Incarceration 
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6/18/2023
What to the Incarcerated Is Juneteenth?
by Antoine Davis and Darrell Jackson
"We prisoners who are left to deteriorate inside one of America's most inhumane systems are able to find joy in celebrating Juneteenth, but not without indignities."
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
3/13/2023
Eric Adams's Involuntary Commitment Plan for Mentally Ill has a Long, Cruel History (and Won't Help)
by Jeremy Peschard
The history of involuntary hospitalization is one of the removal of the most marginalized and vulnerable people from society, in increasingly cruel and inhumane conditions, with treatment and reintegration to society an afterthought. It's unclear the New York mayor's plans will be different.
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SOURCE: New York Review of Books
12/16/2022
Was Emancipation Intended to Perpetuate Slavery by Other Means?
by Sean Wilentz
Protests movements have latched on to a misguided interpretation of the Thirteenth Amendment that argues it allowed and even encouraged the system of mass incarceration as an extension of slavery. A new global history extends that critique to the age of emancipation in general.
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SOURCE: The Baffler
8/16/2022
Smuggled Recordings Revealed the Harshness of British Internment Policies in Northern Ireland
by Jack Sheehan
Tapes secretly recorded in the Long Kesh internment facility, where suspected IRA militants were detained without trial, revealed the degree to which the British government discarded human rights in its crackdown and speak to today's "states of exception."
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SOURCE: Boston Review
8/10/2022
Life Sentences for Arbery's Killers Nothing to Celebrate
by Joseph Margulies
A defense attorney and legal expert warns that the harsh sentences imposed on perpetrators of a racist killing help to validate a punitive system of incarceration that overwhelmingly harms people of color.
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SOURCE: Public Books
8/18/2021
Prison Tech Comes Home: Tenants and Residents in the Surveillance State
by Erin McElroy, Meredith Whittaker and Nicole E. Weber
Landlords have combined technologies developed for screening tenants in the 1970s with more recent digital surveillance and facial recognition systems developed in prisons to dramatically increase control over their tenants during an affordable housing crisis.
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SOURCE: Made by History at The Washington Post
10/21/2020
Disenfranchisement in Jails Weakens our Democracy
by Charlotte Rosen
Because the pretrial population is disproportionately non-White, this kind of “de facto disenfranchisement” constitutes an abhorrent form of racist voter suppression, despite rarely gaining the headlines and outrage that long voting lines do.
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SOURCE: Black Perspectives
8/19/2020
Online Forum: The Imprisoned Black Radical Tradition (August 24-28)
Black Perspectives, the award-winning blog of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), will host an online forum in honor of Black August on the Imprisoned Black Radical Tradition organized by incarcerated writer, activist and intellectual Stephen Wilson and historian and professor Garrett Felber.
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SOURCE: The Intercept
9/17/19
How Joe Biden has Historically Played a Role in Mass Incarceration in the United States
by David Stein
The Intercept reveals the untold story of how Joe Biden pushed Ronald Reagan to ramp up incarceration — not the other way around.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
4/22/19
It’s time to get rid of reform schools
by Amber Armstrong
We need to seize the opportunity to rethink our juvenile justice system.
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SOURCE: The Conversation
5-22-18
Prison records from 1800s Georgia show mass incarceration’s racially charged beginnings
by Barry Godfrey and Steven Soper
A study of nearly 25,000 prison register entries shows how connections between race and imprisonment started in the 1860s.
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SOURCE: NYT
4-28-18
Heather Ann Thompson exposes what how a South Carolina prison riot really went down
by Heather Ann Thompson
In an article in the NYT she shared the stories inmates risked their lives to tell her about riot at Lee Correctional Institution that left seven dead.
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SOURCE: The Marshall Project
11-3-17
What About the "Lost Children" (and Mothers) of America?
by Rheann Kelly, Natalie Medley and Christina Kovats
It’s time for their voices to be heard.
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SOURCE: The Washington Post
9-8-17
America must listen to its prisoners before we make a major mistake
by Heather Ann Thompson
We’re in danger of repeating the mistake we made after Attica when we let prison reforms fizzle.
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SOURCE: The Marshall Project
7-26-17
Our Long, Troubling History of Sterilizing the Incarcerated
by David M. Perry
State-sanctioned efforts to keep the incarcerated from reproducing began in the early 20th century and continue today.
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SOURCE: The Washington Post
4-19-17
The age of mass incarceration may actually be abating
by Charles Lane
The most recent evidence indicates that the age of mass incarceration is abating; it has been, oddly enough, since just prior to the publication of “The New Jim Crow.”
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SOURCE: The Daily Show
1-25-17
Heather Ann Thompson tells the story of the Attica prison uprising on The Daily Show
Trevor Noah says the prison officials hid the truth for decades.
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SOURCE: AHA Today
10-13-15
How We Became the “Jailhouse Nation”: Historians Discuss Mass Incarceration in the US
by Dane Kennedy
The statistics on the subject are staggering: the United States currently incarcerates 2.3 million people, a larger proportion of our population than any other nation on earth.