Brittany Friedman

Let the initiation begin. The Team snatched the bewildered young men from the van and placed them in metal cages. “Take your shirt with your right hand and pass it backward over your left shoulder,” the officers commanded. Perplexed, the young men reacted too slowly and quickly received blows to the head. The officers continued ...

From the Editors

As We Contemplate Change

We look at what’s possible, who makes it possible, and how people move policy

November 20, 2019 • by Claire Potter

So let’s start with how change happens. Economist James K. Galbraith leads off our politics section this week with an analysis of Bernie Sanders’ economic platform: can Bernie do all these things? Read it and find out. Next, we turn to a reflection on activism, as Nick Estes interviews Native American ...

Podcast

LIVE! With Emily Bazelon, Author of Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration

Episode 204

November 19, 2019 • by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Nicole Hemmer and Neil J. Young

In our regular closing feature, What’s Making History: Natalia recommended the work of New York Times editor Lindsay Crouse, particularly her latest feature, “I Was the Fastest Girl in America, Until I Joined Nike,” by Mary Cain.Neil shared Rebecca Makkai’s book, The Great Believers.Niki discussed Adele Peters’ Fast Company article, “How Memphis Transformed its Parks Named for Confederate Generals into ...

Feature

Life Sentences

Opening remarks from the Conference on Incarceration and the Humanities

November 30, 2017 • by N. D. B. Connolly

Now, you could imagine the horrors of a colonial prison in a black, economically depressed country like 1930s Jamaica, just as you can imagine the nightmare that the sound of wailing men might conjure in the mind of a nine-year old child like my grandfather. Even the most benign administrative ...

Feature

Chelsea Manning and America’s Trans Prisoners

What An Activist Might Have Taught at Harvard

September 18, 2017 • by Timothy Stewart-Winter

Manning, of course, is a uniquely polarizing figure, viewed by some as a traitor and by many others as a hero. Her selection as a Visiting Fellow at the Kennedy School inevitably was going to draw howls of protest from her critics. Withdrawing the offer was equally certain to yield ...

Feature

Seeing Rikers, Closing Rikers

Making Incarceration Visible

April 11, 2017 • by Julia Foulkes

A year ago the New School hosted the opening of States of Incarceration, an exhibition created by hundreds of students and people directly affected by incarceration. Organized through the Humanities Action Lab, a consortium of 20 universities, the exhibition details the history of imprisonment in the U.S by a close ...